Manipulate the audience for better crowd control.

::This post ran just a few days after Christmas last year, December 27, 2004.::

I spent the first part of the Christmas Eve service hiding.

We had traveled to my sister Jacqui’s in Grand Forks. Before supper and the rest of the evening’s festivities, we attended the Christmas Eve service at her church. We have done this for a number of years now, and so I am familiar with this church’s Christmas Eve service.

I hate dislike them. I admit, I even dread them. I wish I could get out of going. I don’t want to hurt my sister’s feelings, but there it is.

It’s not a church thing, but something else.

The music pastor at this church is a classic case of what turns me off in larger evangelical churches in the area of music: electronic pleasantries.

Electronic keyboards. Electronic/muted drums. Pleasant singers standing up front in lovely respectable velour dresses singing lovely harmonies whilst holding a mic and tapping the beat of the music on their hip (as only a white person can) with their free hand. A couple of earnest guitar players, properly hooked into the sound system manned by the computer geek of the church who was secluded in the back of the sanctuary. And the music pastor, leading away in choruses viewed on an expensive Powerpoint screen at the back of the church with a lovely pale graphic of some mountains, or something, behind the words.

We sang three Christmas hymns. “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks”, verse two and part of the first verse of “O Holy Night”. The third I can’t remember. It wasn’t one I knew at all, and I love singing Christmas hymns. The music pastor had them dropped to such a low key that I couldn’t find a note I could sing. It was truly miserable, but he sounded great because that was the point of putting them into a key he could sing: to sound good.

Is that the purpose of the service?

This pastor receives many local accolades for the Easter and Christmas plays that he wrote, put on in alternate years. I’ve seen them both, and while they do a good job, once is enough for me. The music seems to be in the same key, and has the same evangelical style to the lyrics, rhythms and chording. If you know what I mean, you know what I mean.

I can’t remember a Christmas Eve service at this church where songs from the Christmas play weren’t sung to the audience.

And therein lies another problem: we were not a congregation, but an audience. We were performed to by a bunch of talented musicians and a music pastor and a pastor who had planned the service to a T, with few glitches, all quite lovely. I looked around at the rest of the people, and everyone seemed to be really into it.

Except me, because I am an alien.

The start of the service should have served as a warning. The music pastor took his place behind the keyboard and as a non-Christmas chorus flashed on the screen, he told us he was going to teach us a new chorus.

Teach us a new chorus. During the Christmas Eve service.

I got up and walked out of the sanctuary. I was absolutely angry, because it just bothers me so much and I couldn’t even say why. I waited outside in the hallway, pretending to read a bulletin board, while a few other choruses that had little, if any, Christmas connection were sung. A few parishioners came in and out of the sanctuary, but I avoided eye contact for fear they would attempt to share the four spiritual laws with me, assuming I was a pagan visiting family for Christmas and was unable to sit through the service.

During all the scripture readings, the music pastor would play lovely appropriate music in the background. I assume it was because we needed to have our emotion level appropriately tweaked. The rawness of the simple words was not enough for our ears. A few minor chords would surely bring us clearer emotional understanding of the scripture.

Since when are the words of the Bible not enough? I don’t want to feel as if I’m being manipulated, I don’t want to have the hearing equivalent of going up front to be prayed for and getting a concussion from some preacher who is insistent that I am going to be slain in the spirit or else.

Then the pastor read an essay, or short story, on the story of Jesus’ birth. It wasn’t from the Bible. No, it was a story I’ve heard many times before, filled with purple prose and excessive adjectives to help the listener really really really feel the emotion of the night. Phrases like “heavily pregnant” and “laborious” and “exhausting donkey ride” and “straining labor” and “stench of the animals” and so on filled the essay.

The first time I heard it, I tucked it away in my mind as something to “hide in my heart” for later. The 50th time I heard it, I thought “yada yada yada.” The pastor said it was his Christmas tradition to read this every year. Once is enough. Twice is maybe OK. Three times too much. Beyond that, it’s beating a dead horse.

Why oh why must we wring every last drop of emotive whatever out of everything we do in church? Why must we focus on controlling or jump-starting the emotions of the audience? Why must I feel emotion? Is it not enough to hear the Christmas story and contemplate on the words? Is it not enough to know and believe the words of the Bible, of this Christmas story? Must I feel a certain way?

A classic example of this emphasis on reaching people through feelings was a “Harvest Party” I attended this past Halloween. (I think I’ve said it before, but aren’t “harvest parties”, with their focus on celebrating a harvest, more pagan than Halloween?) At the end of the standard worship service, the message of salvation was given while scenes from “The Passion of the Christ” flipped by on the large screen in the background. The sound was muted as the worship team played some minor-chord sounding choruses while the pastor pleaded for the kids to come forward. I don’t know if any responded or not. I do know that I turned away because I was not going to have the experience I felt after seeing that movie be watered down in this setting. I still think about that movie, but if every youth event and every church show clips from it, pretty soon I’ll no longer feel anything, be able to think anything, other than “saw that before. lotta blood.” One teen got up out of his chair and marched toward the door. The boy who must have brought him to the event followed after and asked what was wrong.

Why was he angry?

He said he wasn’t going to be manipulated into feeling bad and going up front. No one was going to make him watch that movie.

Some kids probably responded. That boy didn’t. Some people don’t like to be pandered to, don’t like to feel manipulated. Come at them with the straight truth and no extraneous fluff on the side, and you might be surprised.

I fear that evangelical denominations are desensitizing their own parishioners with this constant manipulation, to the point that their hearts are no longer moved by the simpleness of the Gospel, as well the complexity and wonder of the Gospel. They need a minor chord progression in the background before they know the presence of God, or appreciate something He’s done.

The Bible says to let our yes be yes, and our no be no. It doesn’t say anything about a violin in the background.

For the lack of paper, I used up all the deposit slips in my mother’s checkbook to write what ran through my head during the service. I was very angry, angry at the music pastor for putting on what seemed like another Christmas Program, another performance. Angry that I was performed to and not allowed to participate in the service very much. Angry that we couldn’t sing the Christmas hymns that I find so hauntingly beautiful and miss the other 11 months of the year. Angry that this should’ve been a special church service and instead it was just another evangelical chorus-fest where a music pastor seemed to forget that the most important thing wasn’t his professional performance and mastery of a Yamaha keyboard in the key of D, but a chance to be real. Angry that the music pastor seemed unable to have a Christmas Eve service without showcasing the music he wrote for a Christmas play, relegating Christmas music written by Handel and others to the backburner. Angry that I was angry, and not enjoying it as everyone else seemed to be, angry that it all seemed fake and grating.

I just wanted to sing. I didn’t want to be sung to.

You know what I love about my home church? I love that the piano light is precariously balanced and that I worry about it falling on the keyboard as it has done before. I love it that the “worship team” is made up of regular people who sometimes flub the words, sing off-key, and sometimes fall silent when the song gets too high. I love it that I mess up at the piano and the congregation seems to be willing to forgive me. I love it that we sing choruses and hymns, and the stories or talking between them are real and down-to-earth, from a voice breaking in tears one minute and cracking a joke the next. I love that we sang nearly every single Christmas hymn during this Christmas season, even though it meant one Sunday we sang about six in a row and didn’t even skip a verse. I love it that we are a church filled with people who “keep their day job” and come to church and give it a go, at whatever it is that is needed. None are professionals. We just do the best we can. I love it that we don’t perform. We’re just people singing to God.

Next year, I want to go to a Christmas Eve service of another denomination, or another church.