In some of my previous blog posts about The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis and my review of Shiny, Happy People, you might be thinking, “Wow, the church sucks. Why would anyone ever go there?” and you would be right in thinking that. For hundreds of years, the church has been corrupt on all different levels. Even when the Reformation happened, it didn’t take long in the grand scheme of things for some Protestant denominations to become corrupt as well. Even if the church wasn’t corrupt, there were so many heresies infiltrating it that with most people being very hesitant to disprove them, they just ran rampant. Today, with so many denominations everywhere, things get even more confusing. I know that I was confused for many, many years with the rest of my family because of that. That’s why today’s post is about my experiences at different churches and why we still go.
The first church I went to is what I’ll call “The Church of the Holy Dollar.” Why? First of all, legal reasons. The Church of the Holy Dollar would definitely be the type of church to sue a small blogger for telling the truth about their scammy ways. They covered up a rape (which was never reported on) and to this day, I have no idea where their donations go. They are the stereotypical megachurch that uses the name of Jesus as a marketing ploy. Second, this church is fairly close to where I live (in fact all of the churches are, which is why I will be giving them fake names), and I don’t want to give Internet creeps an estimate of my location.
With that out of the way, in 2020, my dad had become a Christian and we as a family decided to start looking for churches that would accomodate my allergy (if you’ve read my post on peanut allergies, you’ll know that most churches we looked at when I was little “Holy Ghosted” us and never responded to our emails). At this point, we didn’t really know what the differences in denominations were. We thought all of them were pretty much the same (except for Catholics, Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses). I remember that we looked at another church other than The Church of the Holy Dollar, but we chose the Holy Dollar because the youth group looked like a lot more fun than the other church and they were willing to accomodate and finally in the spring of 2021, we went for the first time.
Remember how I said earlier that this church was using Jesus as a marketing ploy? This is what I meant. Though it claimed to be a church, for the most part, its sermons were just small “Christian” rock concerts with a message about how we need to be good people with barely any actual teaching from the Bible (I put Christian in quotes, since most of their worship songs were secular or come from Bethel or Hillsong, which are theologically worse). It was basically a glorified Ted-talk. Youth group wasn’t much better. Really, it was thirty minutes of games (dodgeball, foosball, etc.), five to ten minutes of sermons, and a fifteen minute small groups session where us girls mostly goofed off and nothing really got done. This is how charismatic churches such as The Church of the Holy Dollar operate. No actual substance, just a cheap show with a feel-good message with it. Now give us money.
We stayed at The Church of the Holy Dollar for about six months, not minding the crappy teaching until Mom stumbled across a podcast called Cooper Stuff, run by John Cooper of the Christian rock/heavy-metal band Skillet. My family is full of Skillet fans (including me and Mom), so she started listening to it and Cooper was talking about shady stuff happening in the church. My parents realized that the same things were happening at The Church of the Holy Dollar and so we distanced ourselves from them. After more investigation, we found out that their spiritual formation classes were very, very New Age, mixing an African tribal religion with Christianity. I didn’t really know what was going on, but after a Zoom call to the church’s pastor, we abruptly left and said goodbye to The Church of the Holy Dollar, which rocked the ship not only with many of the people I had known, but also with certain family members who still go to that church.
Luckily, while we had been investigating The Church of the Holy Dollar, we came across what I shall dub “The Church of the (W)Holy Incompetent Pastors.” We first went there about a month after leaving the Holy Dollar and were ready for a new church that would hopefully be our home church. They were willing to accomodate us and were much more reformed then The Holy Dollar. Our first day there was Halloween, which – though I don’t believe in omens – should’ve been a bad sign. Things were great at first there for me. I was quickly making friends with the people there, as was my brother, though the teaching was mediocre at best. While they used the Bible more than The Holy Dollar did, the youth pastor seemed less than thrilled to be teaching. According to Mom and Dad, the regular sermons were like that as well and they unfortunately used music by Bethel and Hillsong.
You might be wondering why Bethel/Hillsong keep coming up so much. While that is a topic that could have an entire blog post dedicated to it, I will try to keep it short. For one, while most Bethel songs are – for the most part – theologically sound, there are some that are out right heretical and twist the Bible to fit their agenda. Their music has been incredibly successful in the Christian music industry and has brought thousands of people into bad teaching. As for Hillsong, that church is just evil. While most people don’t think about it, in order to use their music, they have to pay for the permit so they don’t get sued for copyright problems. By buying that music, churches are funding a church that is extremely abusive and spreads bad teaching. By buying Bethel music, they are paying for bad teaching to be promoted.
Unfortunately, when it came to The Church of the (W)Holy Incompetent Pastors, when questioned about their music by me and Mom, they almost immediately started slandering us and gaslighting us. At youth group, my youth pastor seemed more acidic towards me, especially when I started bringing up other problems about his leadership, such as how he and the other youth leaders ignored the fact that my best friend at this church was being bullied by the boys there and only did something about it when I got up in the main guy’s face and it looked like a fight was about to break out.
Finally, on Easter Day 2022, we left The Church of the (W)Holy Incompetent Pastors and spent most of the summer looking for a new church and we narrowed it down to The Church of the Holy Cowpoke and The Church of the Holy Dinosaur. In June, we attended our first service at the Church of the Holy Cowpoke and I wasn’t happy. It was much different than the churches I had been used to. While they didn’t have any of the problems that the other two churches had, I was upset because of the culture shock. This church is located in a pretty rural area where most of the people are cowboys (thus, Church of the Holy Cowpoke). Everyone dresses up more on Sunday and youth group was on Wednesday. I was used to dressing super casual in ripped jeans and band shirts so I felt very out of place.
We didn’t go back to church until the fall and this time we tried out The Church of the Holy Dinosaur. I call it that since their youth group was comprised of mostly college kids and their congragation looked like they had all personally known Adam and Eve. I leaned towards that church since they at least had youth group on Sundays, but we only stayed for two weeks since the youth pastor (who was also the main pastor and half the group were his kids) couldn’t handle statements about Bethel. Thus, we started going to The Church of the Holy Cowpoke.
Since then, our stay at The Church of the Holy Cowpoke has been longer than any other church we’ve been to. We’ve been there for a little over a year now and don’t plan on leaving. While the leadership and my family don’t agree on everything, they teach straight out of the Bible and we agree on the same basic beliefs. They are willing to talk about differences and have provided the type of welcoming community that I haven’t seen anywhere else.
Finally, this leads me to the question of “Why did you still try?” After all, in the title of this post, I said the modern church is crap. While I still think that for the most part the church is a joke with what I believe to be 99% of them being garbage, there are still plenty of diamonds out there that you just need to look for. Humans are very social animals and the Bible calls Christians to seek fellowship with other Christians since “Iron sharpens iron”. In our search for a church, that was one of the things we were looking for. We were looking for fellow Christians to be part of a community with and though it took a long time to find that, we found it. If you have been in crappy churches before and feel like it’s not worth it, I understand that sentiment. But don’t give up.
Until next time,
M.J.
The Tanuki Corner 
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