Jessie_10_I

Back home my family attends a Pentecostal church that is headed up by an old-time Georgian minister. The man is a great storyteller in the way that only Southern gentlemen of a certain age can be. He started out preaching at 14 years-old when he got on a bus with his twin brother and a guitar and travelled around to summer tent meetings and hasn't stopped since. But the fact of the matter is that he's getting older and a couple of years ago he decided that it was high time he started training up another preacher to eventually take his place. He contacted his wife's nephew, a former youth minister in his late forties who had just moved back to Indiana and asked him to come try the job out.

The first time I went home while the man was preaching I came out of the service feeling uneasy. It's not like I've never felt out of place in a Pentecostal church. I'm the lone Catholic holdout in a family of Holy Rollers, it kind of goes with the territory. But I felt especially uneasy this particular day and I didn't know why. This uneasiness persisted every time I went home and this man preached and this past spring it finally hit me. He has some of the most negative sermons I have ever heard in my life. They aren't sermons that are designed to make the audience feel guilty or fearful for their own salvation. You spend enough time in parochial schools and you get used to that sort of thing. No, he gives sermons preaching against other religions and other people. He likes to get going and flash around pictures he's recieved in e-mail forwards (sort of like these) and tell everyone how bad the rest of the world is. That isn't what people want to hear on a Sunday morning. Our senior pastor tells these great stories, some from the Bible and some not, that demonstrate the principles that are supposed to help us grow and be better people. Those are the kinds of stories people want to hear when sitting in a country church on a Sunday morning staring out at the cornfields.

Telling stories that hold that much negativity can only get a storyteller so far. As negative as the world can be sometimes I refuse to believe that the majority of people want to feel angry and upset. You tell people stories that make them feel good and show them how to keep feeling good and they will listen to whatever you have to say. Fire and brimstone should only be used when it is really needed to drive a point home and even then you have to be careful with it.