I went to church this morning with one of my blogging friends. We went to the 9:15 service at the Northridge Christian Church, a post-denominational mega-church in the booming community of Plymouth, Michigan. (See the entire list of Michigan mega-churches here.) I don’t suspect that he has anything up yet, but if you check his site later in the day, I’m sure he’ll be sharing his thoughts as well… I’d like to say that we went into the experience with open minds, but I can’t deny that there was a certain amount of trepidation. The last thing that Jan (pronounced “Yawn”) said to me as we merged with the evangelical Christians and made our way into the new shopping mall-type structure was, “Kill me if you notice that I’m beginning to change.”

Before setting out, I’d called the church and asked a few questions… According to the man I spoke with, the weekend service is essentially an intro to Christianity, built for the kinds of people that never thought they’d find themselves in, or, for that matter, be welcomed in, a church. (He kept saying that I could come, even if I’d always thought that I could never step foot inside a church without it crumbling down around me. He said that the church was full of people who had thought the exact same thing. (Which, by the way, caused me to think that the place must be crawling with pedophiles and murderers.)) He called the weekend sermons “Christianity 101” presentations, and stressed that they were heavy on the entertainment and light on the scripture. He mentioned that there were things taking place at the church every day, however, and that if I wanted a deeper relationship with the Bible, that I might want to come back for one of their weeknight “202” classes. When asked about the history of the church, he said that the complex in Plymouth (complete with a k-5 school, a coffee shop, and a gift store) was built in 1997, but that the church itself dates back to 1921. He was unclear as to the specifics, but apparently they’re operating under the charter of a Detroit-area church that was incorporated in 1921. The name of that church was “Temple Baptist.” He said that they changed the name to “Northridge Christian” in order to be more contemporary. (As we’d be reminded on several occasions this morning, it’s all about marketing.)

When asked what denomination the church was, he said, “generic Christian.” He then went on to say that it was your standard, “praise and worship” operation. When asked about the particulars of the version of Christianity that they are promoting, he said, “If it’s in the Bible we believe it.”

If you’ve read this site before, you know that I have my biases against so-called “mega-churches.” From the research that I’ve done, I’ve come to form an opinion of them as relatively shallow and vacuous institutions built, as many successful businesses are, to fill an unmet need in the marketplace. Again, it’s just my opinion, but they seem to primarily commoditize generic religion, market it, and sell it to isolated suburbanites. ("Jesus as drug,” seems to sum it up pretty well.) They sell community. They sell a sense of belonging. They sell moral superiority. And, it appears as though they’ve been wildly successful in the newer suburban (or “exurban,” as some are referring to the more upscale, new communities forming on the most remote edges of suburban America) areas, where there perhaps isn’t an indigenous religious culture/infrastructure already in existence. Again, it’s just my opinion, but it seems to me that they primarily serve the purpose of reinforcing among upper middle class, primarily white Americans, and those who aspire to enter their ranks, that they deserve success, and that Jesus doesn’t want them to feel guilty for what they have, and what they want.

Jan and I went this morning with the purpose of either confirming or denying those, and other, suspicions.

And, before I get into my notes about what we saw, I want to make sure I make it clear that I’m not suggesting that these people not be able to worship as they see fit. That isn’t my intention. I believe in freedom of religion (as well as freedom from religion). I also believe, however, that we have a duty as citizens to educate ourselves, and take preventative measures when they’re called for. In other words, if the mega-church demographic is growing, and if the individuals within these churches are exercising their newly found strength in order to implement laws that curtail the freedoms enjoyed by others, then it’s incumbent upon the rest of us to understand how they’re organizing, and what people are finding so appealing about the vision of America that they’re presenting. Only then can we lay out a course for action that sees viable alternatives created… Clearly, people need to feel as though they belong, and clearly we’ve been doing a damned poor job of it on the American left.

In the interest of saving time, I’m going to present my observations as bulleted items.

- A volunteer greeter stands inside every doorway and shakes the hand of every man and woman entering. Other volunteers direct traffic, coordinate shuttle busses, and man information kiosks. According to the website, Senior Pastor Brad Powell has a staff of over 20. (Another source says there are 30 on the staff.) There’s no mention of how many other administrative and support personnel might be on the payroll. Most of the work, it seems, is done by volunteers. Several times this morning we’re reminded by people on the stage, and by signs placed around the facility, that individuals should volunteer in the areas where they have expertise, whether it be on the stage, in the classrooms, on the grounds, or in the business office. They are, we’re told, starting a new special interest group for local business leaders.

- We make our way in from the parking lot to the amphitheatre, where there are probably well over 500 people already waiting. I believe a video is playing as we make our way in and settle into a pair of large theater-style seats. Quite a few people, myself included, put their coffee cups into the built-in drink-holders. (I brought my coffee with me, but it looks as though free coffee is available from stations positioned around the outside of the amphitheatre.) I notice that, unlike most other churches I’ve been in, there are no Bibles or Psalm books.

- The minister takes the stage and says something about high school, the lights go dim, and several scenes from the film “Napoleon Dynamite” play. People laugh. The lights go up and the minister asks if we’re all glad not to be in high school any more. We all say, “yeah,” and then he brings out onto the stage all the students in the congregation who are graduating from high school this month. He implores them to stay true to their values… I wonder to myself if they have the rights to show “Napoleon Dynamite” on the large video screens.

- They’ve got a house band. They run through two numbers. It’s uplifting. The woman next to me keeps throwing her hands into the air during the chorus of one song, which repeats a phrase like, “Hold me, Jesus.” It dawns on me a few minutes into it that I’ve heard the song before, a few weeks ago, when my sister was staying with us. She was watching a video of a band on her laptop. It was the exact same song. I’d asked her what it was, and she said it was the house band at her church. (She just joined a church in Atlanta. I didn’t ask her which one, but I believe it’s Northpoint, the huge mega-church slowly taking over the region.) It makes me wonder if perhaps, even though there’s no denominational affiliation, there might be a connection between the two churches. “Is it possible,” I wonder, “that this is a franchise?” “Are they following a script here in Plymouth that was written somewhere else? Or, as with ‘Napoleon Dynamite,’ are they just stealing content?”

- I feel like I’m inside an infomercial. Everything is calculated down to the second. Everyone on stage wears an earpiece and a wireless mic. At different points, the background changes. At one point there’s a projection of a stained glass window. At another, giant wooden window frames, reminiscent of ones that might have been in early 20th century churches, are lowered from the rafters. Somewhere near the middle of the presentation, a series of characters in a skit fall through a trap door. There is a disco light, and a smog machine. Cameramen roam the audiences and everything’s projected on 5 giant screens. “It’s Broadway,” I think, “in what used to be a farmer’s field.”

- We’re urged to attend the 2005 Leadership Summit, a national evangelical event that’s going to be available at the church by way of satellite. They show an ad on the big screens. Guardian Angles founder, Curtis Sliwa, I learn, will be appearing. When I get home I do a little digging and find that the Summit is being organized by an organization called the Willow Creek Association. Upon a little further digging I find that 409 Michigan Churches belong to the organization, and that each of these churches, in order to have joined the association, have “profess an evangelical Christian faith.” (Last year, this annual event featured former Nixon special counsel Chuck Colson. Known as Nixon’s hatchet man, Colson is quoted, as a member of CREEP (The Committee to Re-elect the President) to have said, “I’d walk over my own grandmother to re-elect Richard Nixon.”)

- At some point, a group of actors take the stage to perform a scene from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” I can’t remember the point it was supposed to illustrate, but people seemed to like it. The armor looked real and the accents were good… Again, I wondered how it was that they were allowed to perform it, copyright laws being what they are. “Perhaps,” I think, “there’s some kind of exclusion for churches.” (I write myself a reminder to start a church before entering into the world of on-line file-sharing.)

- I just remembered, the Monty Python piece had a punch-line about pan-theism.

- Once everything else had happened, we got to the sermon, which wasn’t really a sermon, at least not a sermon in a traditional sense. It started with a new band taking the stage and playing the old Norman Greenbaum classic, “Spirit in the Sky.” Once the song was over, the pastor walked out on stage and began to tear it apart, using the lyrics to make his point that New Age religion is evil. I can’t remember all the points now, but I distinctly remember him saying, “The song says, ‘I’ve got a friend in Jesus.’ Well, that sure would be nice, but you cannot be Jesus’s friend.” (I’m not sure how he came to make the leap that Norman Greenbaum spoke for the entire New Age, by the way.) Logically, it was an absolute mess, but people seemed to like it. If you’d like to hear it, you can hear it on-line.

- The pastor also tried to make the case that New Age religion (as though there were some monolithic entity known as “New Age religion”) was OK with Hitler. He kept saying things like, “The New Age people would have you believe that all things, all beings on this earth, are equal. Well, I don’t know about you, but I think Hitler was evil!” It reminded me of when trolls on this site would equate my being against the war in Iraq with my being a “friend” of Sadam Hussein’s, as though one necessitated the other. Apparently, to say that mankind is essentially good and that the believers of other religions probably have the same chance at salvation as anyone else, is the same as saying, “I love Hitler.”

- He then went on to blame the so-called New Age on Hinduism and other forms of, as he said, eastern “mysticism.” Toward the end he corrects himself, however, and says it’s roots actually go much further back, to a certain serpent bearing produce. (He didn’t actually spell out the connection between Hinduism and Satan, but it was certainly alluded to.)

- Most interesting of all, somewhere in the middle of the sermon, I notice that people all around me are writing down what he’s saying on sheets that have been handed out in advance. The sheets have quotes from the sermon with blanks where certain words should be filled in, like Mad Libs. People fill them in as he goes, just like old ladies marking Bingo cards. (It’s a well known principle of Psychology, by the way, that writing things down reinforces them in the mind of the subject.)

- At some point, he goes off an a tangent about how the people of the New Age even want you to think that fish have minds and souls. He reads a press release from PETA to illustrate this, and there’s an audible gasp from behind me. “These people don’t even want you to eat fish,” he says with smirk. (I guess there can’t be Christian vegetarians.) He also says something about how silly people in India are for starving when there are perfectly good cows to be eaten.

- It strikes me as incredibly hypocritical that he also criticizes the New Age as being more about self-help and personal fulfillment than anything else, when it looks to me as though that’s exactly what I’m seeing unfold before me. There is not one mention, in the hour and a half that I am there, of “good works.” There is no mention of the community outside, except for the repeated plea to bring in others with talent and influence. There is no mention of volunteering outside of the church. Everything sounds as though it’s coming through an “us against them” filter. It’s all about self-preservation, building insular communities, and nurishing each other.

- The bottom line of the sermon is that there is a definitive right, and a definitive wrong. All men and women are flawed sinners. There is only one true God. And he will surely judge us. (CDs of the sermon are available for sale in the lobby.)

- There’s a check-box on the form we’re handed when we enter. It asks us to make an “x” in the box if we’re “saved” during the program. (I wasn’t.)

- On the way out, we pass some of the youth program rooms. In one, kids play electric guitars while others shoot baskets and play video games. It looks like fun.

- In the parking lot, I notice a man getting into an ADT Home Security vehicle and it occurs to me that the guy must be wealthy beyond belief. “It must be like shooting fish in a barrel,” I think… The rest of the way home, I consider whether or not I should just invest everything in a business that speaks to the exurban mega-church demographic. “Surely,” I think, “I could sell Amway to these people.”

- It took over ten minutes until someone would stop to let Jan and I back out of our parking spot and join the caravan of SUVs leaving the parking lot. Jan suggests that we would have gotten out faster had we thought to stick a Jesus fish on our car before heading out.

Ok, that’s all I have time for right now. It was an odd experience, but not a terrible one. Everyone seemed nice enough, and no one bothered us, or made us feel as though we didn’t belong. Yes, I was struck by the contrived, superficial nature of some of it, the pop culture references, the slick production values, and all the rest of it, but, more than anything else, I was struck by how damned seductive it all was. While I didn’t feel any urge to join up, I could certainly see how someone, especially someone in the midst of some great personal upheaval of some sort, could find this comforting, even necessary. These are confusing, isolating times, and what’s being offered here is a real value. It’s instant community, or at least the illusion of community. They “want” you. Sure, there’s a financial element, but they really want you, and your talents. That’s what people want, and that something that the left in America has been doing a damned poor job of doing… I’ve got a lot of other thoughts on this, but they’re going to have to wait until later. Right now, I’ve got a tired baby to tend to.

Oh, it’s probably also worth mentioning that, according to the religion industry insider magazine, Outreach, Northridge Christian Church is 69th on the list of the 100 fastest growing churches in America. (If I really wanted to depress you, I’d post a graph here showing membership in unions over the past decade contrasted to membership in conservative, evangelical mega-churches.)

UPDATE: Jan has his version of events up on his site now.