It’s not
like I haven’t dabbled in Christianity before. I went to Anglican Church
services as a child, although all the services were in community halls and
recreation centres, with borrowed tables and plastic chairs. My first Sunday
school was in a shed.
As an adult
I have stayed out of Christian churches although they are curiously still in my
life. The first flat I lived in when I moved out of home was across the road
from a cute little Catholic church called St. Patrick’s, and even now the
apartment I live in is next door to St. Brigid’s Cathedral, which is the second
largest Catholic Church in Sydney. I popped in on Good Friday and was amazed to
see Cardinal George Pell give an address in Italian.
I decided to
go to a Hillsong Easter service today (Easter Sunday). Hillsong is a big
evangelical conglomerate that normally has multiple services in locations all
over Sydney but on Easter Sundays they only have one service at the Sydney
Entertainment Centre. Going there was an overwhelming experience. There was a
lot of Hillsong paraphernalia on the walls, and even on toilet doors. It felt
like their venue even though they rarely use it in this way. The ushers and people
working the mobile coffee carts were Hillsong people. There was a Hillsong crèche
area. And boy they needed it because the place was heaving with people and not
everyone could get a seat. The capacity of the venue is 13,250.
The point of
their Sunday night services is to have a “loud celebration of Jesus” and yes,
it would’ve seemed like a rock concert to someone who didn’t understand
English. There was a lot of singing and people shouting and swaying. The lighting
people did a great job. The songs were suitably uplifting and Dan says he saw
someone crying during a song. I hated the songs, but was impressed when they
paraded two camels, a sheep, a cow, an alpaca and two horses (!!) during one of
them.
I don’t like
using the word cult because perhaps that’s a bit mean, but that’s what it felt
like most to me. Every second sentence seemed to have the word Jesus in it and
curiously, there were only a handful of mentions of God. Is this what separates
the older Christian denominations from these new evangelical ones? Hillsong’s
messages are very simple. Basically they say – believe in Jesus and you will be
saved and you never have to worry about your sins ever again and your life will
be so much better. For a religion based on the Bible they appear to use very
little of it in their teachings, preferring instead to spread their message
through songs and occasionally very sleekly produced videos and little group
performances.
The supposed
highlight was the guest preacher from Germany called Reinhard Bonnke. The
scrambled egg quote above is from him. He was full of strange metaphors like
that. He kept talking about Jesus’s blood having the capacity to cleanse
EVERYONE’S sins. He talked a bit about how the horizontal beam of the Cross is
a minus sign representing humanity that is full of sin but Jesus came down from
Heaven and died for us creating a vertical beam – a plus sign. He said that
atheists were “intellectual vandals” that kept saying “God is dead”. His answer
to that is, “Where is God’s body so you can bury him?” He was kind of
entertaining in the way that people speaking metaphors in a second language can
be, but not when he was trying to get everyone to buy either of his books.
How would I
rate this experience? 5/10, if only to confirm my beliefs as an intellectual
vandal. Would I do this again? No, feeling this uncomfortable should only be a one-time
event.
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