Having attended this church a few times years back, I was excited to be back in town and resume my attendance! I remember being impressed by the guest speaker, and the sheer amount of people in attendance, especially for a quaint little town!
Walking in a few minutes late, I was first struck by the sparseness of the audience; a mere fraction of a fraction of the congregation I remember. Maybe thirty people. I asked a very nice blonde girl, apparently a regular, where everybody was. "This is actually one of our big Sundays" she said with a smile.
The main speaker, Brian, proceeded to deliver the most inexplicably narcissistic and skewed "teaching" I'd ever heard. After 25 minutes, he ended his self-righteous rhetoric stating, with arms outstretched, "every place I go is better because I'm there." People cheered. But without even the slightest hint of context or reference to scripture, this struck me as the most prideful thing I'd ever heard.
It's difficult to excuse a message with the equivocal ambiguity of a fortune cookie, devoid of any scriptural basis. And with attendance plummeting from several hundreds to a couple dozen within the last couple years alone, one has to ask: what is leadership doing to alienate so many people? read more