Unhappy Bouncers

Here's something from a post from last year-

I always get a chuckle out of churches that have a "Vistors Welcome" sign on their billboard; the Lutheran church on Cypress Gardens Road near our apartment has one. Do you ever see a "If we get any more people, we'll have to go to two services, so GO AWAY!!" sign?

The answer is "No." Do you ever see a church with bouncers? The only time you'd hear the word "bouncers" in most evenagelical churches is in the Newsboys' Shine.

...You will inspire the kind of entire turnaround
that would make a bouncer take ballet
even bouncers who aren't .....happy.

They happened to play Shine last Sunday at our church as background music for the Hondurus mission slides.

Well, the assumption for the folks at the United Church of Christ is that the steriotypical conservative church turns away blacks, Latinos and guys who are ..... happy. Here's a reality check for the UCC; check out our last two church homes; the Lakeland Vineyard has a Hispanic praise-leader, while Midland's New Life Vineyard has African-American praise leader. In addition, I've yet to see a gaydar detector used at any church.

What's more interesting in that UCC ad story isn't that the big networks turned down the advertisement but that the UCC seemed to play into a red-state/blue-state stereotype. With the exception of the Unitarian-Universalists, the UCC is as blue-state a denomination as it gets. However, mentioning the UUs brings another possible reading into the ad, one that I haven't seen in the coverage this week; the UCC isn't playing the redneck card, they're playing the anti-universalist card.

The tag line of the ad is "The United Church of Christ. No matter who you are or where you are on life's journey, you're welcome here." The real issue isn't demographic inclusion but theological inclusion; the gay issue here is merely an visable part of a larger underwater mass of downplaying basic Christian doctrine on salvation, becoming more like the UUs year by year. About the only person not welcome in the UCC is an orthodox evangelical that might actually look like the Puritans that founded their block four centuries ago.

The UCC might like to cast theological conservatives as bigots, but my experience is that bigotry tends to lessen as people draw closer to Biblical truths; it's the unchurched that have more bigotry than the churchgoers and it's the more nominal Christians that tend to be rednecks than the more devout ones.

Comments

[Joel Thomas]

When Whites are asked if they are racist, they overwhelmingly say no. When Blacks are asked if Whites are racist, they say they are.

Conservative churches say they welcome gays, but when gays are asked if they feel welcome, they tend to answer no.

Some perceptions may be false, while others may have more than a shred of truth in them.