Forget You Aught
For six and a half years, I attended what was considered to be a multicultural megachurch north of Atlanta, Georgia. Its thousands of members were from all over the world. Cosmetically it looked like people of every nation and tongue were worshiping together in some technicolor heteronormative heaven. But the leadership did not reflect the congregation. It was merely representational advertising for a white church full of brown faces.
When I first moved to Atlanta, I found a Black church east of the city in Lithonia that wasn’t too big or too small. I knew most of the people personally or at least their faces well enough to give a knowing smile in passing. I was part of a new members class that, at its conclusion, held a talent show. I performed a self-choreographed routine and was later invited to audition for the church’s dance team. This was the first church I truly felt a part of on my own, separate from my parents.
The first 30 years of my spiritual life were spent in the Black Church. My mother was a gospel musician and a minister of music until she died. She and my father actively contributed to revivals, prison ministries, Vacation Bible School, recitals, plays, fashion shows, homegoing services, and repast preparations.
After Mom died, I stopped going to church for a while. I kept in touch with some of the people from the Lithonia church and they would check on me from time to time. At some point I started attending a writers’ group one of them formed. It gave me a semblance of community as I mourned.
I don’t know how much time passed before I visited the aforementioned megachurch but it matched where I was in my life at the time as a young professional and new homeowner. Its multiculturalism was the biggest hook because it reflected what had been my friend pool all my life. The lure of shorter services on Saturdays and Sundays was the complete opposite of the all-day Sunday services I was used to. Sometimes I would attend Saturday nights and meet up with friends at a bar, club, or restaurant right after. The convenient availability of different times freed up Sundays for brunch which was especially appealing to young people with disposable income.
There was an alarming lack of intentional intergenerationality. Young and middle-aged couples with families abounded but apart from small-group leadership, elders were largely invisible. Children were relegated to nurseries and classrooms. They did not regularly sing in choirs for the larger congregation or recite Easter speeches or perform in plays unattached to religious holidays. Gone were the markers of confidence building I experienced during my formative years in the Black Church. Megachurch families had separate screens at home and separate worship experiences at church.
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We met in small groups usually on a weekday. These consisted of people who lived in close proximity throughout the city but met in one member’s home. It was a grouped off version of the traditional mid-week Bible study at the church building. Small groups weren’t always Bible studies, though. We often read books by mostly wealthy white men who either wrote about being successful or their succinct journeys of faith. Sometimes we would break off into women’s small groups and read books on matrimony and motherhood written by these successful men’s wives. Many of the authors were church leaders who have since stepped down or been removed from their positions because of some nebulous sin or after a pattern of abuse was exposed.
An epiphanic blip about six years into my attending the megachurch prepared the way for my exit. It was the first of two major events that happened in close proximity–the latter of which I may discuss another time. It took place during a Sunday service where the guest preacher was a Black man from a Black Church background. It’s common for Black preachers to be sanctified comedians with beautiful singing voices. This preacher was both and came from the tradition of singing before starting a sermon. I don’t remember the hymn he sang but I do remember the surge that took place the second he started. Those of us who grew up singing it sprang to our feet. The preacher turned to the praise and worship leader who came from the same tradition and they gave a knowing smile to each other. This wasn’t planned. This was the song the Holy Ghost laid on the preacher’s heart. The usual lyrics projected on the large screens in the sanctuary were blank. We didn’t need them because the song connected to our genetic code. We sang a couple verses and the chorus a few times. My eyes were closed and I could feel the tears falling down my face. I was so grateful for that moment of gospel, Holy Ghost, and blackness in what was more often timed Holy Spirit experiences set to Christian Contemporary Music overrun with maudlin metaphors. Shouts of “Hallelujah!” rang as we tarried. But there’s no time to tarry when there are multiple scheduled services.
Then, our white pastor said into the mic, “Don’t get used to this.” My eyes popped open as if rudely awakened from a sweet dream. As I sat back down, disappointed, I said under my breath, “I gotta get out of here.” Eventually, I did. It wasn’t just about the interruption of the song we were singing. I was still listening to and singing gospel music apart from church service because it’s my soundtrack for tribulation, daily life, and celebration.
Every community of human beings has conflicts, shortcomings, and abuse. One of the most prevalent forms of abuse in multicultural megachurches with white leadership is omission. That hymn unified us in a single shared memory even as we stood in a reality that encouraged forgetfulness. “Don’t get used to this” was an attempt to recalibrate. In other words, “don’t remember this.”
The Black people whose early spiritual formation began in the Black Church tradition were all engaged in an act of remembrance. It went back to that communion table in front of many a pulpit that had “this do in remembrance of me” or “do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19). Everything took place in front of that table, not just communion. Service members were welcomed back home in front of that table, as were people who wanted to join the church or ask for prayer. Newborn babies were presented to the church there, testimony service–all of these acts took place in front of that communion table. And when we did have communion, it was like a whole meal was being served, not just wafers and grape juice. Hidden ceremonial work went into it. Prayers were prayed over the sacrament in secret rooms before congregants were served in splendor by gloved hands holding gold trays. Andraé Crouch’s “The Blood Will Never Lose Its Power” was sung solemnly before partaking and rousingly after. The megachurch’s wafers were attached to the seal of the disposable juice cup under a layer of plastic like a cheese-and-crackers snack pack.
Regardless of leadership, megachurches tend to fixate on results-based faith with Hollywood happy endings: sinner to saved, single to married, employee to entrepreneur, childless to parent, thousandaire to millionaire, sick to healed. The miracle comes from the sky and lands on you. In my presence-based background, the sick and shut-in were visited on a weekly or daily basis and many of them never saw healing in their earthly vessels. Some people lived meagerly but always kept a stash so they could inconspicuously slip a college student a $20 bill during a hug or mail a care package. Meals were cooked and groceries were bought for the destitute and carpools were welcome relief for the carless. Prayers for provision were answered tangibly at choir rehearsals and other church gatherings by taking up love offerings or spontaneous, spirit-led collection of funds. Dwelling in the presence of God empowered people to be the answer to prayer.
The prayers were deeply rooted in a shared humanity of loneliness, lack, sadness, grief, but also joy, thankfulness, gratefulness, and happiness. In a time when material gain is synonymous with being blessed, those elements seem simplistic. They were actually foundational because none of that is possible without being “clothed in your right mind” or “clothed and in your right mind.” When it was spoken as “clothed in my right mind” I imagined pulling a shirt over my head which represented the mind clothing my whole body, affecting how my whole body felt. Sometimes being clothed in one’s right mind was the battle to stay sane while facing tremendous obstacles. Ad libs like “lawyer in a courtroom,” “doctor in a sick room,” and “mother and father” spoke to God’s surrogacy as one attempts to surmount the impossible alone.
Megachurches corporatized the worship experience. Sermons sound like TED Talks. Praise and worship comes off like company pep rallies led by a select group of singers with their own mics. Small groups mimic MLM affiliates. Black megachurches have maintained the gospel music legacy but they hold the same capitalist tenets of their white counterparts thus influencing the readings and approaches to scripture. As a result, misogyny–the Black Church’s original sin–anti-blackness, homophobia, transphobia, individualism, and classism now run rampant in both. They’ve sacrificed the Black Church’s legacy of benevolence and human rights activism in the process.
