Stuff Apostolics Like

In honor of this special week, we look at one of the most enjoyable features of the Easter Drama which reenacts certain features of the story of our Lord and Savior.  If you have not witnessed a Passion play, you are missing out. Find the local mega church near you this weekend and make your way down there... I do not know if it happens any more, but I do recall that the Pentecostals of Alexandria (the Mangun's church in Louisiana) setting the mark for perfection in Messiah plays amongst apostolic churches. And i think it was because they had real live donkeys and goats walking around the church for the performance...There have been several others churches to use real animals in their play to make the play seem more authentic...I can just envision the conversation now as to how live animals in a church Easter play became a good idea... Producer: "How can we make our Jesus play as real as possible?" Pastor: "Well they used to sacrifice animals in the temple....so ...

Note: Not only did SAL catch up to the 21st century last week by making a twitter, but we also scurried right on up to 2010 and made a facebook group page (right side of page as well)! Now we can be satirically cynical, but also encouraging to one another as a community to social networking believers in one place.... This blog is credited to a fellow Urshanite who once wrote an essay when he was at school (that I would randomly stumble upon months after the fact) that literally had me thinking C.S. Lewis' quote that defines friendship out loud: "What? You too? I thought I was the only one." He is also the primary source behind a future, more adventurous post that has been brewing for months.... Firstly, we have already addressed one aspect of the phenomenon of church seating with the post entitled " Claiming your seat in the sanctuary as a separate independent nation." Now onto the most sacred part about church seating: The front row- To quote the recommender, ...

To fully understand this post, let's see an extreme example... Psalms 14:1- "...There is no God..." Done. Atheism is proven by the bible.... Except, of course for my honesty to include the ellipses indicating there is more to the verse than what I wrote.... which upon further investigation will reveal that it is the fool who says there is no God. But the idea is evident, it's very easy to pry small parts of the bible and the foundation from which God and the author intended, and use them for your own assumptions to back up some weird image of how God works.... The difficulty from the verse quoted above is that the verse was pried from it's immediate context within a verse itself. The trouble comes with understanding that chapter breaks were not even within the bible until 1227 AD via Archbishop Stephen Langton. Verses were not apart of the bible until the 1400's. That means for the first 14 centuries of Christianity, the idea of quoting speci...

Firstly, stuff apostolics like has a twitter! You can find the feed at the right side of the page. Follow us. You should find the occasional commentary on SAL topics that do not have enough content to deserve a post and an announcement about a new posting...with this in mind, if anyone has any photo shop skills/creative ideas, a logo for this place would be awfully nice (I'll write a very sincere formal piece of mail to you at your home address/and also on your facebook page....I'll even make my own amateur microsoft paint photo for you (it will be like from a 3rd grader)... And now to the topic... This one will probably make me out to be a bad guy (if i am not already)... A long time back I did a preachy post on the horror of how interracial marriage/dating is frowned upon in many circles in our culture...here's one more preachy post... Apostolics do not like gay people. It's actually quite a common preaching point complete with Bill O'Reillyesque commentary t...

Ahh food. America’s greatest vice. What demonstrates the excess in America more than the muffin tops spilling over our waist lines as we walk into our local eateries. And no one loves food more than this guy. I enjoy all types of food, from the deliciousness of mine and Joel's favorite barbeque (Slows BBQ, look into it), to a good chicken shawarma. From the deserts of the Middle East to the café’s of Sicily, from chili dog to shrimp tempura, there’s no type of food I’ll not try. But the irony I love about apo’s is the intensity with which we condemn other vices while stuffing our faces full of saturated fats. Some of the greatest messages I’ve ever heard were preached by preachers who were pushing 300 lbs. “Don’t drink that! You might get drunk!! Don’t smoke that! Know ye NOT that your body a ha, is the temple, a ha, of the Hoooooollllyyyyyy Ghhosttt?!?” ….three hours later…. “Yes I’ll take the 18 ounce porter house, rare, mashed potatoes with extra gravy, and an ...

Giving honor to whom honor is due (yet another thing Apostolics like), I must start out by acknowledging that Joel coined this term. However, after reading his home run post on the Altar Hierarchy System , I felt that gang prayer deserved an entry of its own, and with his blessing, decided to pen this post. Gang prayer as a phenomenon should be discussed more in depth, but we would do well to include discussion of the individual members and functions of the gang prayer team as well. Gang prayer definitions and conventions To be clear, 'gang prayer' is a noun which denotes the Pentecostal ritual of an assembly of people rallied around one, usually at the altar in an attempt to bring the person (henceforth known as the "praythroughee") to a state of physical, emotional, outwardly observable response. The praythroughee's reponse is the desired ending to gang prayer, although it also sometimes dissipates if the praythroughee fails to respond accordingly. The infinit...

“Fast Apo’s Conscience Cleanse. Pull your soul in every 3,000 sins for a guilt-flush and conscience cleanse!” This pretty much defines itself. We know exactly who I’m talking about. They treat the altar like a metaphysical oil change. Enter-pray through-socialize-and on to the club we go! Once a month we see this peach of a person. The characteristics are generally the same. They’re usually a girl, somewhat-to-very good looking, in her late teens to mid-twenties, and very conflicted. She’d say she wants to live for God, but has so much in her life, blah blah blah. The “things” in her life pulling her away usually amount to the same things everyone has in theirs: full time job, school, boyfriend, etc. This member of our congregational roster is usually the catalyst in the Breakout Service . The Shouting Song plays and said person is so overcome by guilt and raw emotion that they begin to respond. Soon after the Militant Altar Workers (future post) and Helping Hands bombard t...

Okay, first off, this idea is completely not my own. A good friend has long held this idea, but he does not want to be cited in this article for fear of ramifications in his current cultural context. But the show must go on.... What we have above is a hierarchical chart that basically defines who is allowed to pray for who at the altar. The theory goes that there are clearly defined roles for each church patron on who they can allow to pray for them and who they can pray for. Within these rankings (which can allow  for promotion/demotion as necessary), the answer comes as to who is more spiritual than who and with that, a level of respect/contempt is associated with the appropriate level accordingly. An expansion of the roles outlined in the picture above The Pastor- This is pretty much self-explanatory. The only occasion by which the pastor (or bishop) may be prayed for is by the following population figures (the numbers in parenthesis denoting the amount of...

(Special thanks to a favorite Canadian who recommended this post and much of it's content to me. ) First off, let me say that I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the singing special part of church. To me, it is the most real aspect of the church service. It reminds us of our humanity. There comes time in many a church service where we are floating on heaven. We forget that Obama is president, we forget about the dying children in Africa, and we forget about the earthquakes messing the world up (save a prayer request). We are in our element in church, free to be ourselves without the cares and criticisms of the world. We can pray and shout and dance our lives away and know that we have the truth. Church, in these instances is heaven on earth. That is.... Until the church solo comes crashing into our lives.....and the awkwardness that entails, and how on occasion it allows those who normally go unnoticed in church get their chance to shine....I will forever be a fan of the church solo i...