Fuck Your Stupidity, I've Had Enough.

[silentknight]

In my area we have doctors and dentists in strip malls. I find that odd.

[Akheia]

After my Evil Ex committed the unpardonable sin (stomping into a hospital ICU with a bottle of Pompeiian to anoint and pray for a dying pastor who was on his deathbed surrounded by family who just wanted to bid him a dignified farewell, aka "Wait, we weren't SERIOUS about all that...") against our regular church, one of the UPC cornerstones, we defected to a small homegrown strip mall church. I quickly realized that strip mall churches are where dreams go to die. I wanted to help, I did, I wanted it to succeed because the pastor and his wife were genuinely good people doing what they thought was the right thing, but if anything, the strange setting only increased my sense of awareness that we were all just playing pretend, talking to the ceiling, and nothing about it could possibly be true or real. The make-believe gets a lot more tenuous when you're in a converted strip-mall store with about 20 people tops attending every week. The medieval Popes were right: put people in huge gorgeous buildings, give them a lot of ritual, ostentation, and pomp, and they'll believe much more easily.

 

That church also made me way more aware of how limited the UPC denomination considers women to be. There were precisely TWO things I was encouraged to do there, in a setting where every able body should have been invaluable: I could do "music ministry" (aka, lead the singing while the pastor's wife played the keyboard), or I could teach Sunday school. Well, I'm shit for singing. And I really, really don't like being around children. So you can guess how fun that all was for me. Part of me knew that church isn't supposed to be "fun," but the other part dreaded it so much I was getting tummyaches Saturday nights knowing what was looming ahead the next morning.