Last year my wife and I attended a local church to satisfy a neighbor who was concerned for our soul. Nevermind that I had told him about my life filled with ministry; he felt that since my church didn’t meet on Sunday I should go to his. Or it didn’t count.

He is a nice old man so we went to see him sing in the Christmas choir. This church is a church I would have been happy with years ago, but these days the place seems a little to trendy. It is like they read a church growth manual and are following it to the letter.  The folks there are great and pastor is nice, but the place isn’t for me.

But these church leaders are like the guy who won’t take no for an answer.  As normal, we filled out an information card.  Now we get invitations to special events and other things.

The problem I have; the place where they went out of control is adding us to their automated invitation phone calls.  They have a special event, we get a phone. At 10:00pm.

I understand keeping people informed, but this is intrusive. You hate to call some nice folks and ask them to remove you from a call list. They’re just working for Jesus and such.

The best way to handle this is to allow people to choose what kind of messages we receive. Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter, Newsletters are just fine. They are passive. I can easily ignore them if they get intrusive. But phone calls, which I rarely take from people I like at late hours.  Entirely too much. So if you ever think of doing this…DON’T! It is not a good idea.  It will actually sour someone and they will not want to be a part.

I don’t like the idea of a pentecostal preacher promoting his church with social media by posting the altar show. It is disrespectful.

Many readers will think the videos we find online are hilarious, ridiculous, or creepy.  I don’t care about that so much. Pentecostalism works for some people and good for them. The problem comes when these folks are having a very intimate moment in the best way they understand it with God and some jerk is shoving a camera in their face. That would be enough to irritate most people.However, in the pentecostal world, it seems this would be even worse because the nature of what they are doing is full of snot, tears, running make-up, sweat, falling down. Embarrasing moments if they are taken out of context.

And with that you get videos like this:

Some very funny person put this together with video from a pentecostal service. I don’t blame the person; penetecostals do hilarious stuff. The people I blame for this are those who record it and post it to begin with.  These are church members, pastors, and staff that have the audacity to point a camera and someone having a moment and exploiting it to promote their church or ministry.

A pastor friend of mine did this earlier today. I felt bad for the people. It isn’t the thing you want floating around the internet out of context.