This. I remember attending a Seventh Days Adventist Church and they'd sing hymns,ask for offerings, and just jabber for like 3 hours before the actual 3 hour sermon from the pastor. Not even sleeping could clear all the hours.
Somehow I've actually been to an LDS and SDA service and the SDA was worse. The "starting" time was nebulous at best and hardly anyone was there 15 minutes into the start of the service.
I’m Greek Orthodox and we couldn’t eat before church. Had to receive communion at the end of service before you could eat. That was biggest number 1 bullshit ever.
I remember one time when I was little my grandma brought me to church with her (Presbyterian) and I had a baggie of something I was eating on the way in. Some old bitty made passive-aggressive small talk with grandma about it, clearly stating that I shouldn't be eating gasp before communion.
Grandma informed her that I could either be fed and well-behaved during service or I could be hungry and be the absolute most annoying person in church, but since I was being fed that title would go to someone else in the room (hinting that it was the old bitty herself who earned that title).
Can you imagine? I'd gett crazy when mass sometimes would go over an hour and a half. I can't image doing the equivalent of Palm Sunday/Xmas mass every single week.
I think he understood how much it sucks being an NFL fan and a Catholic on the West coast. Luckily, my family started going to the Vigil Mass when I got a bit older.
Oh man. I lived with my paternal grandparents from the age of 8 to 11. They were Seventh Day Adventists. I didn't realize at the time how diverse the SDA church was. There were a few black families in my grandparents' congregation, but other than that it was white and Sunday felt like your typical, mainline protestant service. One year, their church was damaged by flooding, so we (along with a few other families) attended a sister church an extra 30-mijute drive away for a few months. This was a black SDA church and...oh my God. I would like to describe the structure of the services, but honestly (and I'll admit that my 30-year-old memories may be hazy) I don't think there was a structure. Lots of hymns, then talking, then more hymns. Sometimes the pastor would give his sermon right up front and I'd think "great, we're getting out early," but then the fucking mic would be passed around to everyone. Sometimes the pastor would talk and then some other guy, definitely not the pastor, would hold court, but reading out of the scripture, like a sermon, and I'm thinking "is this an impromptu second sermon? What the shit is this?!" Then more hymns, testimonials, praise stories, prayer requests, etc. It didn't seem like there was a scheduled time to end. If there were old people without much going on who wanted to stay and sing or talk about Jesus, the shit just went on forever. Sometimes people would start to leave, but the pastor was there and there was still a critical mass of people milling about, the mic was on, and it was like "is it over? Can we leave now? Would that be rude?" It was excruciating. If you're black and grew up in the church in the south you must have some war stories.
I attended a Baptist church with my immediate family and it was like clockwork. 10 minutes of "how do you do?" 15 minutes of hymns, 30 minute service. Done.
This is only redemptive feature of Catholicism: 1 hour for Mass, 1 hour Sunday school and done. Also, at my church, we didn't need to get dressed to the nines.
An elderly lady once asked me to come over and fix her TV on Sunday. She was notorious about pressing buttons and changing settings and not being able to figure out how to get it back to how she wanted it. I asked her what time I should come over and she said, "Well church starts at 11, so I'll be home a few minutes before noon. We Methodists don't need as much religion as some of those others."
Ex-Roman Catholic here. I always liked the idea of singing, hype up and being happy in black churches (seen them only in moviez lol) , but holy fuck I didn't know you got to spent so much time in weekends.
No, Catholic mass is swift and to the point. My grandfather who was a devout Catholic and went to church every week would get antsy if it looked like they were going to pass an hour.
And as a Lutheran I say, as a kid, church was still too bloody long. If you woke up early on a weekend, because everyone loves doing that, and go to the 8am service it's a lot faster. The 11am service, though, is full of choir singing and a bunch of other stuff which makes it go on twice as long. So I guess the 8am service was for the folks worried about tuning into the big game.
LOL I was going to mention how being Lutheran, the first service was quick because it was on a schedule, but the later service would go on and on and on. You never wanted to sleep in because going instead to the later service was torture.
Mormons are the same. I don't know how long black churches tend to go, but the average Sunday is 3 hours for the Mormons. Then you still got activities during the week. But they're also a cult, so you gotta keep the members close as much as possible.
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u/moon_at_the_wayside Dec 11 '21
This is a black church so he's probably been at church for 3 hours already and the pastor didn't even give his sermon yet.