The Baptist Church of Los Angeles

Today I went to the Baptist Church of Los Angeles. I won’t go into the story about how I ended up going there (it’s a long one). But I’ll write some about what my experience there was like. They’re got a very interesting style of worship. It’s probably the strangest church I’ve ever been to. Everyone must dress formally; they provide a dressing room with shirts and ties. So I wore a shirt and tie that they provided. They originally pitched that “over 100 students” will be there, but there were 10 rows with 10 columns, with one aisle down the middle – making for exactly 100 seats. Most of the seats were taken, but there were a couple empty ones at the back – so I’d guess there were 97 people there.

Everyone who spoke at the mic literally yelled everything they said. And every five words, the entire congregation would stand up and begin clapping. The clapping would continue for almost an entire minute; sometimes, the preacher would be yelling over the clapping. We must have stood up and clapped about 50 times, maybe more. At an average of 30 seconds per clapping session, we might have spent some 25 minutes dedicated to the sole purpose of standing and clapping – no exaggeration. That’s a really long time to be clapping.

Everything was really, really loud, too. They used noisemakers insanely, including bells, horns, etc. No projectors; no worship leaders, the worship songs were hymns with piano or guitar by the men on stage.

When the service was over, we went upstairs for lunch. We celebrated the birthdays of two seniors; one was a lady of about 70; the other was a man who was celebrating his 94th birthday. Then they turned off the lights and played an episode of the Spiderman cartoon, projected on a screen. It was about a machine that creates vampires and a vampire slayer who is experienced with killing them, and Spiderman strugging to stop him from killing the artificial vampire (whose vampire-ness was Spiderman’s fault). To be continued…

Then they played an episode of I Love Lucy. It was about tricking couples into doing various funny things (coming to dinner, pretending to have been run over by a bus, pretending there’s a fire) to get back together. Everyone there seemed to enjoy it a lot. It was good, but weird.

One Response to “The Baptist Church of Los Angeles”

  1. Tony Bressie says:

    This Los Angeles Baptist Church is very liberal and Worldly. And Im NOT a Church Of Christ Member, I am a Missionary Baptist One and this stuff makes me want to destroy The Baptist Chruch of Los Angeles and Churches just like it Because God is NOT welcomed in it. The Clapping, The Praise & Worship Music, Going out of control with Spiderman & I Love Lucy. This IS A PEOPLE PLEASING CHURCH, NOT A GOD PLEASING ONE. If they praised God, they would cease the Clapping and the Loud, Insane Praise & Worship Music, and NOT Show “Spiderman” or “I Love Lucy”!
    Hey I Love Animated Characters like Spiderman or Teen Titans too, but I would not show an episode of them during worship service. I would recomend they show either an episode or a photo of Spiderman worshiping God, not an worldy episode of Spiderman stopping A Vampire Slayer.

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