Bucky: Is there a church around here?
Would-Be Helpful Stranger: What are you looking for? Catholic? Methodist?
Bucky: Oh, whatever. I just wanna hear a sermon.
Would-Be Helpful Stranger:
It's hard, I found out, to work into a casual conversation that you're on the road making a conscious imitation of Steinbeck and therefore you're making it your business to attend a representative American church that you don't have any philosophical allegiance to just like Steinbeck went and attended a representative American church with which he had no affiliation as an exercise in projecting a lot of sociological ruminations onto whatever corresponds to your prefabricated opinions about the emotional value of religion all as an excuse to show off your practiced pseudo-intellectual detachment.
And by "you" I mean "me."
And really, slipping that into a brief exchange with a complete stranger in Fresno, a town where nobody smiles, is quite beyond my social dexterity. But I digress. My real point is that Fresno is a town where nobody knows how to give directions.
I puttered about downtown Fresno in search of a church, asking here and there about where one might be, do you know where, how many blocks is it... I received a charming medley of noncorresponding and geographically ignorant advice about a few blocks there or two more blocks that way and at least three outright lies of how you can't miss it in an Oddyssean saga of zigzagging that will go unrecorded in this space, if only to spare you the trauma of enduring what I went through. I will only tell you the moral of this story and that is this: if you need to ask for directions, do not go to Fresno.
Eventually I found The Downtown Church: A Church Aflame. But this being Fresno, they were shut down and boarded up. So eventually I found right across the street the Cornerstone Church (in the Historic Wilson Theatre) with Pastor Jim Franklin.
The historic Wilson Theatre is a gorgeous art deco cinema house from the 20s or 30s. I was a little underdressed for church—the good jeans and black shirt I'd worn since LA—but so were a number of other church goers. The parishioners' attire ranged from yardwork casual to Sunday best. The church ladies working the theatre lobby tended to more garish ensembles. Think "Mrs a-Whiggins" from the Carol Burnett Show. It was an elegant lobby, with the popcorn stand refurbished to a reception desk facing the the wide glass doors and on either side two swirling conch shell staircases that spiraled up the balcony. If the ornate rug wasn't the original from the Wilson's heyday, it was a suitable replica.
From behind the popcorn counter, a thirtyish church secretary directed the two welcoming church ladies and the two black-tied male ushers to guide traffic. When I made for the theatre doors to go in to the service, the secretary came from behind her popcorn stand.
"You can't go in yet. He's in the middle of a prayer."
From the window in the door, I could see Pastor Jim Franklin walking back and forth on stage like a moving target. He wore a stage mic on his head and was brandishing a sword over his head and talking to the congregation. No, you didn't read that wrong. He clutched a bible to his ribs with the other hand. He didn't look like he was praying. I do not judge, however.
"I think he's finished praying. This is the part I wanted to catch."
"Sir, you'll have to wait for the 11 o'clock show."
"You mean the 11 o'clock service?"
"That's what I said, the 11 o'clock service."
It was 10:40am. I had time to check out the bathrooms. I'm fascinated with bathrooms. The Wilson Theatre had the original decorative tile and quite old toilets. I doubt they dated to the 1930s, but the technology and commode architecture was definitely pre-1960. Commodes were thrones back then; commodes worthy of a great industrial empire, when America straddled the world and California was fresh and new.
When they let us into the theatre for the 11 o'clock showverce, I found myself in a traditional theatre auditorium. Big jumbo monitors hung on either side of the stage and an even larger one hung above center stage. The stage had stark props, an extended hardwood floor, colored studio spotlights against black out curtains, and a rock band set up situated upstage from the pastor's promenading zone. Pastor Jim Franklin was nowhere about. Soothing yet peppy background music backfiltered through the hub-bub of crowd conversations. Singles, couples, and a few families milled about and slowly found their seats. I sat fourth row center and surreptitiously snapped away.
The camera and lights crew wore black collared tee-shirts and khaki pants. They moved around, setting up equipment, testing sound, adjusting light mounts, and positioning cameras. They moved with the all-business detachment of stage techies, undistracted by the lights and the music and the building mood and all the other showbiz elements. The gathering congregation had an enviable variety of people—all races, all ages, all income levels judging from the clothes. I finally put it together. Despite the size—the theatre would only have seated 400 people tops—the Cornerstone Church was a megachurch, a mini-megachurch. I wasn't going to get my sermon today at all. I was going to get a pep talk.
Suddenly the lights dimmed. The jumbo monitors on the sides went black. The music swelled. Then up on the widescreen above center stage a commercial came on. It was a commercial for the Cornerstone Church. Pastor Jim looked out from the widescreen and told us about the love of God and the inner power of the light. He didn't say anything I could've disagreed with. The commercial closed with a sincere good-bye from Pastor Jim, followed by a montage of generic slogans about joy and belonging. Everyone in the theatre seemed to feel the joy and belonging. The stage lights rose up, revealing a choir and small rock upstage and a row of pretty, sharply groomed lead singers downstage. A keyboardist, Pastor Jim's wife I figured later, led the celebratory music from stage left and a pretty blonde saxophonist jazzed up the flashy ensemble from stage right. The music swelled.
The six lead singers sang about what a friend they had in the Lord. They summoned us all to our feet. The beat was jazzy, percussive, at times almost surf-guitar in its drive. Pastor Jim's wife raised one hand, the saxophonist wailed, and the music shifted tone to a rock power ballad. It was another song, but with a lot of the same lyrics. One of the leads stepped forward and had a solo. The Lord guided him, he sang. His song repeated some of the slogans from Pastor Jim's opening commercial. He was strikingly effeminate. My instinct was to snicker at this, a suppressed gay guy singing lead at a Christian church. But I was the asshole; I was the hypocrite. I saw nothing the whole service to suggest the Cornerstone Church was down on gays. They didn't seem to hate anybody. They didn't seem to condemn anything. It was all just love, love, and more love all service long. The Lord gives me this, the Lord saves me from that. They never even mentioned Jesus. It could have been any Lord. A Jew, a Buddhist, a fifth-level magic user with a Spell of Belonging could have sat through this showverce, clapping along with the joy, and not been offended.
There were more pop songs about God and the spirit and everybody's life making sense. There were duets and trios and more solos from the lead singers. They finished with a song about armor, based on the "Armor of God" verses from Ephesians. It was the first hint of any Bible quoting I'd seen all service. One guy sang about the Belt of Truth and strapped a gaudy gold belt around the blonde woman standing center stage. The other woman singer sang about the Breastplate of Righteousness and slipped a fake chainmail vest over the blonde's head onto her shoulders. There were verses about the Shield of Faith and the Helmet of Salvation, each with the singer similarly adorning the blonde model up front, each made from cheap cloth or cardboard and emblazoned with cheap gold-colored foil. Then one of the ushers came out with a sword, a real saber with visibly sharpened edges. Instead of handing it to the blonde woman up front while the choir sang about the Sword of the Spirit, the usher raised up the sword and then chunked it, Excalibre-like, into the solid wood floor. A splinter flew up. He'd thrust it hard enough for the sword to stand alone, statue still, gashing into floor of the Church. No one sang a joyous verse about the Vandalism of Entertainment, but the Lord protected them with this just as well.
Now the Pastor's wife stilled the singing and the joying from her keyboard and, at last, Pastor Jim came out. He gave a quick little prayer about God opening our hearts. Then he set into the sermon. But as I feared, it was just a pep talk. He made all the moves of an inspirational speaker. He was good at his job. He warned us against fear and against worry and about the need to bring God into our hearts. He yanked the sword from it hardwood and swung the sword over his head. He earned a murmur of praises and amens when he called it the Sword of the Spirit.
He wanted each of us, each one of us here today, to make a commitment to the Lord and sing his praise. I kept waiting for a hint about what the commitment was for. But this God wasn't for anything. And apart from evil and worry, this God wasn't against anything either. He called for anyone in the congregation who felt so moved to come forward now and make a commitment to the Lord. Come on, come on, I know there's more of you, yes, God was out there in the audience right now, touching someone's heart, calling them down. A dozen or so people came down, sons and sisters and husbands, and bowed their heads in the well of the theatre, and asked God into their hearts. This Lord just wanted me in Heaven and didn't seem to ask much from me in return, not even gratitude. But give a God some credit, he and Pastor Jim at least got Fresno to smile.
The service was over. We all walked out into the sunlight. The sky was a perfect blue overhead. The storefronts of Fresno were still boarded up. But my spirits were up and my step was light. I'd killed an hour and the good mood lasted for at least an hour after that. There wasn't any hypocrisy and there wasn't any con job going on. This was not a bait and switch. Pastor Jim Franklin was selling God, pure and simple, and it wasn't weighed down with anything like an ethical code to live by or a hint of something sinister dragging me into the sin the world. I could go on drinkin' and whorin' and writin' unrhymed poetry and this God still wanted me up in Heaven. I went ahead and dropped a few coins in the collection plate. The Cornerstone Church had earned my business.
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