First Bank of Christ
2003-02-01 - 11:34 a.m.
**WELCOME TO TORNADO ALI**
QUESTION FOR TODAY: WHAT WOULD JESUS REFINANCE?
Picture this.
You’re driving down your street, on the way to Taco Bell, when you notice a sign for a new bank up ahead. You wonder how it’s possible that you didn’t notice a new bank being built since you take the same street to work every day.
It’s a typical bank sign.
A flashing marquis atop a gray column of shiny steel. Sometimes there’s a fancy clock. The messages, with their all-caps text, are visually imposing like weather warnings on the TV screen, “TAKE SHELTER IMMEDIATELY,” but their content is far more passive: “ICECAPADES TICKETS, DISNEY ON ICE.”
As you approach, you wonder if a bank is the kind of business that necessitates the existence of a flashy marquis.
In a bank you have withdrawn money, deposited money, and been looked down upon by women wearing these, but you have not seen strippers, off-Broadway shows, or Alice Cooper concerts there.
You like to think you can choose where you bank without a bunch of screaming capital letters trying to decide for you. You like to think your bank won’t look down on you if you decide to bank elsewhere, or if you decide not to bank at all and keep your money in a shoebox under the bed instead.
You soon realize this sign is different from the rest, though. It doesn’t say anything about low interest rates or home equity loans. Instead it says: "THE BIBLE IS G0D’S HOLY WORD. What are YOU reading?!?!?"
And then you realize there is no new bank.
There is, instead, the same sprawling, flat-roofed, dry-walled church that’s been there as long as you’ve lived here. The one you entered in April when it opened itself as a voting precinct, where the “Choose Life” posters in the doctor‘s-office-like hallway did not influence your voting choices in a last-minute salvation. The church simply has a new marketing strategy.
It makes you hope that if you should ever feel the need to evangelize about a holy word, you’ll do it in a format that doesn’t reduce it to the same empty statements as “FREE CHECKING, COLLEGE STUDENTS.”
At the exact moment you pass by, as you think about the shiny gold of collection plates, you hear a new Macy Gray song on the radio. You turn it up to hear her froggy voice, but the song is only five seconds long: “If I had money, I’ll tell you what I’d do/ I’d go downtown, buy me a Mercury or two/....so crazy ‘bout a Mercury.”
And you wonder if Macy Gray goes to church.
