On a stormy Sunday in January, I decided to visit my local megachurch, a sprawling slate-gray complex called Green Pastures in the Northern Irish town of Ballymena, where hundreds gather every week to be washed in the blood of the lamb. Spotted as a newcomer by the doorman, I was given a free latte at the café on the ground floor and then escorted upstairs—past the gym, theological college, playground, and youth center—into the auditorium, where the house band was just beginning to perform a series of worship ballads. They sang in an American gospel style that left little trace of their own accents, with the lyrics displayed on several massive LED screens that glowed above the stage.
Over the next hour, we received sacramental grape juice in shot glasses, heard from a parishioner whose cancer had been cured by prayer, and prepared ourselves for the sermon, or “the preach,” as the congregants called it, delivered by the church’s founder, Jeff Wright. His topic was fear. “Are you here today with a sound mind,” he thundered, or “are you a basket case?” If it was the latter, he told us, that was probably because we had been expecting unconditional love from the Lord, when in fact He should inspire terror. Now that we have entered what Wright menacingly referred to as “the age of His return and the rapture of the church,” we had better get this straight. At which point the service ended and we went for tea and biscuits in the foyer.
