TheChurch Maumee

The pastor here is truly excellent. I highly recommend him. He has one defect, which is that he spends an enormous amount of time discussing faith healing. All the evidence clearly shows that faith healing is mostly bogus. Once in a blue moon someone gets healed, but even then you never know whether it was due to the "faith healing" or to something else. It strikes me that his endless discussion of faith healing is simply meant to appeal to gullible, poorly educated people with severe medical problems. Perhaps he can get more people into his church through this appeal. If faith healing really worked, we wouldn't have to have over one million doctors in the USA and pay our high insurance premiums. Still, it is possible that some people are specially gifted in the area of healing and we should keep an open mind about it. I am not saying that severely ill people won't feel temporarily better or spiritually high for a short time at a "healing service." I do, however, think that people with chronic illnesses should know in advance how unlikely it is that they'll be permanently healed through prayer.

This church has almost no social activities, which is not particularly unusual for a Toledo church, but is unfortunate. My concept of a church is that the people who regularly attend it should all get to know each other. They ought to have two 30-minute or one 60-minute social event every Sunday morning. At this church, hardly anyone will even talk to you. I've attended this church about eight times and I've managed to have about three conversations that lasted less than one minute with people I never even saw again. They love to give everyone a cold shoulder. I attend because I think the pastor does a great job when he is not talking about healing through prayer.

The pastor expects everyone to do what he says--even though we never even see him except once a week for an hour, as passive listeners. But that sort of pushiness is essentially a part of Christianity, which is a highly conformist religion. I prefer a pastor to give advice, rather than to insist that everyone do what he says. There's a difference between giving advice on Sunday morning and telling people what they must do. Hard-core fundamentalist Christians, like the pastor of this church, strongly believe that everyone in the world must think and act exactly as they do. But I like the fact that this church is also a very experiential church.