Lions and Tigers and iPods... Oh My

A local kilo church (I'm sure you can figure that out) rented a lion to illustrate something for one of the pastor's sermons. They tend to go through Revelation over and over... and over again. So the lion was an illustration for that. It turns out that the lion was only available for the morning services so they rented a tiger to show up for the evening services. The tiger, perhaps offended at playing second fiddle to a lion or saddened by its exclusion from the Bible, peed on stage. (Is stage the correct term? Hmm... it's not an apse. In this case, yes; it is most certainly a stage.)

I know that sounds like the set up for a joke or a parody of the things churches do, but it's not. It is, but it is also an actual event. Well, I've been told it actually happened. When I tried to find a citation for this, Google searches for this story turned up a lot of MySpace pages. That's funny to me too. Anyway, here's the lion at church. But there's no picture of a tiger. You'd think a tiger would be photo-worthy too, so maybe it's a snub for the peeing on stage. Or maybe it never happened. I trust the source but have no external confirmation, so take it however you will. Lion yes, tiger maybe.

An other church, more mega than kilo, is giving away iPod Shuffles with sermons about The DaVinci Code so that parishoners (Is parish the correct term? Probably not.) can give them to their non-churched friends or keep them for themselves.

So the question is: which would you rather have? I really want an iPod- even the poorman's iPod Shuffle. I would be willing to listen to a crappy sermon for a free iPod Shuffle. So that's tempting. But a lion's a lion. I mean come on. People here get excited when a house cat wanders into the sanctuary, imagine what we'd do with a lion; that would be such an authentic experience. But I think I get enough authentic experiences so I'd pick the iPod Shuffle.

Our church, barely hecto, doesn't have any plans to wow people with lions or draw them in with iPods. We don't even have plans to talk about The DaVinci Code. What can we say we have to offer? It's like we have no idea what church is about.

Oh well.