Word: churches
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
About 40 minutes into Chris Christie's talk July 27 at the Bethel United Methodist Church in Pennsauken, N.J., he got the question. The Republican candidate for governor is a former U.S. Attorney who made his name prosecuting corrupt Garden State politicians - 140 of them in seven years. So it's not surprising that Christie can hardly go an hour these days without someone asking him about last week's dramatic arrests of 44 people - including three mayors, two state assemblymen, several city councilmen and five rabbis - on charges ranging from money-laundering to corruption. "One of the things...
...took me to the worship center to see the end of the sermon being given by Warren, who apparently was our warm-up act. He did not make me laugh once. Then as the full house of 160 took their seats in a small meeting room next to the church, we gathered to pray about our performance. Preshow praying, as most professional comedians will tell you, is not quite as confidence-building as shots of Cuervo. (See TIME's 2008 cover on Rick Warren...
...troupe mates were impressively funny within those boundaries, but after a while, I couldn't take the comedy shackles. During a version of the game Jeopardy!, someone shouted the answer "Milk!" to which I nervously buzzed in with "What is a movie they'd never play at this church?" To my relief, this got a laugh. So when we had to make up rhyming greeting cards for imaginary events and an audience member yelled out "Going to an improv show!" I said, "Improv is scary to do/ Especially when the whole audience wants to convert...
Afterward, lots of supernice Christian people complimented my Christian-bashing jokes, including Tony Guerrero, Saddleback's director of creative arts, who also throws a jazz and Shakespeare festival at the church. I asked him what exactly the point of all this was, and he said, "If you look back in history, most of the arts were done for the church. All the music of Bach and Mozart was written for the church. We'd like it to be a hub for the arts again." Even back in the Renaissance, for every Michelangelo, there were probably five guys on a stage...
...pictures of a drive-in church...