WWACD?

Continuing with yesterday’s theme (It’s Sunday; let’s do something religious), I had what for me was a very strange experience listening to the radio recently. We are now well into the 21st century, and in the Atlanta area, at least, that means one hears advertisements from churches smack-dab in the middle of news and talk-show programs. You know, where you go straight from Neal Boortz, Libertarian apologist, to “Hello, I’m Bryant Wright, and I’m the pastor of Johnson Ferry Baptist Church.” One minute you’re listening to Clark Howard, Consumer Advocate, tell you how to spend wisely and live well, and the next minute a new voice is saying, “...this has been a message from David Cooper, pastor of the Mount Paran Church of God.”

Well, old Doctor Bob Jones, Sr., founder of Bob Jones University, did once say many years ago, “There is no difference in the sacred and the secular. All ground is holy ground, and every bush is a burning bush,” but there’s still something a little jolting about suddenly hearing a commercial for a church in the middle of, say, Sean Hannity’s program. It’s just bizarre.

I may be a little too comfortably ensconced in my little corner of the evangelical world, but I was surprised one day recently to hear, just after Scott Slade had concluded the hourly news update, a pitch for the Episcopal Bookstore at The Cathedral of St. Philip in Atlanta. I mean, I’m aware there are such things as Christian bookstores -- Family Bookstore used to be Zondervan, for example, and what is now called Lifeway used to be the Southern Baptist Bookstore -- but I wasn’t even aware there was such a thing as an Episcopal bookstore. Imagine that! It made me want to run right over there and buy one of those WWACD bracelets (and, no, they weren’t mentioned in the commercial).

You know, What Would the Archbishop of Canterbury Do?