You can listen to the show at:
http://blogthereligions.com/node/36.
This week's religion:
Love First Christian Center
10817 Dixon Drive
Riverview, FL 33579
Held in the Vision for the Nations Church building
Contact: Pastor Jomo Cousins
Book Recommendation: Pending
Religion: Christian
Denomination: Non-Denominational
Web Page: www.lfcc.tv
Update: As you can see from the Podcast episode, I got the interview. So, now you can listen to it. Yay!
I just got back home from visiting the folks over at Love First. I also have about 2 hours of recordings I'm going to need to squeeze down for the show.
I didn't get a chance to sit down with Pastor Jomo Cousins. But I have to say I rather enjoyed the services.
First, the kind of church services that I'm used to over my 35+ years of religion are the much more quiet style. People come in, sit down, sing a hymn, there's the prayers, there's a talk, sing another song, and you're pretty much done. Very quiet, very reverent.
Love First is full of energy from beginning to end. The opening songs are kind of a gospel hip-hop. People are standing, they're clapping, they're all singing along. Just before the opening prayer given by Pastor Jomo, there's another song that's more serene that invites the spirit of God to enter the room.
Just before the prayer, Pastor Jomo invites all members to hold hands across the church, across the aisles. I was just there as an observer, so I felt bad when someone came by to hold my hand. (I approached them afterwards to explain, and I think they understood.) During the prayer, people agreed, offered "Amens", and communicated back with Pastor Jomo.
Directly after the opening prayer, Pastor Jomo invited the congregation into an exercise I thought was very cool. He invited every member to reach out to a stranger, to someone they didn't know, and introduce themselves. To share love with them. Within moments, everyone was about the room, shaking hands, telling people they'd never met before that they loved them and cared about them. I thought this sense of growing the community, of making everyone feel welcome and accepted was a very endearing move.
After the greeting, the children of potty-trained age were separated to "Children Church." All of the members were invited to stretch out their hands to the back of the chapel where the children were and offer a blessing upon them. It was yet another sweet image, and I thought enhanced that idea of community - of shared support for their members.
Pastor Jomo was a former NFL player (I need to ask what position he played) until his knees and shoulder was injured through playing. He did motivational speaking for awhile, until he opened his ministry. I can see why he was a motivational speaker. He is very engaging, but more importantly, I felt he frank about his own problems.
The lesson was on discouragement, drawing from the Bible in 1st Kings. As he told the lesson of Elijah, Pastor Jomo also discussed his own hardships. Of losing his NFL status, becoming "broke". As he put it how he went from his former career high, "I had to be broken down. Now I'm broke."
As he put it to me before the services, people put on a "happy happy" persona, trying to pretend that there was nothing wrong. But since people aren't perfect - even pastors - it was important to show that even people of faith had problems they had to overcome.
The way the service worked was both simple and effective. On a projector screen would be the scripture to be discussed. The congregation was encouraged to read out loud, and then Pastor Jomo would expound on the meaning, drawing from his own experiences. At times amusing, at times evocative, but always very engaging.
As I mentioned, we didn't have time for an interview afterwards, but I'm going to try to get in touch with him later this week. If you're curious about services, here's the appointment link I set up for Love First Christian Center - they also have a Wednesday study group, and a prayer line. They're in the mode of setting up a web page, so once they have that up I'll link to that directly.
On Tuesday I'm going to the Humanists, and I have a link to a book explaining their philosophy in the event notes there. Either way, I'll have a show up on next Sunday reporting what I've seen.