Mega Churches...'Pomp Mobiles'...Elaborate Statues..Ornate Structures - And Other 'Christ-Like' Images Poem by James B. Earley

Memories return my spirit to another place and time. That impoverished community of my birth, and its bastion of spiritual strength..New Bethel Missionary Baptist Church - Mounds, Illinois. A faded white, ramshackle building it was. Its stately support - a single metal bar fragilely binding leaning exterior walls together. In the child's perspective, providing a helping hand to others seemed its only mission. That priority driven sense of 'Church' is now long extinct, the distant relic of a once caring past. In its stead a masquerading pretense maliciously supersedes with mega churches...slick oratory..forked tongues...sleights of hand...'pomp-mobiles'....elaborate statues.....ornate structures - and other 'Christ-like' Images