Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist; pp. 308-310
The memorial for the Rev. Bruce Barnes was scheduled for the same time as the regular Sunday morning service at New Hope Village Church. This is a neat trick if you want to make sure that plenty of people show up for your funeral. But the authors still want us to know that the church is extra crowded this Sunday morning, because the reclusive pastor who never spoke to anyone outside of his inner-inner circle of friends was so widely beloved:
Buck knew there would be a crowd that morning, but he didn’t expect the parking lots to be full and the streets lined with cars for blocks.* If Loretta hadn’t had a reserved spot, she might have done better to leave her car at home and walk to the church with Tsion. As it was, she told Buck later, she had to wave someone out of her spot when she got back with him.
This seems out of character for both Loretta and her passenger, the incognito messianic rabbi. I have no doubt that Rayford Steele, Buck Williams, Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye would all feel entitled to reserved parking for the extra-special and extra-important. And I’m sure all of them would indignantly wave any uppity intruder out of their special spot. But this doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that Loretta’s actual humility or the rabbi’s extravagantly performative humility would lead them to do.
Since we’re reading about this from Buck’s POV here, I can’t help but imagine that he’s misinterpreting what “she told Buck later.” I imagine Loretta and Tsion actually did wind up walking from her home after circling the church and realizing the lots were full. Later, when she started to explain this to Chloe, Buck interrupted: “But of course you waved the intruders out of your spot, right? I mean, surely you wouldn’t allow one of those nameless nobodies to take your special place?” And she just kind of let that go because it was easier than getting into all that with someone like Buck.
The lump in Buck’s throat began the moment he entered the sanctuary and saw the crowd. The number didn’t surprise him, but how early they had assembled did.
Who are all these people and where did they come from? It’s understandable that the memorial service for Bruce would draw every member of the congregation to attend this Sunday, but this seems like more than 100-percent attendance. And if far more people are showing up than ever before, it doesn’t seem like devotion to the late Bruce Barnes could account for that.
Here’s my theory: These are refugees.
Take a moment to recall something that the authors themselves have already forgotten, and something that Rayford never even alludes to in his funeral sermon over the following pages: the city of Chicago was destroyed by nuclear weapons just a few days ago. Millions of people just a few miles from here were annihilated when the Antichrist’s Global Community Air Force rained fiery death down on the city, on the airport, and — inexplicably — on a hospital in Arlington Heights that was singled out as the only suburban target in the global potentate’s sudden and arbitrary war against himself.
Millions dead — including likely the friends, relatives, and co-workers of every single person gathered this Sunday morning in the church. But there were some survivors. Tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, of Chicago residents may have managed to escape death, and now they would be displaced — refugees now stranded in the suburbs surrounding their ruined city. Where would they go? What would become of these now homeless, penniless and jobless, traumatized Chicagoans? They cannot turn to the Global Community for help — it was the Global Community that just attacked them.
Enter Loretta and the underground resistance network she coordinates from New Hope Village Church. She knew this was coming. She’d heard all of Vernon Billings’ End-Times sermons over the years and, unlike Bruce, she didn’t need to spend long hours poring over “Bible-prophecy” tomes to understand the basic outline of the Great Tribulation that was now upon them. Ever since the Rapture, she’s been preparing, stockpiling food and supplies, setting up a black market, forging documents and getting ready for all the seals and trumpets and the Mark of the Beast to come.
Her first move had been to reform New Hope’s board of directors. While Bruce was cloistered in his office, moaning in prayer with his Tribulation Force cronies, the new church board was securing a second and third mortgage on all the church’s property, structuring them for high-interest deferred payments that wouldn’t come due until more than seven years later. That influx of cash and resources was what allowed Loretta to be ready when the bombs fell on Chicago. She’d moved quickly to relocate survivors and refugees — some into the still-empty homes of raptured former members of the church, others into the now-abandoned elementary and pre-school buildings now controlled by her underground network.
This theory, I think, makes the story seem more interesting and more exciting, but that’s really just a side-effect. Insisting that the characters in a story behave sensibly and act reasonably out of necessity tends to make for a more interesting and more exciting story than when characters fail to do so.
Also, it allows us to accept Buck’s description of the scene there in the church without having to accept his implausible explanation for what he’s seeing:
There was not the usual murmuring as at a normal Sunday morning service. No one here seemed even to whisper. The silence was eerie, and anyone could have interpreted it as a tribute to Bruce. …
Anyone could interpret it that way, that is, provided that, like Buck, they chose to ignore the hundreds of others killed in the same hospital attack where Bruce died, and they chose to forget the millions of others killed in the following days.
People wept, but no one sobbed. At least not yet. They simply sat, most with heads bowed, some reading the brief program that included Bruce’s vital statistics. Buck was amazed by the verse someone, probably Loretta, ran along the bottom of the back page of the program. It read simply, “I know that my Redeemer lives.”
Yeah, reading Job 19 at a funeral — that really is amazing.
Loretta would know to include that passage in a memorial service because over the past two years she’s had to become something of an expert in funerals. The Rev. Bruce Barnes apparently never conducted any funeral services during the year and a half he spent as this church’s nominal pastor — not for his own departed wife and children, or for Irene and Raymie Steele, or for any of the other children or adults in the congregation and community who were among the disappeared. It’s impossible, and inhuman, to think that none of those grieving parents would have needed some kind of ritual to mark the disintegration of their beloved children. We know that Bruce and the Trib Force members never conducted or attended such services, so we have to assume that “someone, probably Loretta” did.
And then, for the past three weeks, while Bruce’s service was delayed due to the jet-setting schedules of his inner-inner circle chums, it would have fallen to someone, probably Loretta, to arrange and conduct a nearly constant stream of funerals and memorial services for all the other victims of the hospital attack, and for the incomprehensible number of victims of the destruction of Chicago.
So I don’t know whether Loretta is expediently borrowing from the Book of Common Prayer, or if she’s accidentally reinventing it based on the years of hard experience she’s compressed into the past few weeks. But I’m not at all amazed that she’s gotten good at this after all that heart-rending practice.
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* Parking lots are the standard measure of church growth here in America. This is what healthy, successful church growth means: parking lots that are both A) vast and B) full.
I’ve read dozens, maybe hundreds of articles about “church growth.” Many of them mention this need for adequate and convenient parking. I don’t remember any of them ever discussing public transportation. Not even when those articles are fretfully concerned over churches’ inability to attract Millennials or when they’re full of well-intentioned, if naive, discussions about the desire for greater ethnic or economic diversity.
We can’t begin to do justice to the subject here, but just give a quick thought to all the assumptions and presumptions involved in a parking-lot-shaped ecclesiology. It’s rather a huge deal.
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