I recently visited The Well. It seems to be an overgrown Christian youth group run by college students. Either they change the way that services work on a regular basis or they did this time by some fluke. On this occasion, they must have been going for an intimate setting. There were no chairs inside the large auditorium in which the service was held. The only furnishing in the room was a four-by-four square stage covered with candles. Two young guys with guitars stood on the stage and served as the catalyst for the evening.
As opposed to a normal church service (which is generally led by someone in front of the congregation giving a long, spoken message), The Well was more about decentralized worship.
The guys with guitars stood in the middle of the room on their flaming stage surround by young people of faith sitting, kneeling and laying on the ground. They sang song after song after song with no breaks to speak to the crowd in between. The minstrels did not encourage their audience to sing along, but they did not discourage it.
The point was to worship God in your own way. No guidance, no condemnation. People swayed, kneeled with their heads to the ground, added their own heartfelt refrains to the songs, held their hands in the air, just watched . and everything in between.
I loved it. Without a speaker demanding my attention, I was free to watch people unselfconsciously expressing their spirituality.
After several songs, the projector began to show the message of the night. Not a word was spoken, there was only the large white words glowing in the darkness. When the evening’s message ended, the guitar guys went at it again and sang a few more songs. I was lying on my back, staring a hole in the air conditioner vent, lost in my own thoughts and failed to notice the speaker take the small stage. He gave a short speech/prayer that was supposed to reinforce the message of the night.
Though there was precious little actual content involved in the service, most of the people in the room seemed to be riding some sort of emotional wave. Hands were raised, praise was given, tears were shed.
Up until the message was given, I was observing with a somewhat chagrin form of interest. I delighted in all the people in the room that were having an experience that, to them, was completely real, completely honest.
The way that people can get absolutely lost in spiritual reverence has always been beautiful and confounding to me. Until the message started, I was enjoying watching these people of roughly my age all lost in emotional bliss brought on by nothing more than candles, guitars, and their desire to be lost in it. In those moments, religion can be beautiful.
When the message started, it reminded me why I spend my time away from places like The Well.
The message was poorly put together, dogmatic, used quotes from the Bible to justify logical fallacies and didn’t even make sense in context to itself.
In situations such as that, I have to tune out. If I listen too closely, I either find myself bothered by the total lack of consistency and real coherence, or I am reminded that I am incapable of ignoring the content of a message in favor of what its sender is trying to sell.
If I listen to the promises that speakers often make about life-altering experience and heart-changing revelation, it just brings back the hundreds of times in my life that I have thrown my whole heart into trying to achieve these feelings that so many of my peers claim, only to find nothing. Nothing inside, nothing outside.
So I pick something and I stare at it, I try to take something apart with the mind powers that I do not have. I simply let go and wait for the tempting mirage to fade.
After the message, more songs were sung and the crowd became a sea of people each lost in their own experience again. No glowing words trying to steer their thoughts, no one behind the words using the emotional high to bypass reason. Only the music and the feeling of connection.
When the service ended, it seemed that the spell was broken and everyone came back to themselves for the most part. Again they were college students with classes to worry about, with images to maintain, with parents to please and with lives to ponder. The emotional wave broke and receded.
I think this is what brings people to organizations like The Well and keeps them coming back week after week. They serve as a facilitator for people to let go of the concerns and weight that plague us all and just feel divine, feel at peace.

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