When I go to church there is definitely something missing: the culture. People don't relax around one another because they're all busybodies managing their own respective images and judging each other. I've gone to black churches and white churches and although the former have wild sessions, I've spent my time there, personally, vainly combating rebarbative tensions. Ideally, I go to church to purge frustration from my life, not to exacerbate it. Congregations at white churches, on the other hand, from my experience, are lacking in the will to experience catharsis. People are inhibited in worship and very legalistic/hypocritical in their dealings with one another. I've been to a lot of places, and the best experience I know about is still at home, listening to sermons online and reading the good book alone. It's sad, really because God does not call us to become imprisoned by the culture we are in; he says we are to live in the world, but not of it. White culture today is tolerant to the point of a forced masochism such that people would rather inflict pain upon themselves than take the chance of offending someone else (of another culture). Self-restraint is a virtue, but when it inhibits the flow of Christ, we are only accommodating Satan's will to subdue and to subjugate us.

People think I'm so serious when I talk like this, but if you distill the message it comes out like: 'relax and don't put up with [ethnic or any other type of] chauvinism'. Nobody has a claim on my life but God. If someone wants to manage my emotions and my thoughts, let them come and experience almighty wrath. We are not to be constrained except within the holy confines of God's will. Even if the law of men contradicts God's law, we are to conform to the latter, regardless of the consequences. Sure, there may be trials, but ultimately God's covenant people will overcome because everything we do is for his glory. That is a serious message, but translated into this life and this time here and now, it means we should relax and let God take over. His will be done. People who pretend not to be serious are the ones who are most uptight because they have to maintain an image of [leisure], which can be a tough act to follow time and again.