The One True Church by Michael Jurgensmeier

Basic Guidelines for Missionaries of The One True Church

Welcome to the Mission Training Center and congratulations on your decision to help spread the truth of our prophet’s plan for salvation to all the Godless heathens of the earth! Let us begin by first making it known that your dedication and service to the lord will not go unnoticed to us here at the One True Church and ultimately our prophet who has joined the great spirit in the sky. As you are reading this a lagoon style pool is being erected in your honor in the highest degree of heaven and will be completed and ready for you to enjoy in the afterlife as soon as your two years of service are finished! Constructed by master-craftsmen, who are the souls deceased Christians who almost picked the right religion, but just barely missed it and as a result have been granted the privilege of being our servants beyond the veil! Your fun and stylish lagoon style pool will be the toast of the afterlife as you invite your friends and loved ones over to your celestial mansion for virgin Shirley Temples and games of Marco Polo! Your lagoon style pool will come complete with a white marble plaque displaying your years of service and a tally of all the souls you will save through baptism on the journey you are about to begin! So let’s get started mmmkay!  

Dress Code 

Remember, a well groomed missionary is an obedient tool of the lord and prophet and thereby a happy missionary! Our required missionary dress code here at the One True Church has been referred to by Vogue Zealot magazine as the fashion standard for heathen convertors of the world and as a result we here at the Mission Training Center find it imperative to follow our renowned dress code with same diligence and bloated self-righteousness the One True Church has become known for! 

Now you may be saying to yourself, “Golly jeepers! How am I ever going to maintain the high-standard of dress and grooming One True Church missionaries are known for? Until I decided to serve a mission for the prophet I was one of those ratty American teenagers walking the earth looking like an unmade bed!” 

To that we here at the Mission Training Center say, “Now calm down Brother Smith/Young/White/Whatever, let’s make this as simple as possible and relieve any sort of pressure you may be feeling about our dress code. Just remember, if you can’t follow our standards to neurotic perfection you will be sent home to your family, community and church where you will spend the remainder of your life labeled as “that guy that got sent home”. People will avoid you, employers will not hire you, women will not mate with you and, of course, there will be no lagoon-style pool for you waiting in the highest degree of heaven. So shut your mouth and calm down silly-billy and listen as if your livelihood depends on it, because it really does! 

As far as grooming is concerned there will be no facial hair of any kind. No five o’clock shadows, moustaches, sideburns and certainly no beards! Hair will be trimmed and parted to the right. TO THE RIGHT! Our barbers will make that beautiful blonde head of your shine on the mission-field sun with our years of experience giving everyone the same haircut. And don’t worry if your hair-color is the devil’s brown –we will cut your hair as well! 

One True Church missionaries are required to wear the whitest of white dress shirts and thin plain black ties. ONLY BLACK TIES! Let’s not be a rebellious-riley and wear ties with designs and certainly nothing with cartoon characters. We here at the One True Church enjoy having a good time as much as the next prophet/God-fearing zealot, but we are here to work not make any kind personal statement. We do not wear loose-fighting clothes and robes at any time; rather we wear black slacks and plain black belts. 

As far as foot-wear is concerned sandals are forbidden, instead you will be issued white, Nike sneakers that are to be worn at all times including times of rest and relaxation. The sneakers are necessary, along with the packets of drink mix, in case the time comes when the comet Zothar returns to the earth from the celestial planet Kolib to return us to our maker! --but let’s not go into that right now. Oh, listen to us, we’ve gone and said too much. 

By following our dress code you will go from being this guy…

into this guy…

Mission-Field Basics

The rule of thumb for One True Church missionaries is simple. We don’t understand the word “no”. In fact we aren’t exactly clear on, “I’m sorry I’m not interested” or “Please leave me alone and never come back here”. Just remember, everyone wants to join the One True Church, they just haven’t realized it yet! Don’t give up! No matter what!

Should you come across a person who’s heart has been hardened against the truth we are offering just know that the more angry a person gets with you the closer that person is to accepting the gospel of our prophet. It’s not that they aren’t interested. They are just testing you! So let’s pass that test with flying colors and continue to harass them until they finally give in! 

It doesn’t matter if you are simply getting doors slammed in your face, things thrown at you by passing traffic or people start suggesting you go back to where you came from and begin fornicating with your mother once you get there. The world needs your help! Keep at it! (Unless the police are involved, in that case you are on your own and we have never heard of you.) 

Should a person be rude to you while attempting to share the gospel with them, act deeply offended. Disregard the fact that you showed up on their doorstep on their private property and basically mocked their religious beliefs by declaring that you are right and they are wrong. Let them know how deeply hurt you are by their candor. Then cheer right back up bucko and try again! 

In Conclusion

There will be days when you feel a little blue and you may be asking yourself, “Why don’t I stop bothering strangers and assuming I know what’s best for them and go get a real job?” To that we here at the One True Church Mission Training Center say, “listen you little punk. You will do as commanded or so help me I will fill in that lagoon style pool with manure. We are working very hard for you in the after-life so stop you sniveling and get back to work.”

That being said, best of luck out there gentlemen! And remember, we know what’s best for everyone! 

Baptism by Christina Osborn

Twenty nine black books in a box. Twenty nine black tongues in white teeth holding no particular spot on the books but heavy with the weight of the words I have rained upon ivory pages since I was eight years old and baptized in the white font at the feet of my Michigan relatives and the Utah ones too who had flown all the way across the midlands to see the second oldest of my grandmother’s brood initiated into the family faith. I didn’t really want to get baptized; it seemed liked a lot of paperwork and a ceremony so archaic and fraught with vagueries filled me with a dread born of apathy and ambivalence. I felt the same way when I voted in October (early voter, I’m not an overachiever just a vagabond so I figured if I wanted to get my digs in I’d better act quick or the clerks would be sneering at one less democratic ballot before throwing it on the thin pile that means there’s a tenacious sense of reality in this state full of sheep). I voted this October and I voted in March of 1998 with my toes as they slipped into the warm water where my father waited with his white robes and receding hairline, smiling with the encouragement of one prisoner to another, Don’t worry, Stockholm is pretty in the Spring. Eight years later my father and I left the church together, he with his faith far behind him, dead and bled and half-buried under a cracked bathtub and me with the acid taste of too many ambiguities on my tongue, so when the bishop came to implore me to leave my name on his books I burned through his bullshit with the cool logic of a girl too many times assumed to be a fool. Sitting for the dinner in the golden late afternoon after I’d allowed myself to be tilted backwards and held under the hundred and twenty degree water while my grandmother cried and my father spoke a twenty second burble of dogma that couldn’t quite cut through the ripples of ceiling panels and fluorescent lights, I remembered feeling nothing. I felt nothing as the shadows grew and relatives I barely knew patted my pigtails and I stared straight ahead at the flower settings and the fat black bible with my name crawling across the leather in silver script, the bible that I opened only a handful of times when I was thirteen and looking for something to hold onto and it didn’t turn out to be that book. I dragged that three pound catalogue of human metaphor across the country and through the warren of desperation my mother dragged us through and when I threw it away it was because I was trying to rid myself of dead weight. On that day when I was eight years old, the bible seemed to be the important gift, the one everyone knew would help me so much. Joseph Campbell said the best way to avoid a religious experience is by expecting one but I don’t think my family ever read any Joseph Campbelll. So the journal my father gave me was overlooked by everyone except me, because eight year olds can still see things for the way they are, can still see the hope in someone else’s face, and I saw the hope there in my dad who was my favorite person, my mentor, my comrade. He didn’t enjoy my mother’s company, so he sought me out. He didn’t want to talk to her so he talked to me. He didn’t have any friends, so I was his friend. He didn’t trust anyone so I was the shoulder he cried on. And that is not the cross a child should bear but I bore it  because what else do you do when you are the confidant of not just one but both parents who never grew up and don’t know what to do, so they stay on the phone all night talking it through with a kid cuddled up learning the language of pain at the feet of the two people who should’ve been teaching a language a love, who should’ve found out who they were before filling a cup that cracked before it could be drunk from again. So I have this box full of word and I guess if I get cold and there’s nothing else I could start a fire. Or maybe there’s wisdom still buried in those years that I didn’t see my dad, when my mom was giving me plenty of material for my daily scrawl, when sometimes I would get so angry that I’d write from top to bottom for two hours before I could speak his name again. I didn’t believe in getting angry because it didn’t seem to help, so I wrote it away and held it all down. And not that I’m older and not writing as much, I see why that shit all had to come out and I see why the feeling of anger couldn’t be felt, but only recorded. I have these twenty nine books in a closet and I can’t spend them or grow them or call them by name but they may be the one last physical trace of a past I ignored for almost ten years and now it’s bubbling up out of this black pool inside me that smells like a cold golden afternoon on the lawn of a church three lifetimes away.