Unspoken prayer requests are a staple of any fundamentalist prayer meeting. Far from being a simple acknowledgment of an private and personal need, “unspokens” have a variety of classifications.
The All Inclusive This is the most common form of the unspoken request. This call for a show of hands often comes at the end of time for spoken prayer requests, but can also come at any time before someone prays. (Bro. Dwight will now bless the food, are there any unspoken prayer requests out there?) If a person can’t think of a specific unspoken request it’s best just to raise a hand anyway in case they think of one later that they needed covered. This call for unspoken requests may also be accompanied by calls for responses from anyone who has unsaved loved ones, knows someone sick, is wearing a red sweater, etc.
The Guessing Game These are unsolicited unspoken requests given in midst of a call for prayer requests. They are often stated in the form of “I have a very special and important unspoken request.” The game for the audience is to try to guess what the person’s unspoken request might be by counting the number of adjectives used to describe it. Bonus points are awarded to the person with the most creative answer in the after-church unspoken request phone chain.
The Spoken Unspoken There are also the quasi-unspoken requests which go something like “I have an unspoken request that I really can’t talk about that involves my sister. I can’t say a lot but her marriage is having some trouble…and without giving a lot of details there’s also a Bolivan chef named Roberto involved and his three adopted kids and their second grade teacher.” The air is filled with the sound of pencils scribbling furiously on prayer request sheets around the room. Who knew that the unspoken could say so much?
(thanks to mark for the unspoken suggestion)
As a result of living outside of popular culture, fundamentalist preachers often end up preaching against a lot of obscure and outdated things. Lyrics from popular bands may not be as shocking as the ones from some little known death metal band named the Flaming Satan’s Army of Human Sacrifice so inevitably the latter’s songs will be the ones quoted. As an unintended consequence, many teenagers also find a lot of new music this way that they would otherwise have never heard about.
Because of their emphasis on separation, the body of approved source material for fundamentalists is a very small and often changing list. Quite often when a fundamentalist goes to look for a book or sermon on a given topic there just isn’t one by one of the three fundamentalist leaders he’s still on good terms with. This problem has created an extensive taxonomy of disclaimers as fundamentalists attempt to quote experts while maintaining a proper separated distance.
For when the claim of the “appearance of evil” just isn’t enough to create the required amount of fundamentalist guilt, the “weaker brother” technique is the veritable Swiss Army knife of fundamentalist arguments, ready to be whipped out in a moment to get the job of conviction done.