Evangelizing With eBay
by: Matthew Ralph

My 15-year-old brother and I stumbled through the large oak door at the top of the carpeted stairs into the balcony of the 19th century church, making sure we didn't make enough noise to draw the attention of our mother in the choir loft or worse, our father in his normal place a short stride from the pulpit.

For me, it was a rare visit to a church I seldom call home, but the usual showing up late that my older brother and I had made a habit of all through high school was certainly in order. Taking our seats in the cold hard wood pews behind my brother's snickering peers, we scanned the pulpit looking for our father in the place I had seen him stand in many different churches for more than twenty years.

"Where's dad?" I heard my brother whisper, moments later tapping the shoulder of one of his friends who had arrived on time to church sitting directly in front of him. He had no idea. As far as we knew he wasn't sick and even though it was lay Sunday, meaning he didn't have to preach, we expected to see him at least fighting sleepiness in his short pew behind the pulpit.

Not long into the message being given by one of the church's lay leaders, a light bulb clicked on for my brother. He knew where dad was. Or at least he knew where the one place dad would be if he weren't in the sanctuary.

"Dad's probably on eBay," my brother whispered, his friend in front of him who also was not paying attention to the sermon snickering. For a majority of what little was left of the service, we pondered what our dad would be bidding on and cracked jokes about what had recently become an obsession with our father.

Would he really go that far though? Would he skip out of church to put in a last minute bid on some old seats from a baseball stadium or some other baseball artifact from his past?

During the fellowship time after the service, we got our answer. No sooner did we bring up our theory to my dad, he started chuckling out a confession.

"This auction was going off at 11:29 on a program for the movie Hoosiers," my dad said with a smile. He was caught by perhaps the only two people in the church that morning that knew him well enough. Aside from his associate pastor who gave him the thumbs up to go to his office, log onto the internet, and up the bid a quarter in the last minute to secure a copy of the actual program given out at the premiere of one of his favorite movies, a movie he can quote from beginning to end with very little hesitation, no one had any idea what their pastor was doing.

If they had, most probably could not have condemned him either. Given the amount of daily visits to one of the Internet's most popular sites, chances are high that at least a handful of parishioners visited the site as soon as they got home that day. And if they didn't, chances are even greater they saw the commercial on television where the guy does his Sinatra impersonation singing "I do it eBay" to the tune of "My Way."

A funny story my brother and I will no doubt rag my dad on for years, his eBay addiction, though pretty far blown by now, remains separate from his work at the church. Like his politics and his conspiracy theories about who shot Kennedy and what really happened to Jimmy Hoffa, my dad keeps his eBay life separate from his life as a spiritual leader for the community.

Unfortunately, the same can not be said for a church in Pueblo, Colorado, which recently made national headlines for its attempt at auctioning off a vehicle used by the "Texas Seven," a group of escapees from a Texas prison who grabbed attention in December 2000 when they escaped from a maximum-security South Texas prison and were at large for nearly a month. According to police the group was responsible for killing a police officer in an armed robbery on Christmas Eve. A month later, six of the seven were apprehended in Colorado and brought into the authorities. The seventh committed suicide.

The "getaway" car they used, a 1986 Honda Accord, somehow ended up in the hands of Pastor Albert Struck, of the Word of Jesus Christ Church.

According to the Dallas Morning News, "The church pastor's wife and her daughter first got the car Jan. 11, 2001, at a Motel 6 after finding an envelope in the church mailbox containing the keys, directions to the car and a note. The message read: 'May God bless you the way he blessed us.'"

The car was then seized by police as evidence, stripped and left in an impound lot, where the pastor and his wife later claimed it. According to news reports, the couple had originally planned to give the car to a needy family, but when the car was taken by police the church instead raised money for another car to give to the family. Stuck with a car and in need of money to put toward purchasing a $1 million parcel of land for a new building, the couple and its 60-member congregation decided to auction it off on eBay.

"Texas Seven" mugs had been made and sold at the RV park where the group was found and arrested in Colorado and a pool table at one of the taverns the group stopped had already fetched $7,000 on an eBay auction, so the church decided it would get into the game.

Posting a reserve bid of $10,000 for a car blue book valued at substantially less (estimated by some sources as low as $1,300), the church was in business. Their defense to the controversial act was that the car didn't run the police officer over and that it was a way of turning something negative into a positive.

"If you become the new owner of this historical collector's item, we will include all the paperwork we have on the vehicle, which includes the original title, a copy of the bill of sales, all the newspaper articles, the subpoena ...," the church wrote on eBay.

As the auction neared a close, there were no bids, but it drew sufficient attention from the family of the slain officer who were sick over the idea that a church would even attempt to auction something of such a sensitive nature off and cash in on the rewards.

And rightfully so. If someone were interested in buying a car like this off the Internet, which the absence of bids suggests might be no one, then surely they could be considered sick, their priorities somehow backward and twisted by an American culture that seems way to fascinated with crime shows and high profile criminals to begin with.

My dad will agree. It's one thing to cut out on a church service to bid on personal items for your own collection. Pastors, after all, have hobbies and obsessions too. But it's a whole different animal when the church is sanctioning an auction of a vehicle used for criminal activity in hopes of benefiting monetarily in the end.

2003 White Elephant Productions