Pastor purchases luxury massage chair to illustrate the dangers of comfort. Finance committee approves matching ottoman for sermon on self-denial. TULSA, OK — Following coverage of Michael Todd’s use of a roughly $4,000 massage chair to illustrate spiritual complacency, a fictional church production committee has concluded that self-denial requires a substantially larger furniture budget. “We considered simply reading the passage,” explained creative director Brandon Wells. “But people struggle to understand the dangers of comfort without seeing a pastor experience the premium version.” The committee approved heated calf compression as essential to the illustration, while rejecting the standard model’s limited recline as insufficiently representative of spiritual lethargy. “Obviously, we oppose comfortable Christianity,” Wells said. “We just need the chair comfortable enough to demonstrate why.” An accompanying ottoman was approved for the following week’s sermon, “Take Up Your Cross.”...
“It copied our entire musical vocabulary,” says man who learned it in one afternoon. NASHVILLE, TN — Contemporary worship producer Caleb Mercer has accused an artificial-intelligence music service of stealing his signature sound after discovering that it could reproduce every chord he knows. Mercer identified the offending progression as G, D, Em, and C, which he described as “the foundation of our ministry and the extent of my training.” “They didn’t just take one song,” he said. “They took the next six albums.” The dispute began when Mercer heard an AI-generated worship track and immediately recognized the sequence he had used on “Walls Are Falling,” “Fire Is Falling,” and “Something Else Is Falling.” Engineers suggested that the similarities reflected a musical vocabulary already common throughout contemporary worship. “That’s exactly what makes it ours,” Mercer replied. According to Mercer, each composition emerges from a unique season of spiritual formation, after which he de...