A Twisted Crown of Thorns ®

It’s been coming and soon it will be here. Crowd control has always been a nightmare since the days of the ‘brood of vipers’ open air sermons of John the Baptist to the modern day children’s trampoline tea and biscuit parties of a pastor’s wife. Many delighted mega church ushers seemed to jump for joy this week supposing they had landed themselves a useful gadget in ultimate crowd control but stopped mid air as police in the UK seized large numbers of a gadget that has been supposedly dubbed ‘the ushers touch’.

A MILLION-volt stun gun disguised as a mobile phone is being smuggled into Britain by criminals. Potentially-lethal K95s are 24 TIMES more powerful than a police Taser. They look like a Nokia but electrodes in the top deliver a 1.2million volt shock.

UK Border Agency officers have seized several in recent weeks amid fears the illegal US-made devices are being bought by gangs.

A boy aged about nine is seen playing with one of the weapons on YouTube. And a reviewer of the K95 wrote on a website: “A friend shocked me for a split second and it hurt like….[edited colourful expletives for the sake of decency]”

UK Border Force chief Brodie Clark said: “We don’t want these weapons on Britain’s streets.” K95s were seized at Manchester and Glasgow airports and at a North London postal sorting office.

–The Sun Newspaper

With many churches becoming trouble hot spots as numbers increase and soar  for the numerous and endless entertainment programmes for revellers it surely wont be long when you see ushers wielding weapons of crowd pacification. For now it seems the church will have to depend on that old Psalm that says:

Unless the Lord builds the house,

those who build it labor in vain.

Unless the Lord watches over the city,

the watchman stays awake in vain. Ps 127:1