Diving for Divinity: Church Gives Away Cars and Other Prizes to Anyone Who Shows Up for Easter Mass

Pastor Bil Cornelius knows how to draw the faithful to Easter mass. The head of a megachurch in Corpus Christi, Texas, is planning to give away $2 million in cars and prizes in a sectarian version of “The Price is Right.”

Cornelius will be giving away sixteen cars, 15 flat-screen televisions, furniture sets and other prizes to anyone who attends the church’s Easter services on Sunday.
He insists that the game show theme is “an opportunity to share Christ with people who may never go to a church for any reason.”

It seems that Mark 11:15 does not apply if you give away the goods in the Temple rather than sell them directly:

And they come to Jerusalem: and Jesus went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves;

Corneliuis insists that he and his donors are “willing to do whatever it takes to get spiritually lost people in the door to hear about the love of God.”

In the end, Cornelius promises “[t]hey’re coming for the loot and they’re going to leave with Jesus.”

Perhaps, but he should give full credit to Janis Joplin:

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