Over 900 people turned up at the Grace Cathedral Church in San Francisco on Wednesday for the "Beyonce Mass," which reportedly featured some scriptural readings blended with music by the pop star.
According to World Net Daily (WND), the church usually draws about 50 parishioners during evening services, but more than 900 came for the "Beyonce Mass" on Wednesday.
Beyonce's music blared inside the church as a screen counted down the minutes to the start of the mass.
The service featured Beyonce's songs "Freedom" and "Flaws and All" after scriptural readings from the books of Luke and Psalms.
Rev. Yolanda Norton of the San Francisco Theological Seminary delivered a sermon taken from her seminary course on "Beyonce and the Hebrew Bible," which highlights the themes in the pop star's music as well as the injustices experienced by black women.
"Empire never falls lightly. Sometimes we call it racism; we call it empire. You call it homophobia; we call it heterosexual aggression; and tonight, we call it empire," Norton stated in her sermon, according to Breitbart News.
Performers also belted out their own rendition of Beyonce's music, including the song "Survivor," which was released when she was still part of the group Destiny's Child.
There were also scripture readings by black women, communion and the reading of a speech by civil rights leader Elle Baker.
Jude Harmon, the founding pastor of the church's ministry called the Vine, said that the responses she had received in the days leading up to the event had been "overwhelmingly positive," although some had raised objections via phone, email and social media.
"I know there are people who will say using Beyonce is just a cheap way of trying to get people in the church," Harmon said, as reported by WND.
"But Jesus used very provocative images in the stories he would tell to incite people to ask hard questions about their own religious assumptions. He regularly provoked. We're following in the way of Jesus," she continued.
The mass was part of a series called "Speaking Truth: The Power of Story in Community" and follows on from the first part of Vine's series called "The Original Nasty Woman," which focused on Mary Magdalene.
In the program, the church argued that Mary Magdalene would be "wearing a pink hat" if she were alive today, and that she would be "marching with all who wear that epithet, 'nasty woman,' as a badge of honor."
