Daily Archives: May 10, 2002

Megachurches as Minicities

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In Glendale, Ariz., the 12,000-member Community Church of Joy, which has a school, conference center, bookstore and mortuary on its 187-acre property, has embarked on a $100 million campaign to build a housing development, a hotel, convention center, skate park and water-slide park, transforming itself into what Dr. Walt Kallestad, the senior pastor, calls a ‘destination center.’ (Hvala Ellen!)

Question: if this is the kind of Jesus the members see on a daily basis, what is going to happen when they move out of the community to another church in that denomination (in this case an ELCA church) and find that churches are not like this normally.

All that money spent on convention centers, skate parks, water-slide parks, and stuff like that could be put to better use as funding for missions and homeless programs. Or, it could be used to help the Native Americans in that area.

I’m all good with building Christian communities but the churches mentioned here seem more concerned with sheltering their members from the *gasp* thought of living within their means and building communities where the highly capitalist lifestyle can perpetuate itself. Maybe I’m really mistaken, but didn’t Jesus preach against such shows of wealth in the Gospels (especially Luke)?

Worship is another thing that I wonder about. It’s all about Powerpoint and contemporary music. Maybe it’s just me… but wasn’t it the hymns and old-school type songs that kept Lutheranism going for the last 500 years? Could we maybe function as a Lutheran church and not a wannabe Baptist church?

Jon just told me that they’re probably gonna withdraw from the ELCA. I wonder why…

TGIF!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Chapel this morning was TaizÃ? prayer and it was beautiful. I was sitting with my friends Mark and Chris. On the Laudate Dominum, I started singing the alto part and then Mark decided to copy me and start singing the bass part. Chris then starts singing tenor. It was cool to have the harmonies going. I also sang the French on some of them which sounded prettier than the English. I love TaizÃ? prayer and wish I had the time to go to the ones held here in Cols but they’re usually on nights when I’m busy. I also wish we’d done it during our I-Group week.

I’ve been reading through the Gospels for my NT class and I’m starting to understand all the theories about their redaction. There is always the question of why the Pharisees had to go to the garden to get Jesus when they could have just arrested Him in person. Did they want to avoid the crowds mobbing them? Did they really think He was that dangerous? I am also reading The Meaning of Jesus by Marcus Borg and N.T. Wright, which is interesting but Borg is driving me up the wall. He wants to claim himself as a Christian but he doesn’t commit to Christ being the Son of God exactly. His argument is “no and yes”. He thinks that Jesus didn’t know that He was the Son of God until after Easter, which is preposterous to me. Do you think that God would send Jesus to earth, let Him die, and then reveal “Hey dude! You’re the Son of God!” He commented on Jesus’ words that “[He] is the Bread of Life” and “[He] is the Light of the World”, saying that “we have psychological diagnoses for people who talk about themselves like that.” (p. 149) At least Wright is orthodox.

Tonight I’m going out with other seminary spouses to say “buh bye” to the Senior Spouses. It should be a really nice dinner. It’s Italian so I might have to indulge in some chicken marsala.