{"id":460,"date":"2002-05-10T17:10:09","date_gmt":"2002-05-10T22:10:09","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=460"},"modified":"2002-05-10T17:10:09","modified_gmt":"2002-05-10T22:10:09","slug":"megachurches-as-minicities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/grace-filled.net\/?p=460","title":{"rendered":"Megachurches as Minicities"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a HREF=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2002\/05\/09\/garden\/09CHUR.html\">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 &#8216;destination center.&#8217; <\/a> (Hvala <a HREF=\"http:\/\/ellenmhampton.blogspot.com\/\">Ellen<\/a>!)<\/p>\n<p>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 <a HREF=\"http:\/\/www.elca.org\">ELCA<\/a> church) and find that churches are not like this normally.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;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&#8217;m really mistaken, but didn&#8217;t Jesus preach against such shows of wealth in the Gospels (especially Luke)?<\/p>\n<p>Worship is another thing that I wonder about.  It&#8217;s all about Powerpoint and contemporary music.  Maybe it&#8217;s just me&#8230; but wasn&#8217;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?<\/p>\n<p>Jon just told me that they&#8217;re probably gonna withdraw from the <a HREF=\"http:\/\/www.elca.org\">ELCA<\/a>.  I wonder why&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/grace-filled.net\/?p=460\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ministry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p38xoO-7q","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/grace-filled.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/grace-filled.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/grace-filled.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grace-filled.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grace-filled.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/grace-filled.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/grace-filled.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grace-filled.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grace-filled.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}