Granger Community Church is a flippin’ huge megachurch in Indiana. I believe that is a place in the USA, but I’m only a Brit so don’t ask me for any details. Granger is an enthusiastic endorser of the Purpose Driven Church model and has thousands of attendees to their services.
Anyway. They recently did a survey of the people that go to the services. The results are interesting:
57% of attendees do not believe in the authority of the bible.
56% of attendees do not believe that Jesus is the only way to eternal life.
47% of attendees do not believe in salvation by grace.
Perhaps understandably, many detractors have jumped to criticise Granger. I admit to a little wry smile when I think that a church attracting 5,000 attendees a week seems unable to get them to believe in their own basic theology. Given the evangelical tradition which Granger belongs to, I wonder why these people attend (and/or why they answered a survey in this way - maybe they didn’t understand the questions). Maybe there is a minority of people regularly attending the church and a substantial mobile group coming to see what the fuss is all about.
Tim Stevens, ‘executive pastor’ at Granger has a few positive thoughts on this.
When anyone asks me, “How many are in your church?”, I typically answer this way: “That’s a good question, but there are around 5,000 who attend each weekend.” We’ve believed and taught for years that a crowd is not a church. At Granger, we build a weekend experience to draw the biggest crowd possible, because we believe that if more people hear the gospel, more people will respond. But we don’t for a minute believe that a crowd is a church. But we are leaning on Jesus AND working our butts off to turn the crowd into committed congregation of believers who are serving, giving, growing, and inviting their friends to join them on the journey.
The best part of the story for me is the leadership’s solution to the perceived problems, which is so good it almost works as satire.
Posted in Religion, Theology | 8 Comments »Now when he saw the crowds, he went into a megachurch. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them saying:
Cursed are the extremely poor, Read the rest of this news item »
for one billion of them will have no clean drinking water and live on less than a dollar a day.
Cursed are those who mourn,
for they will continue to be bombed by the most militarily powerful nation on earth.
Cursed are the meek,
for they will be shot at, and have no means of shooting back.
Cursed are the 30,000 children who will die of hunger and thirst today,
because hardly anyone here in the west gives a shit.
Cursed are the merciful,
for they will be shown to be sniveling weaklings compared to those of us who have guns and know how to use them.
Cursed are the pure in heart,
for their idealism will cause them to be trodden on by more realistic types.
Cursed are the UN peacemakers,
for they will not take swift military action when it is called for.
Cursed are those who persecute Americans Christians,
for we will rain down bombs, death, and destruction upon them with no regard for proportionality.
Cursed are the people who insult, persecute, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because you are an American and thus a Christian. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward here on earth, for in the same way the evil Communist Vietnamese people tried to persecute a previous generation of Americans, and we showed them by killing five million of them!
This year at Thanksgiving I realized how radically my story about Thanksgiving has changed over the last while. The story about Thanksgiving with which I was raised is more or less summarized in this Chuck Colson commentary from last Thursday. Chuck tells this story about the “pilgrims”:
In April of 1623—three years after the first Pilgrims landed—the transplanted Englishmen and women planted corn and other crops. A good harvest was essential to their survival. But in the weeks following the planting, it became clear that a dry spell was turning into a drought.
Pilgrim father Edward Winslow recorded their distress in his diary. “It pleased God, for our further chastisement,” he wrote, “to send a great drought; insomuch as in six weeks . . . there scarce fell any rain.” The crops began to shrivel up “as though they had been scorched before the fire . . . God,” Winslow wrote, “which hitherto had been our only shield and supporter, now seemed in His anger to arm Himself against us. And who can withstand the fierceness of His wrath?”
Posted in Forgiveness, Nationalism, Poverty, Religion, United States | 6 Comments »
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Syncroblog–Things I learned from “Church”
Thursday, August 2nd, 2007Glenn Hager kindly invited me to participate in his synchroblog. Thanks Glen!
His subtitle was “(That didn’t prove true, and what I am learning lately)”
So a coupla lists–and a tiny bit of a justice and compassion slant (I’m not making this stuff up)
What I learned in church:
- Sex is mainly for procreation.
- America is the greatest nation on earth.
- Alchohol is evil. period.
- Using contraception is almost always a dumb, and perhaps even bad, idea.
- The U.N. is evil.
- Homosexuality is a far worse sin than gluttony.
- We’re right, and they’re wrong.
- God created the United States.
- Public Education is evil.
Posted in Blogging, Religion, Theology | 32 Comments »
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Quote for the Day
Tuesday, April 17th, 2007“Karl Marx said that religion was the opiate of the masses, and too often, there has been too much truth to his diagnosis.”
Posted in Quote for the Day, Religion | 4 Comments »|