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.
09-02-2008 |
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