From the NY Times which I see today has an article on megachurches (a subject I brought up in Friday’s post).
When you ask people how Radiant has changed their lives, they will almost invariably talk about how it helped open their hearts. But there’s a kind of narrowing going on here as well, which became clear a few minutes later, when Tom flipped to another passage from a recent sermon. ” ‘Some seed fell among the thorny weeds, and the weeds grew up with them and choked the good plants,’ ” he read, quoting Luke 8:7. Then he added his exegesis: ”We’ve had friends who were not Christian, and for me they were like the thorny weeds,” he said. ”We’ve had to commit ourselves to friends who could help us grow spiritually.”
The following night I heard this same message, communicated more explicitly, at Radiant’s youth service. ”If I asked how many of you have close friends who are unbelievers, a lot of you would probably raise your hands,” the pastor told the crowd of about 150 teenagers, most of whom looked dressed for a rock concert. ”I’ll tell you right now, if one of you is a believer and the other is not, your relationship is doomed.”
Radiant is a megachurch in Maricopa County AZ. It has a weekly attendance of 5000. They were expecting 15,000 for Easter weekend services. It is the core gathering place for the “exurbs” in that area who purchase the new middle class homes for $175,000 without the amenities of community planning, parks, local government. As the article states, the church, Radiant, has taken the place of local govt in providing certain amenities. The cost? The tithe. 10 percent of your income. The church is like a mall with Starbucks and a drive-thru Latte window. They are conservative. When the GOP asked for church directories they handed them over and had church voter registration drives, in church, making sure to point out in sermons that they were non-partisan.
One of the more striking facts to emerge from the 2004 presidential election was that 97 of America’s 100 fastest-growing counties voted Republican. Most of these counties are made up of heretofore unknown towns too far from major metropolitan areas to be considered suburbs…These exurban cities tend not to have immediately recognizable town squares, but many have some kind of big, new structure where newcomers go to discuss their lives and problems and hopes: the megachurch…In sprawling, decentralized exurbs like Surprise, where housing developments rarely include porches, parks, stoops or any of the other features that have historically brought neighbors together, megachurches provide a locus for community. In many places, they operate almost like surrogate governments, offering residents day care, athletic facilities, counseling, even schools.
One can go look at Radiant at the link above, but don’t get too attached to the photo of the building as it being what Radiant looks like. Because Radiant is building a new church, all 55,000 square feet of it, to look like a ski lodge.
They play down that they’re Assemblies of God. The article states you often don’t learn this until you’re preparing to join.
They don’t believe in evolution.
Homosexuality and abortion are considered sins.
The church was built on canvassing which learned most people wanted a place to go to without dressing up. The majority of young middle class families with children are conservative. Radiant is a monster of a fast growing church. It didn’t exist 9 years ago. Some elders felt the area was about to take off and they called in Lee McFarland, who had just left his job with Microsoft in Washington State to take up the ministry. They felt they needed young blood. Lee put on chinos and went around canvassing, door to door. No one wanted him. He put on jeans and presenting himself then as a secular canvasser he went out asking what music people liked and why they didn’t go to church. And built the church according to the responses he received.
What’s interesting about this is, and I could very well be wrong about it, but how much do the current ammenities of socializing with a certain group of people play in the moulding and remoulding of one’s beliefs, over the idea that people, based on beliefs, seek out individuals and groups with which they’ll feel at home?
Ask people at Radiant what first brought them to the church, and you will almost never hear a mention of God. It might have been a billboard: ”Isn’t It Time You Laughed Again?” Or the twice-a-week aerobics class (with free child care) called Firm Believers. Or one of their children might have come with a friend to play video games. ..McFarland’s messages are light on liturgy and heavy on what he calls ”successful principles for living” — how to discipline your children, how to reach your professional goals, how to invest your money, how to reduce your debt, even how to shake a porn addiction. ”If Oprah and Dr. Phil are doing it, why shouldn’t we?” he says.
But never mind all that. Never mind what they believe. Never mind what has brought them together. How they live. What I’m interested in is this, repeating again a passage already quote d from the article,
‘’If I asked how many of you have close friends who are unbelievers, a lot of you would probably raise your hands,’’ the pastor told the crowd of about 150 teenagers, most of whom looked dressed for a rock concert. ‘’I’ll tell you right now, if one of you is a believer and the other is not, your relationship is doomed.’’
The non-believers are thorny weeds to be broken away from. They are the weeds that choke the good plants.
Apparently most don’t stray too far from the hand that raised them. The success in voter registration drives at these churches is credited to many of these people coming up during the Reagan years.
These are people that the Republican Party has always run well with — it’s conventional wisdom among political analysts that young, middle-class couples raising children tend to be conservative — and in 2004 the G.O.P. made a strong play for exurbanites. Megachurches were a key part of the strategy. Supporters were asked to supply the Bush-Cheney campaign with church directories so it could make sure these churchgoers were registered and planning to vote. ”For the first time we didn’t just engage businesspeople or Second Amendment supporters; we engaged people who said they were motivated first and foremost by their values, and these people were often churchgoers,” Gary Marx, a liaison to social conservatives for the campaign, told me recently. ”We asked them to reach out to their community, and their community is the megachurch.”
Marx also went directly to megachurch pastors, not for endorsements, he says, but to encourage them to help get out the vote. More often than not, he was well received. ”An old-line pastor who went to seminary in the 60’s is not going to be open to something like Citizenship Sundays when you pass out registration cards to everyone at the church,” Marx said. ”But many of the pastors of these megachurches are in their late 30’s, early 40’s. They were teenagers during the Reagan years, and that’s when conservatism and engagement by evangelicals began to become mainstream. So they would be more willing to do voter drives and things like that, more tuned into citizenship and engaging the community beyond soup kitchens.”
I doubt in Surprise there’s much call for soup kitchens, not so far from urban centers. Where you have people who can afford to separate themselves off in this manner, areas where a broad mix of income isn’t likely to happen, they’re not only exempt from dealing with the dynamics of urban centers but even the dynamics of typical smaller towns where not everyone is cut from the same cloth.
Out in the exurbs, you don’t have to work to learn to live with and get along with thorny weeds. They are not part of your community socially or economically. They and their concerns can easily be shed.
I read an article a Minnesota megachurch, Wooddale.
We skip the nosh and buzz past a number of small meeting rooms labeled with today’s discussion topics (9:00: “Making Sense of Creation and Evolution,†10:15: “Handling Difficult Situationsâ€). A banner hanging outside one room announces “Classes at Disciple U.†This is not simply a church, it’s a religious campus—a fusion of theology, education and business.
Crossroads Church hosts 5000 members. A “vast majority” voted for Bush. The pastor says that abortion and value-of-life issues are the #1 reason they voted for Bush, taking precedence over the war and economy. Indeed, he compares abortion to terrorism.
“Suppose you ask some candidate for office if it should be OK to allow terrorists into our country, and he tells you he’s all for it. At that point, the other issues on your plate wouldn’t much matter. Well, for us, the value-of-life issue is that critical.”
The area in which Crossroads church is located, in Vancouver, Washington, is home to three megachurches. It is believed that most are Bush supporters.
And now that the elections are over with and Bush is set for another four years, they’ve had some thinking to do on the heat, the divisiveness.
Pastor Ritchie is tired of divisiveness.
Now, “I’m tired of divisiveness” would make many think, “Oh, a willingness to try to communicate.” And that’s what it might mean coming from the mouths of people who treated other people like people and believed in working toward a tolerable living agreement according rights to those of differeing opinions.
“I’m tired of the divisiveness,” Pastor Ritchie says. “There was a letter to the editor… just the other day from a lady who said Bush is delusional if he thinks God had anything to do with him being president.
“In that case, what is she saying about the Bible and being led by God to do anything? What is she saying about people’s faith? That kind of arrogance does not win friends and influence people.”
There’s nothing the woman could likely have said that would have influenced Pastor Ritchie. Nothing she could have said that would win her his friendship other than, “I want to be a member of your church.”
Being tired of the divisiveness here means only it’s high time for the weeds to shut up.
Despite the euphoric conviviality and the tremendous and successful social outreach of these churches, these are not people who are interested in getting along. They don’t believe in dialogue. Their numbers have increased significantly, and what they’re telling their children is this, “If I asked how many of you have close friends who are unbelievers, a lot of you would probably raise your hands…I’ll tell you right now, if one of you is a believer and the other is not, your relationship is doomed.”
I feel for those kids living in a world full of expendable weeds which they must root from their gardens.
(Man, I hate this. It is so depressing.)
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