10.23.04
Posted in culture at 4:08 pm by
I don’t always enjoy weddings. Often I find them to be dry, lifeless, without personality. Our wedding wasn’t, but sometimes I think we were an outlier. And, maybe it’s just my personal bias toward liking our own wedding, but I doubt it. However, last night Jen and I were at a winner. James and Kari celebrated their marriage last night.
It was a wonderful evening. Perhaps because it was informal, perhaps because Kari and James come from different places (the US and the UK), perhaps it was because the beer was truly fantastic, but we had a wonderful time. My favorite part of the ceremony was the part when James’ father–the officiant–talked about how James had emailed him during the time he was planning his sermon.
In his email to his father James said something that caught my attention. I think it’s wise and it bears repeating…unfortunately, I’ll need to paraphrase as I can’t remember the phrase exactly. The jist was this:
“…it’s important to hear about how Christians are supposed to treat eachother in a marriage relationship. But a new angle, one we don’t hear very much about, is how a marriage is not just for the two people in it. A marriage is about the relationship of those two people to the community around them; it’s about how that community functions as a part of a more global community. A marriage is about how two people help to affect change and bring glory to God through their friends and family. A marriage is really about how two people connect to the world around them and bring about Shalom.”
I thought that was money. Thier fathers were both pastors and as such they together did the ceremony. That was cool, too.
The reception was great, too. But for a different reason. If I had to describe it in a word, that word would be “multicultural.” As I’ve mentioned, Kari is from the US. She’s brutally Dutch. James is from the UK. Not entirely sure of his ethnicity but I know that he has at least some Iranian heritage. So, in celebration of all those things there was an Irish Band–yes I know Ireland and the UK aren’t the same thing but it helped the multicultural feel,– dutch treats (read bars) and some of the most wonderful banket (pronounced bahn - ket) I’ve ever eaten. A middleastern feel was preserved as Pita-House did the catering. It was marvelous.
Oh, and there was beer. I suppose that the beer–though American micro-brews–added to the european flavor of the event. It’s not that the beer was particularly european in style, at least to my tastes, it’s just that it didn’t suck like most of the beer one would tend to drink at a wedding ceremony. I’ve been subjected to far too much Miller Lite at weddings this year, so Founder’s and Bell’s on tap was just what the doctor ordered.
One last charming vignette. I so enjoy meeting people from the cyberworld in real life. It’s always a bit akward, but still a rush. I got to meet one such young man. Steve Lawson. It seems that I had purchased ALL of Steve’s shares on BlogShares.com (a virtual blog trading game). So, I got to meet him and chat briefly.
All told, last night made my world feel just a little bit smaller. It made me feel a little bit closer together with humanity…all kinds of it. Perhaps that’s the effect of loud Irish music in the upstairs of a barn with far too many wonderful beers running around my system. Perhaps, but I think there was something truly and really magical about last night. There will be great times ahead, no doubt, but last night will live on in my memory infamously.
So, tip your virtual glass and say congrats to Kari and James. And if you see them, congradulate them not only on their committment, but also, tell them they throw one heck of a party.
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10.22.04
Posted in fun at 12:00 am by
I listened to Ralph Nader the other night on NPR. Truly, I wish the man had a shot at office. He says a lot of good things. For me, the decision about who to vote for this year is more a decision about who SHOULDN’T be in office rather than who should. I wish we had a few more viable alternatives, but, given the current situation: I’m voting for Kerry. I do so under duress, but I do so nonetheless.
We really need to do away with the two party system–Nader is right. I don’t know that he’s going about it the right way though. I mean, who’s the guy kidding, he’s not going to single handedly overthrow decade upon decade of bi-partisan political history. So, I don’t dig the Nader option.
But, I do have a radical plan to change the face of two party politics. I call it my “Playground Initiative.” It works like this. First of all, we do away with elections. We acknowledge the fact that whomever has the most money wins congressional elections and we do away with them. Entirely.
Next, we take a lesson from third graders everywhere. You know what I mean, if you think about it. The two ringleaders get up and pick the best players on down to the worst. If you’re thinking what I’m thinking, we’re going to get rid of elections and just have some people pick teams.
This is how I envision it:
Team Captains:
Ralph Nader - (Whatever the hell he wants to call his party)
Hillary Clinton - Democrats
Tom DeLay - Republicans
Michael Badarnik - Libertarians
So, we’ll have four parties. There’ll be a sumo wrestling match to determine who picks first. Hillary Clinton will win in a close duel with Ralph Nader.
Hillary will go first and pick Rudy Giuliani. Then Ralph Nader will pick John McCain. Tom DeLay will get Jerry Falwell, and Badarnik will choose John Ashcroft. And so it will go. Once you’ve been chosen by a party you will be required to swear off your old affiliations and adopt all the party lines, verbatim.
Each party will be required to print up a pamphlet with its positions on issues. Any time congress cannot agree on a decision, they’ll take a page out of our far-eastern counterparts’ playbook. Fist fighting. Clearly this favors Hillary Clinton, but hey, she’s already been President, so in all likelihood, she probably knows best, right?
In the end, we’ll have a four party system. Chosen by team captains. I really don’t know that it’s that much more ludacris of a system than the one that’s currently in place. At any rate, it would get a younger generation interested in politics.
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10.21.04
Posted in faith, culture at 11:10 am by
I’m going to take the second (though probably not final) part of Charles’ comment today. His next point seems to be this:
God (who is neither male or female BTW) called humans to represent his nature so as the “Father” leads the children follow.
Ah, the politics of naming. The primary reason that I cited Dale Spender in the past article. Other good sources for information on this topic would be folks like George and Robin Lakoff. Bear in mind that Spender and Lakoff (particularly Robin) will hold opposing views, but they’re both from a feminist perspective on language.
Basically, what you’ll find if you do research on these folks is a preponderance of information about naming and the use of language. They argue, successfully I think, but certainly logically, that even the very structures of language favor men. I hold this view. It’s not popular, but I hold it.
All of this has bearing on the way we treat the gender of God, I think. I’ll say right off the bat that I agree with Charles’ that God is neither male or female. And, I’m not going to make the argument that God incarnate–Jesus Christ–was actually a woman. That seems ludacris, (to me at least.)
However, as to the first person of the trinity, we don’t have any empirical evidence. Out of a patriarchal Biblical society, it should be no surprise that our God, of indeterminate gender we agreed, should have adopted a masculine pronoun. That’s not to say that God adopted this pronoun–but the patriarchal society assigned it to him.
In this patriarchal society woman was seen as a second class individual. I see no basis for this in scripture. Still, the popular nomenclature for God to this day utilizes masculine form pronouns.
I am curious why Charles, and many others, insist on propogating this naming when most do support the notion of an ungendered God. Charles seems to insinuate that God is referred to as man (father) because he shepherds his children. To me, this doesn’t make sense. My reasoning is this:
1. In a patriarchal society women were generally given the task of staying home and raising children.
2. It should seem to follow from this that God should be referred to as “mother.”
3. This is not the case.
This confuses me. I think the primary argument cited for using the masculine with reference to God is that it may somehow offend God if we humans refer to God as a woman. However, veiled in this belief is another belief. A belief that women are somehow inferior to men. After all, if men and women were on the same ideological level, and God has no gender (and we don’t want to refer to God as an “it”) then it would make sense that either pronoun should be acceptable.
To me, this disconnect is indicative of a deep-seated inequity. (I would also argue that this is a form of misogyny…but that’s a more radical view that I won’t delve into for the time being.)
We just don’t have an inclusive pronoun in the English language with which to refer to God. That said, it seems illogical to use only one pronoun more than the other if there were no fundamental basis for using that pronoun. Yet we do. I do. Without even thinking about it.
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10.20.04
Posted in culture at 6:57 pm by
[Brandon hums a few bars…]
Everybody was fundy fighting
Those cats were fast as lightning
And though it was a little bit frightening
But they fought with expert timing.
So, whaddya say? Shall we look into registering fundyfighters [dot] com ? We could all have blogs there and be beligerent all the day long.
I’ll give you a minute to pray and journal about it. You can let me know in the morning. 
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Posted in culture at 3:24 pm by
Greg has inspired me to make a post on a comment I received a while back. (That Greg, he always is an inspiration, isn’t he?) If you’ve been reading for a while you’ll probably remember the “misogynist worship post“. If not, you can go back and read the link. The jist is this: I pointed out that modern churches, and our church in particular is a hostile place for women.
Fairly recently, a commenter took issue with my post. Kindly, he gave his name and took the time to comment elsewhere. For that I applaud him. He wasn’t a ‘hit and run’ commenter.
Too often, when we–humans–present opposing views we aren’t able to really come up with a comprehensive opposing viewpoint. We, too often, either set up straw-man arguments and red herrings for opposing viewpoints and proceed to tear those down rather than getting at the heart of the issue. This is much more difficult to do when one actually has a living breathing example of an opposing viewpoint. That’s what Charles gave me.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I love it when people challenge other people and seek to sharpen eachother, but that goes both ways. Okay, I’ll cut to the chase. Charles makes these comments in response to my view that women have been and are being systematically excluded from the full life of the church.
First Charles says this:
Well Brandon I will give you the alternate view.
I would have to say you are not examining the facts. You say it is a cultural thing. But in reality, your comments and beliefs are the cultural difference. Only in the “modern” world cultures is this thought to be normal. It was the 1920’s when we gave women the vote. In Japan, for instance, women think this idea is strange. They do not connect with the American women on this point. In Nature and God’s word this idea is commanded. It wasn’t thought up by some guy long ago.
It’s hard to argue with this, mostly because it doesn’t really make a point. I suppose the argument here is that culture is different all over the world. If that’s the case, if culture is what’s moral–then there are no moral absolutes. (I may be misreading the above and if so, I apologize.) But, here’s the rub. I do think there are moral absolutes. In this case the one that applies, in my mind, is justice. Whether or not the Japanese, or the Korean, or the Iraqis, or the Italians, or the Germans, or the people from the good ole’ U.S. of A. believe women should have rights–they’re HUMAN BEINGS. As such, they should be treated as a HUMAN BEING, with all the rights afforded them. This extends governmentally, in the church, you name it.
I really can’t think of a place where God commanded that women be systematically derogated to second place. Doesn’t sound much like the God I worship. Unless you’re going to pull out “wives submit to your husbands…”. Either the Colossians verson or the Ephesians version of this doesn’t matter much. Either way, in order to use this as an argument in the current context one must ignore other parts of those passages, you know, those pesky passages about husbands loving wives. (And that’s taking a fairly conservative reading of these passages.) How can a husband love his wife and at the same time knowingly submit her to a life as a second class citizen. I simply cannot comprehend this.
It’s turning out that this is taking longer than I’d anticipated. So, I’ll close with this section of my rebuff again as volume one. Rest assured I’ll come back with other ideas in the future.
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Posted in culture at 9:00 am by
Why is it that Christians insist on making dumb things dumber, more infantile, and just plain tackier. I’m not even talking about how Christian Bookstores are insanely and flagrantly stupid in their marketing ploys. I sometimes write about these stupid things Christians do and sometimes people find their way here by way of google or another search engine. I can’t help but feel a little sorry for them when I berate the merchandise or idea they were looking for.
Here are some examples:
1. The 40 days of purpose “Got Purpose” t-shirt. “Got Milk” wasn’t even that fantastic of a marketing slogan, so when the WMIC (white man in charge) over at Rick Warren, Inc. came up with this one to market their waste of trees…ahem excuse me…market their book the idea was beginning as mediocre. It got worse because everybody and their dog got on the “Got Milk” bandwagon and stole the catch phrase. So…as far as unoriginality and genuine ineffectiveness goes–the got purpose t-shirt is near the top for me.
2. What’s with the whole concept of youth rallies? I mean there’s not a parent in the world that really thinks those things make any lasting change. I’m not ready to write them off as completely worthless, but for crying out loud, I would dare to bet that more Christian kids have their first sexual experiences, take their first sips of alcohol, or try their first tobacco products at youth rallies. All three not bad things–though the last isn’t healthy–but for 13 year olds? Also, any gathering that has to give the whole “you’re on a mountaintop now but next week you’ll be in the valley” sucks. Why in God’s name can’t your organization give a kid something more lasting than an emotion that will last a kid 1 week.
3. CCM. What the hell was wrong with real music that we felt like we needed CCM? My answer: nothing. I vote we pass a constitutional amendment against the production of any new CCM. Which is not to say that any group out there that is “into” pop culture is on the right track either. There are, in fact, whole Christian magazines that gear themselves to be in to mainstream pop culture–just because it’s cool.
4. Witness wear. I’ve talked about this recently. I’m sometimes more convinced that it’s more a goal to “Jesusify” one’s clothing than actually serve as any form of witness tool. Most, if not all, is just tacky.
5. TBN. In what reality did any Christian EVER think that the Trinity Broadcast Network was a good idea? I honestly don’t know how they stay on the air from year to year, what with what their lipstick and hairspray alottment must be alone!
As I got rolling on my list here, I realized that it could end up long. So, from time to time I’ll just make another volume of the list.
Now, time to go to the library.
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10.19.04
Posted in faith at 8:56 pm by
I long to be like you. I wish I had all the answers.
I wish my mind wasn’t so busy with unanswered questions,
with uncertainty, with self-doubt. My speech hedgeless and clear.
I long for the day that at this pinnacle of Christian
accomplishment and I finally crest that mountain of belief.
That’s what it’s about really; for you. Isn’t it?
Belief. Knowing–having those answers.
Becoming so farmiliar with faith that it really ceases to be faith.
After all you can’t have faith in facts.
Facts have been proven to be true, we just know them.
I long to look at the world like you look at the world,
and like so many, see black and white.
The shades of gray that infiltrate my eyes give way to an
infinite sea of indecipherability. I long for the halcyon days of youth,
when right was right and wrong was wrong. A modern time.
Scripture. A book of truth you say.
Unquestionable interpretations are clear.
The words your eyes must read evade me. A secret code, I suppose.
You see, it’s not that I don’t want to read your Bible.
The Bible of belief. It’s that when I look my eyes must betray me.
Must I really read beyond the words?
Peer deeply into the soul of God? It’s no use, I still read gray.
Perhaps it’s my eyes, perhaps my heart;
perhaps I have a broken soul.
Am I not predestined to know–a forgotten remnant.
For you, you know the truth. Your truth repels me.
Your grasp of it scares me. Belief, for me isn’t easy,
maybe even unattainable. I long for a belief–not in God though.
That, for me, is easy. The belief I long to hold is
the same one you claim to be so simple, so basic.
Allow yourself to wonder with me. What it might be like,
though, if your belief in God was really a belief in belief.
Where you shatter the need for faith because faith in facts is unnecessary.
Even faith seems difficult. My disgusting self.
All I seem to be able to do: Give faithfulness my best shot.
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Posted in faith at 12:02 am by
I guess with a site like badchristian.com you’re just asking for the loonies to come and give you a talking to. Now, before anybody gets up in arms, I’m specifically referring to loonies…not fundies.
It’s not that I don’t get my share of fundies surfing these “less than hallowed” pages, but loonies are a different breed. One story begins a long time ago. Last summer, actually. I got this email from a woman, Anne Robare. Basically, it was a spam email that was trying to get me to “convert” to her brand of “true Christianity.”
I never did report the fact that she was using her America OnLine account to send emails of solicitation (I’m sure a violation of the terms of service at AOL.) In fact, it’s possible that at some point, some of you have gotten an email from canawedding@aol.com –and if you do, that’s Anne.
I did a little research on our friend Anne Robare. In addition to sending out “witness emails” (a medium for evangelism which I roundly and wholeheartedly despise,) Anne Robare also seems to frequent church guestbooks. Standard operating proceedure seems to be to go and violate these church guestbooks with her brand of “christianity.”
I refer to this as “her brand of ‘christianity’” because even the most hardcore of the fundamental southern Baptist church guestbooks where Anne peddles her wares finds her message to be borderline heretical. I’m sure if you google her or her email address, you’ll find a plethora of ‘Anne-shaped rhetoric.’
Naturally, her email to me was too much for me not to respond to. At this point, I assumed that she was a conservative fundamentalist posing as an evangelical. I shared with Anne what I consider to be one of the best hermaneutical retorts in my short history as a writer. It’s rather a long communique, so if you’d rather, I’ll skip to the good bits.
The long and short of it is that Anne had so inflated her own translation of the scriptures (she swears by the NIV, NASB, or the KJV, but truth be told her understanding of scripture was so contorted that it could only best be described as the Anne Robare Translation or ART…he he he,) anyway, she’d so inflated her version of the word that any questioning of her translation actually leads to her claiming that you’ve made a sin against the spirit.
Eventually, she told me that I had committed the unpardonable sin, and that I was going to hell. There was nothing more she could do for me. It was at that point that my life of debauchery began, because, hey, what the fuck I’m going to hell anyway, right? Kidding about that last part, my life of debauchery began long before this.
Anyway, if you check the comment section of the above link, you’ll see that Anne has once again visited. You too can recieve her series of emails! I know, try to take it easy on sending all your friends there at once, I only have 5 Gigs of bandwith per day.
Eventually, after asking Anne Robare repeatedly what church was hers and getting no real answer, something dawned on me. Anne probably doesn’t belong to a church. (I don’t know this for a fact, but based on her writings this seems quite plausible.) Anne, it would seem has created a religion of her very own. It also dawned on me that Anne may be delusional. In fact, all joking aside, I hold that this is likely the case. I haven’t heard from her since the email I sent where I suggested that she see a Christian counselor.
Given our history of heated correspondence, it’s likely she didn’t take my suggestion that she might be insane gracefully. Nonetheless, my concern was in fact heartfelt.
I’ve gained something important from this somewhat interesting correspondence with Anne, though. I have a greater understanding for the fanatacism of some evangelists. I believe wholeheartedly that some folks are serious about changing lives and this is why they engage in such a fanatical evangelism.
If only these folks would take a year and turn that zeal into research about the types of communication that worked. Grabbing someone and metaphorically holding their collar over a cliff and threatening to drop them if they don’t accept Jesus…yeah, probably not an effective witnessing tool.
Christian t-shirts? Now, if this witness-wear was so effective wouldn’t we have heard a rash of stories in the early to mid nineties about folks who were walking down the street and saw a “pray-hard” t-shirt and turned from their wicked ways.
How many gays go to a gay rights parade and see the “turn or burn” signs and say, “Well, holy shit. I’m straight, it’s a miracle!” (Unless, of course they were somehow decapacitated by the rock which was thrown by a church member and hit them in the head.) And, then proceed to go on to a life of fellowship in a fundamentalist congregation.
Maybe it’s just a dream of mine to hope that people who practice this “extreme evangelism” are all delusional. Unfortunately, I know better. They’re not. These same folks represent the Church. Badly. Very badly.
I wish I could write off all the Anne Robares of the world as whack jobs. Alas, I cannot. But the saddest thing is: many do write them off as whack jobs. And they lump you and I right in there with Anne. That, my friends, is truly depressing.
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10.18.04
Posted in culture at 9:30 am by
My friend Kyle came up for the weekend. He’s a dear friend. He and I and three others spent the weekend together. Kyle is in his second year of medical school. His roomate, Jarrod–who also came up–is in his third and last year of law school. My friend Tim and Ryan are both engineers. I am the lone social scientist of the bunch. Naturally, when I reflect on our time together I think of it in these terms.
We shared: a truly countless number of beers, a poker game (you’d think that a lawyer would be good at bluffing…but the social scientist cleaned house,) football watching, talking politics, and a trip to Pier One. As I reflect on the weekend, though, the group dynamic of the five of us is what strikes me most.
I really look forward to spending time with these guys, they truly are good friends. What strikes me though, is the competition associated with 5 men hanging out. Yes, there was a “who’s got the biggest salary” contest, a contest in which I’ll prepetually be the loser, but the biggest contest, I think, was the contest for time. Each of us had unstated goals about the things we wished to accomplish together. Not goals about what activities we’d like to do, but goals about the kinds of things we’d like to happen with each of the relationships that we were to foster over the weekend.
During that time my unstated goal was to reconnect with my friend Kyle. I had cleared out my whole weekend (a precious time that could be spent with Jen) in order to reconnect. Unfortunately, other group members had the same unstated goals. I suspect that for some this would have been a non-issue. However, it seems as though we (the five of us) were unable to accomodate our competing unstated goals. Thus I felt that this weekend was a competition for Kyle’s time.
That’s unfortunate. Everyone loses in that scenario. I feel bad for me, Tim, Kyle, Ryan, and Jarrod. We all lost. I mean it wasn’t a worthless weekend, we did spend quality time, but it was certainly less than it could’ve been. I wish we could have somehow negotiated our similar but competing goals.
It all makes me wonder if this is a guy thing. I don’t have intimate knowlege of what “girl-time” together is like. Jen can tell me about it but it will never be more than a second hand experience. I suspect that our situation, though, this weekend isn’t exclusively a “guy thing.” I suspect it’s a human thing.
Perhaps, it’s fallacious to extend every adventure or misadventure I have with community as a metaphor for what church life should be like. But I’ll do it again here. Perhaps if we were more intentional about helping eachother achieve our community goals–less selfish, focused on other group members–everyone in a particular community would win more often. I think that there’s a good chance that this could help me surmount my ideological hurdles surrounding worship style. If I was more intent on helping OTHERS feel like their goals were being met, like worship or community was meeting their needs, probably they would be more likely to reciprocate those actions to me.
There is one problem and one sticky issue with this. The sticky issue is reciprocation. Reciprocation is a necessary step in the process of the growth of healthy community. Reciprocation is contingent upon the one problem. That one problem is that too often personal intent or personal goals for what community should be is unstated. We’re left wondering what a particular individual desires for a given social situation. I propose when that uncertainty exists, we’re likely to selfishly fill in the blanks with our own goals, or desires.
Perhaps if we told eachother what we wanted, instead of leaving those goals as a giant mystery to be solved by someone else this “true Kingdom Community” would be attainable. Of course, that can only happen if and only if we put others before ourselves and seek to be servants. And, I think that I may have just stumbled on the key, there. Servanthood. It may just be the key to “Kingdom Community.”
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10.15.04
Posted in faith at 10:21 am by
In my long string of admissions about myself, I think it’s time that I dropped this bomb. I was once a mega-church attender. I can’t say member. Really, I would argue that mega churches can’t really offer membership. I’ve been thinking about telling you all this story, and I got a kick in the pants tonight/this morning to give it a go.
Greg had a commenter over at his blog who flamed his critique of her church. You can find her original comment here. Greg offered a spirited rebuttal of “commenter Cathy’s comment. In that comment he used the phrase, “the cracker-ass suburban cult of self.” I find this phrase to be eerily spot on.
I’ll just cut to the chase of my feelings here, because my time today is limited.
First, a mega-church loses its ‘church-ness.’ It cannot run like a regular church. People are forced to not really know the other members of their body. Hence, these churches form small group ministries. I would argue though, that these ministries turn into a microcosm of the mega-church. Ultimately, what you have is small groups of people who don’t know eachother.
This all stems from problem number two, which Greg pointed out. These churches seem to propogate the myth of “God the giver.” Yes, yes, God is the giver of all good things. This does not mean however that God exists to give me good things. There is a greater purpose in my life than to get cool shit from God. I know it may seem foreign to the mega-churched but God wants me to get up off my ass and do things. Things like fighting for social justice, even if it’s something as small as creating a local groundswell of support for a local mexican restaurant.
Mega-churches, based in their highly buisness oriented mindset, though, know that this doesn’t sell. Christians want something free. So, they market Christianity’s free resource: Salvation. A good thing, to be sure. But, they ignore the obvious response to salvation: Action. Action is much less marketable. It’s not fun, it’s not cool.
You can see some attempts ot soften the blow of action in trends in youth groups all over the country. Mission trips don’t go to the inner cities (that they should be serving since it was in part their own white flight that contributed to such abject poverty in the first place.) Now we see mission trips to the Jamaica, europe, other cool and hip vacation destinations where youth groups will do 3 days of service and 5 days of sun worship.
Even when these mission trips happen, kids don’t really get the message. (Probably because their youth leaders don’t know the message anyhow.) They hear, “there now, don’t your feel better about your SELF because you’ve helped these people.” Your SELF. Telling, isn’t it.
Mega-churches soften the blow of the good news. They seek to make it pallatable. Pallatable to the masses. In that, they lose some of that gospel’s effectivness.
So, I think mega-churches suck for the above reasons. But there’s another problem. Smaller churches seem to be adopting the flawed small group model of larger churches. My church, for example. We don’t need small groups to connect to the church. It’s just not that big. But these small groups contribute to the overall feeling that we need small groups…that our church IS big. They’re a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Small churches take the small group model of a big church and duplicate it. The thing is, that fails the purpose of a small group. It could be a tool to inject folks into the larger body of Christ as expressed in that church, but instead, due to their carbon copy nature of what mega-churches do, small churches see small group ministries as an end to themselves, not as a means to an end.
I think small churches do this because they desire something. They desire to be big churches. It all comes back to pride. I wouldn’t go so far as to call pride a modern value (in the modern v. post-modern sense.) In fact, I think pride is a good thing. But, we do see a modern v. post modern difference in the source of pride in the church.
The modern church derives its pride from size, sheer volume, number of lives “changed” which they feel comfortable calculating by some nebulous and terrible formula. The post-modern church doesn’t see things that way. They derive their pride by quality, by the qualitative whole of their community.
It’s a fundamental difference. I hold that mega-churches often derive their roots from this fundamentalist modernism. They will sell their soul to the devil to fill a few more pews on Sunday morning.
I see things differently.
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