No room at the inn. Or the megachurch.

  • Am I the only one who has been curi­ous about what life would be like in one of those Protes­tant megachurches? The biggest Ortho­dox church I’ve ever seen prob­a­bly had a cou­ple hun­dred peo­ple in it. I can’t imag­ine what church life would be like in a build­ing that had to pack in twice that every Sun­day. It must be a dif­fer­ent world.

    But judg­ing from this arti­cle (via Jim), it’s a dif­fer­ent world that you don’t want. Sev­eral of the megachurches are going to be closed on Christ­mas Day, because it falls on a Sun­day and they don’t think they’ll get enough bod­ies in to cover their bot­tom line. For good­ness’ sake, it’s Christ­mas Day. The devil take the bot­tom line. For one day, every cou­ple years, go ahead and lose money. But for any Chris­t­ian church to close its doors on Christ­mas is shameful.

    I’m guess­ing that they’ll catch enough neg­a­tive flak for this that those churches will fig­ure out it’s a PR dis­as­ter and change their sched­ule. But they never should’ve done it in the first place. Shame on those big guys.

    And Jim’s right — down here in the cheap Ortho­dox seats, we have ser­vices either Christ­mas eve or Christ­mas Day (some­times even both — it seems to change from church to church). Yes, some­times our non-Orthodox fam­ily don’t under­stand. And some­times we may lose some church-goers who favor the fam­ily thing over the church thing. But I don’t know. If a church stops act­ing like a church and acts like a busi­ness, what’s it good for?


    Related posts:

    1. N-C-C ya later!
    2. Roman­ian exorcism
    3. The Sitka Icon (again)

    December 8th, 2005 | Grace | 5 Comments |

5 Responses and Counting...

  • Mimi 12.08.2005

    Well, I have to admit that I usu­ally don’t go on the Nativ­ity morn­ing (and I’m well aware I SHOULD) I do agree it’s a PR disaster.

    I have dreams about attend­ing a mega-church some­times, but it’s always an odd expe­ri­ence in my dream and odd and a bit exag­ger­ated. I have no idea what that says about me.

  • Grace

    Yep, I know what you mean. In the years that my folks were in town, I used to kind of pick and choose from the ser­vices. It was just hard for my par­ents to under­stand why my sis­ter and I would be away for hours on Christ­mas morn­ing and leave them at home (and it would’ve been out of the ques­tion for them to come). Some­times you pick fam­ily. Just another rea­son I’ll have a lot of explain­ing to do at the Pearly Gates. (I always tell every­one as a pub­lic ser­vice — when you get there, remem­ber not to get behind me in line.)

    Re: the megachurch dream — seems like a per­fect dream locale to me. Sort of famil­iar but also not, and too big and every­thing. Yep, now that you men­tion it, I’m sur­prised I’ve never dreamt about one.

  • Mimi

    Yeah, my hus­band isn’t Ortho­dox, and so I am def­i­nitely a pick and chooser.

  • s-p

    Per­son­ally, I like Mis­sion Churches. You have to find your own enter­tain­ment, Jazzer­cise classes, gyms, Star­bucks, and bowl­ing alleys, but what you get in exchange is some pretty inti­mate rela­tion­ships and really short com­mu­nion lines. :)

  • Grace

    Yep, I know what you mean. Plus, if there’s any job you had the slight­est inter­est in doing (or even if you didn’t have any inter­est at all) chances are you’re going to do it.

Leave a Reply

* Name, Email, and Comment are Required