Total Mileage: 1,352
Song of the Day: “Waitin’ for a Superman” (Iron & Wine version)
Book of the Day:
Still Beyond Megachurch Myths
Alright, everything’s in order for my visit to LaSalle Street tomorrow. I’ll be looking around the church, hearing a bit about its mission, and working as part of “Breaking Bread,” the program in which the community around the church are invited in, and church members serve them dinner restaurant-style. I’m looking forward to it, and I’m sure I’ll have plenty to write about tomorrow night following that experience.
Revisiting Megachurches
I’ve spent my day holed up in the hotel doing research. Housekeeping probably thinks I’m some sort of sociopath, but I wanted to get a few more chapters of Beyond Megachurch Myths under my belt. I have to say, this book is dense. Dense and useful. Dense and useful and full of things that I feel like I have to go look up on the internet just out of curiosity. Every five minutes, I find myself opening up the laptop again to check out a church website or look up a database or cross reference the authors’ findings with another study. What fun! This is the sort of stuff that I’m betting will come in handy next semester when I’m working on the numbers side of things a little more. In particular, I’ve been playing around on two databases today.
The National Congregations Study is the survey from which Beyond Megachurch Myths pulls much of its data, and I enjoyed telling the database to spit out tables based on the various variables they asked about in their research, and they asked a lot of questions in their research. In particular, the questions about allowing members were fascinating. Of churches surveyed, 53.9% would allow an unmarried, cohabitating couple to join, while only 37.9% would allow a gay couple. 71.9% would grant membership to someone who drinks in moderation. The majority of acting head pastors in churches surveyed were between the ages of 40 and 60, with only 2.7% having a senior pastor in his/her 20s, and, unfortunately, males outnumbered females at a whopping 92.1%. Again, it’s a fun tool, so try it out and play around with it.
The other database I examined today didn’t have quite the same fun number-crunching/question-asking engine, but it is still a useful tool: the Hartford Megachurch Database. Rather than having me work with percentages, this site allows me to chart all of the documented 2,000+ member churches by state, denomination, and size. Thanks to this site, I know that, of the ten largest churches in America, I’m going to be hitting three this summer, and I’m contemplating adding a fourth (Second Baptist of Houston) since I’ll be passing through anyway as I visit the largest church in the country: Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church. Of course, looking back at my schedule, maybe I have enough to do in Houston, and Lord of the Streets and Ecclesia aren’t churches that I want to move to the backburner.
Of course, I didn’t just play around on databases all day; I did spend quite a bit of time in a book. I think that the most intriguing idea presented in Beyond Megachurch Myths so far is the notion that the megachurch is really just the natural byproduct of the megasociety (and since I haven’t seen that word used in the book, I’m going to go ahead and coin it, so it’s mine now). Megasociety is something we encounter so often that we don’t even think about it anymore. Stores and malls are getting bigger and sleeker. Food is sold to us in huge portions and prepared almost instantaneously. Cars, TVs, movie theaters, highways, the amount of memory in your computer, the amount of channels in your cable package-- it’s all getting bigger, and it’s doing it all the time. Isn’t it only logical that your church should be getting bigger too? Maybe the megachurch is just the natural result of a society that sees everything through the lens of “Bigger is better, and if we can somehow make it more productive too, then why not?” It’s a point that I’ll be exploring further as I attend more megas, and on Saturday, I’ll be attending a service at the country’s fourth largest church. Should give me a lot to mull over.
Peace and Blessings,
Tom
PS-- I used the book of Jonah as my morning devotion today and will probably do so again later in the trip. I don’t want what I’m about to say to be misinterpreted, but I love how Jonah reads almost like a fairy tale, with the overall lessons of patience and respect for God being repeatedly beaten into the title character’s head over the course of four chapters. We always hear the stuff about the big fish in Sunday School, but I love the second half of the book even more.
Once he gets spat out on shore, Jonah agrees to go to Nineveh (as God had originally commanded), and he goes about the town with a hateful attitude telling the people that God will soon destroy their city because they’re just that sinful. The people hear Jonah’s message and immediately repent. The King hears Jonah’s message and repents. Even the animals hear Jonah’s message and repent, and you can’t help but laugh at the mental image of someone’s sheep wearing sackcloth and ashes out in a field somewhere (and, yes, that actually is in the Bible, and yes, I’m pretty sure the writer meant for it to be funny). God sees all this repenting and issues a divine “It’s cool, bro,” and this infuriates Jonah since he really had his heart set on God reducing the place to rubble. God makes Jonah sit in the desert and cool his jets for a bit, and God puts a tall bush over his head to keep him cool and protect him from the elements. On the next day, God also sends a worm that immediately devours the bush-- think “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” crossbred with a John Deere riding mower. Now subject to the sun and the wind (which God has made just a little more unbearable that day especially for Jonah), Jonah throws a hissy fit and asks God to kill him since it would be better to die than to be without that bush. Unsurprisingly, God’s response is phenomenal:
Then the LORD said, "You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?” (Jonah 4:10-11)
That’s how the book ends. There’s not really a resolution. It’s just God saying to Jonah, “You’re furious over one bush and yet totally okay with killing thousands upon thousands of people? Dude, what is your deal?” Jonah is judgmental, melodramatic, and rude, and that’s the main reason that he’s such an interesting character! He makes crazy demands of God, disobeying God at one moment and then ordering the Lord to commit genocide in the next! Strangely, Jonah’s impatience with God and disobedience of God make him compelling, and even more challenging is his desire to see the sins of Nineveh punished. He yearns to see justice brought against Nineveh, to the point of being disappointed when his message is so well received, and there’s a huge lesson in that. Sometimes, we try to pass judgment on our neighbors for their actions, their shortcomings, their intolerances, but the book of Jonah reminds us that God loves everyone in spite of all that (if not because of all that). We can’t demand that God visit harm upon our neighbors. God loves our neighbors. God loves sinful people. God loves countries we go to war with. That’s how God works. God is love.
How many times in the past few decades has our anger over one bush --or one Obama for that matter-- blinded us to the real issues in our communities? How often has our desire to see justice carried out distracted us from the real love and mercy that we are called to show?
Don’t waste your time on fury.
Look for the people around you who don’t know their right hand from their left.
Reach out to them. Love them.
That’s the command we’re supposed to be following.
Leave the judgment to God, who shows mercy and compassion beyond anything we can imagine.
Listen and obey when God points you to Nineveh, and don’t get mad when God shows them (and us) the love we don’t deserve.
God’s pretty awesome like that.
No comments:
Post a Comment