On an Evangelical mega-Church:
"The nondenominational Lakewood Church, the nation's largest congregation, moved into the Compaq Center, once the home of the Houston Rockets, over the weekend. After $95 million in renovations, including two waterfalls and enough carpeting to cover nine football fields, the arena now belongs to a charismatic church with a congregation of 30,000, revenues of $55 million last year and a television audience in the millions.

Like many new evangelical churches, the building has no cross, no stained glass, no other religious iconography. Instead, it has a cafe with wireless Internet access, 32 video game kiosks and a vault to store the offering."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/18/national/18lakewood.html?ex=1121832000&en=d960034e1f09f152&ei=5070




Okay, Catholics may have been wasteful building those awe-inspiring churches, Presbyterians may have been nutty to make their interiors so bright and joyous, Lutherans may have been solemn in constructing such majestic, powerful churches, but the Evangelicals?

A stadium? A cafe? Internet?

Now, I'm not an aesthetic by any stretch of the imagination. God is present in every closet, shanty and park (at least in my way of thinking). But a real church, synagogue, mosque or prayer space should smack of care in the construction.
There's a sense of devotion. It's a statue to heaven. It enspires faith. Maybe when I'm big, strong and holy, I won't need a lovely space (or a national park, which make me all the more spiritual) to get godly. But I'm a weak mortal. I like my spires and iconography. There's power in symbols... It lets you seperate your life.
I see something wrong about using a stadium as a sanctuary and sticking church in with grabbing a cheeseburger.

(Crisis Begins)

Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps if we're "faithful" we should be so wherever, whenever...if we're in a church or a stadium, it shouldn't matter. Th evangelicals see God in everything, so why should church be special?

I guess I can't be born again. People aren't always "good" or faithful. Whether you believe in a Bible, Torah, Rede, Koran, Kant or Freud, you violate it sometimes. You cheat. You curse.
I think we need spaces to be wretched, degraded, pieces of moral filth... if only so other times we can be true. I need my porn and my church to be far apart.

...When I was younger, I rearranged one of my drawers as a sort of prayer space. It had my candles, my rocks, my shells, arranged in several circles. It was an altar and I believed it had power. No, not witchy power... faith. When I prayed there, I always cried. Good crying. The kind that makes you feel exhausted and hurting when you do it, but light when you're done. I could always sleep afterwards, feeling as though I'd been listened to. Or that I was finally listening.

Is it weak and faithless that I can't feel that without my altar?


Here's the trouble... I don't trust the evangelical preachers. It's funny because when they're speaking about nonpolitical/prostelizing issues, I can agree. Happy faith. Good faith. But it's the preaching. It's almost as though they speak to a crowd of sheep. And I don't want to be a sheep. The believers lose control... they scream... It scares me a bit. That fervor. It can be harnessed so easily and can lead to such horrors and such blessings...

What do you all think? Pretend it's all philosophy...