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“Thou shalt lose thine hair.” - God
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My parents are getting older. They're in their sixties now. While that's still relatively young by today's standards, they can't do things like they used to.
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Everyone remembers their first date. It's a special experience that you never forget. Like your first real kiss. Or your first car. Or your first computer.
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Okay, here's the deal: My office was broken into over the 4th of July holiday. My computer, my brand new Dell computer, was stolen along with all my personal stuff…
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Can you blame me for adding stuff to it?By the time anyone reads this, I'll have been through the experience and we can all laugh about it. But right now,…
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I was talking with some friends last night and the topic turned to the best water we'd ever had. One guy said he took a drink out of a fountain…
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It's true. The world's spelling acuity, and America's in particular, has suffered immensely due to one major reason. The advent of the Internet.
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Just like the song says, I'm another day older and deeper in debt. I've always been a fan of birthdays due to that whole "receiving presents" thing. And check this…
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Written by Ross Cavins
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Tuesday, 25 September 2007 03:26 |
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I heard someone talking yesterday about how this pastor and his church owned half a city block and had a membership of more than five thousand people. By "Big City" standards, that's small but by my little country church standards, it's huge. Too huge. It seems to me that big churches have become big business in America.
In Europe, way back in the time before the Knights Templar, the Catholic Church was the only game in town if you weren't Jewish. It was the epitome of big business, affording special privileges and tax-exempt status from the Kings and Queens of the land.
 A Big Church.
Enter America and the mass dissemination of every flavor of Protestantism. Add a few we made up along the way (Seventh Day Adventist, Mormonism, Scientology, etc.) and you have the land of choices. Religion has never loved a form of government more than ours, one that guarantees the freedom to give your money to any religion you so choose.
In America's beginning, the church played an integral role in the community. In most cases, the church was the community. As cities grew, so did the churches within their borders. Somewhere along the way, I believe the focus changed.
Big churches are worried more about having two services to handle the volume of participants than having a close-knit community. Sure they spend a lot of money to print posters and flyers promoting community and youth league sports and fall festivals but it's just not the same as the type of community a small country church creates.
Big churches are all about big business. That's an opinion I know, but I believe it's a true one. And to me, big churches defeat the purpose of what the church set out to do in America in the beginning. Draw together the community into a strong cohesive unit.
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