Shaun Groves
How strange is it that multi-million dollar buildings are constructed for the worship of a God who came to earth as a poor homeless man? And that millions are spent to celebrate His birth?
I’m not willing to say it’s wrong (today). But it’s at the very least ironic don’t you think?
Ron Woods says:
Totally ironic. Also, rather like each of us, wouldn’t you say? Born naked and broke. Helpless until rescued by physicians, parents, and the bank accounts of others. And yet the one who left the planet beaten, tortured and executed offers to allow us to leave destined for the amazing riches of His Heaven.
That analogy breaks down all over the place but I still find it incredible.
Jill Foley says:
It’s also ironic that we give eachother gifts for Christ’s birthday! I have been trying to tell others to give Jesus a gift…sponsor a little child through Compassion. After all, Jesus said, “whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me”…Matt. 18:5
I blogged about this last week…
http://sydandkay.blogspot.com/2008/12/compassion-sunday.html
stacia says:
Was it ironic when a woman poured-out expensive perfume on that poor homeless man’s head?
I’m not asking this just to be snarky. I think your concerns about the way American Christians spend their money are perfectly legitimate. I also think it’s possible that there are times when what looks like wastefulness or extravagance might be seen as a holy act of worship in the eyes of God.
TransitionGirl says:
Totally agree with ya. I’ve always had an issue with churches saying that they needed to build a big building complete with stain glass windows in order to serve God better. I don’t think that’s God’s criteria for serving Him better.
Texas in Africa says:
I’m willing to say it’s wrong. But to be honest, it has more to do with the fact that people are starving than with concern about whether Christ came as rich or poor.
Veretax says:
I’m curious how many square foot can you get for 1 Million Dollars? How big of a church would that be? My second thought is whether it is built out of materials that will last, or those that corrode over time (read Steel).
Dawn in Canada says:
Ironic indeed! And here’s the kicker-people go hungry because our $$ are too often committed building bigger and better. Ouch!
E-Jayjo says:
Totally! Why do so many churches keep “upgrading” and asking their members for more building fund money when so much of that could be used for people who have no homes at all… I drive by so many churches now with their “thermometer” fund signs showing how much they have left before they can start their new building. Are we just trying to keep up with the Joneses at the church down the street or what??? It is sad to me. Is it about the church or the Church?
keith says:
We’re not trying to keep up with the Joneses at the church down the street, because the Joneses and all their neighbors and extended family are coming to our church, and we need to give them a place to park and sit and listen…
And I think God came to earth as a poor homeless baby. Just sayin’.
MamasBoy says:
Scripture is replete with irony. Whether or not a church building is wrong depends (in my mind) on whether the Church has lost its focus on the poor and is primarily focused on itself. If mere buildings consume huge portions of a given congregations budget, to the detriment of the poor, then it is certainly a problem. The rule-of-thumb recommendation in my “denomination” is that 50% of the tithe be given to the local congregation and 50% given to the poor and other worthy causes. Given that a much smaller fraction of the 50% given to the local congregation goes to actual building costs, I’d say it seems quite reasonable to me.
Veretax asked, “I’m curious how many square foot can you get for 1 Million Dollars? How big of a church would that be?”
For comparision purposes, how much does $1 million buy in residential housing? 4-6 homes for the average middle class family in most locales. Honestly, I don’t think it would buy much worship space, just over 6500 ft^2 at $150 per square ft. Now, I’m no expert on this, but I’d go out on a limb and guess that 6500 sq. ft. could service 150 4-person families with 2-3 services per Sunday (25-40 ft^2 per person seems reasonable to me). Amortized over 20 years (and I certainly hope it lasts longer than that), the cost is less than $30/month per family or $7/month/person. If the church also functions as a community center and can support other activities with that building (e.g., a crisis pregnancy center, a private school, a homeschool co-op, etc.), then it seems much more efficient than other setups I’ve seen (like business offices similar to the one I work at, where the cost per person to merely lease the space (no utilities, cleaning service or ownership) is well over $100/month).
If somebody can point out any bad assumptions that I’ve made in these calculations, I’d appreciate it. I’m not an expert by any stretch of the imagination.
Just for reference, I also checked the number of families assumption with the average seating space required. If each person is given 4 feet from side to side (lots of fat Americans or room for Christmas growth) and each pew is spaced 2 yards apart and only half the church is taken up by community seating with 1/2 left for classrooms and other functions, then each church can serve about 100 families with three services.
MB
Veretax says:
RE: MamasBoy
Wow, property must really be pricey in your neck of the woods. Only in select counties will you find a prevalance of homes over 200 Grand Most that I’ve shopped for are at or around 100K or lower. However, I live in West Virginia where just about everything is depressed, (except for Gas Prices that is).
MamasBoy says:
Veretax,
The median home price in the US in 2007 was $217,900 and dropped less than 10% to $206K in the 2nd quarter of 2008. Half were more expensive and half were less expensive. My range of 4-6 houses per $1,000,000 with prices of $250k-$167K seems to bound that nicely. However, it is certainly understandable if that seems high for people in the rust belt or other low cost of living areas.
http://www.realtor.org/research/research/metroprice
Even if the the number of homes was increased to 7 or 8 (with prices of $142k and $125k respectively), I’m not sure that would change the conclusions much in the aggregate. One could just as easily say that a 20 year assumption for the life of a church building is unnecessary. There are a couple small churches within a 2-5 miles of my house that are over 100 years old. They have been paid off for nigh a century, with only maintenance costs and taxes remaining.
The bigger issue is balance. Paying $30/month/family for a church building to worship in seems reasonable only if one is doing a whole lot more for the poor. If $30/month is the extent of one’s charity, then it does seem out of balance.
MB
Richard says:
actually, its 450 billion that we spend on christmas
.
Fred Sanford says:
Hmmmm…The first commandment is to love the Lord God woth all your heart soul mind and strength. Seems to me that building a building where poeple can come to worship would be important. When you have 7,000 people coming in a Sunday morning, any building that would hold them all would start in the millions to build. We are called to worship Him first. Then to love our neighbors as ourselves( although,of course, serving the poor is an act of worship). Yes, we do waste money, and we waste a lot worse than that…time, resources, opportunities, etc. You can take the argument back to the legitimacy of meeting at church in the first place, I suppose. When a church grows, you have to either build on your property or make a satelite campus or plant another church. Or we could all really take this argument to it’s conclusion and move our ministries to the poorest mission fields and not judge the churches that pay high $$$ to bring in our tours?
Veretax says:
James 1:26-27 (NKJV)
26 If anyone among you F2 thinks he is religious, and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, this one’s religion is useless. 27 Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.
Why is a multimillion dollar facility necessary to worship God. Are we building it for worship or as a feather to put into our caps and say look what we did for you Lord.
Remember Our God Does not reside in brick, mortar, steel, or plastic, Our God is a Living God and he shall be worshiped in Spirit and in Truth, and that my Friends can be done even with out a roof to cover us from the elements.
Fred Sanford says:
So you either don’t attend church, or you attend one that meets in a tent? I’m not trying to be argumentative, just pointing out how we all like to sound spiritual, but logistics and real life happen. Again, unless you are faulting a church growing and having 7,000 in attendance, than we all can agree that a building is needed. And again, even the simplest of buildings that would pass safety codes in the US, when being bult to hold this many people, is going to cost in the millions to build.
I’ll keep my eyes open for the next tour to be of homeless shelters and villages, then everyone can be very spiritual.
My issue is that it’s probably poor sport to write a blog like that on the day you are at the largest church on your tour. It’s obvious the blog was talking about us, and it makes me wonder why tour in the first place? Why send an elaborate ryder and charge thousands of dollars when all that money could have been sent to Africa? So we sponsored 156 kids-if they crowd wasn’t huge that wouldn’t have happened,and the crowd, again, had to sit somewhere
Anyway…
Shaun Groves says:
Fred, I’d love to talk about this if you’re game? I appreciate – heck, I’m thrilled! – to be disagreed with here. Doesn’t happen often enough. So thanks for that. And thanks for using your real name and not hiding behind “Anonymous.”
This entire tour of ours has been in very large baptist churches, yes. And that has made me think about church buildings every single day. Why build them? How large to build them? How to use them when they’re built?
This post was not saying it’s wrong to have a building. I’m not at that place yet. It was stating the obvious irony of ALL OF US worshipping a God who came to earth in weakness and poverty by spending millions on buildings – and for that matter, on staff, electricity, technology, etc. Church as we know it in America is an expensive and, I think, sometimes inefficient wasteful institution that sometimes treats members like share holders or customers and not like servants or family.
Your church takes up 12 city blocks. How many of those blocks sit empty, being cooled or heated, being protected by security most of the week? I don’t know. But it crossed my mind.
It’s telling that from time to time, when I’m thinking out loud about this issue here on the blog, someone will point out the lack of alternatives to church as we know it. The only alternatives you mentioned are a tent or no church at all. I know you were being facetious and it was funny but, really, there are other options.
How about no owned buildings? Homes, for instance. Church can be 30 people and when it grows beyond that it can split and become two homes. Church can also meet in buildings that already exist and split when it outgrows that space. Church can meet outside. Church can’t do any of this and still cater to people who want an indoor amusement park for their kids on Sunday morning or a room full of Xboxes for their youth, or a coffee bar, or anonymity or the prestige of going to THAT church. But church – in the truest sense – can happen without owning buildings. My question is MUST it? I don’t know.
As for me, I’m part of a community that meets in a school cafeteria. The church office/food pantry runs out of a house that is also shared with Campus Crusade for Christ. We don’t have buildings apart from that house, which I think was given to us, and I hope we never do.
Back to your church. Your church does great work in the community and around the world from what I was told. Everyone I met there served us well. No complaints here. But even your church, the best of the biggest, gave me pause. I was told your church spans twelve city blocks! And I wondered: How many of those blocks of buildings sit empty most of the week, heated or cooled? I don’t know the answer. I asked the question kindly twice while I was there and didn’t get an answer from the lay leaders I asked. They don’t know. Can you tell us? I’d love to hear about how those buildings are used daily to do the things your community downtown needs: healing broken bodies, feeding hungry people, job training, tutoring, cottage industries, etc etc.
I’m the victim of exposure, Fred. When I visit the third world and see churches with sorry facilities (by US standards) making big differences in their neighborhoods and when I see how far $32 a month goes in some countries I do get a little pissed off when I read about a pastor upgrading his sound system for $250,000 when the one he had worked just fine or when the mega church down the street buys the Kroger down the road from me, hurting the businesses around it. Or when I see buildings sitting empty costing tens of thousands to cool and clean and secure every year. Divide that expense by $32. It hurts me to do it. I get mad. I talk out loud about it. I wrestle publicly with it. I’m desperate for answers. What answers can you give me/us as a member of one of the biggest churches in America? Make your best argument for doing church the way you guys do it.
(I’m not even touching the financial statements you made about this tour. It’s off topic. But I’d love to talk about it by e-mail: shaunfanmail AT bellsouth DOT net
Veretax says:
Maybe this is the rural west virginian in me, but I can’t imagine 7 thousand people in one place at one time, unless its like bigger than the WVU coliseum so to speak. It would seem that such a church would need a team of pastors, and frankly I think a thousand is plenty big as far as churches go, but like Shaun, I don’t know of anything in the bible that prevents or prohibits such.
Although in Acts God did allow persecution to come which split and spread many to the surrounding nations, that’s about the only thing remotely I can think of to apply here, and it may be a nebulous idea at best :/
Fred Sanford says:
Great points from you both. I humbly concede. Thank you. I will ask our pastor to beginthe liquidation ASAP, so we can look better the those that are “real”. Thanks again.
Fred Sanford says:
And you have to admit, that question from FBC Jax, on the day of your concert was a little obvious