I might be wrong, but I took SlowDave's comment to mean that churches are hospitals for sinners, not hotels for saints - and I tend to agree with that sentiment. While we all should be trying to follow Christ's example as well as we are able to, none of us is perfect, and all of us are going to screw things up once in a while. Returning to Doug.38PR's condemnation of mega-churches, I would have to disagree with him. I don't currently attend one myself, but the very first church I attended and joined after getting saved at age 41 was a congregation of 6,000 - Lake Avenue Church, in Pasadena, California. I don't know if that is large enough to qualify as a "mega" church, but it is certainly a VERY large church by any rationale. It was also over 100 years old, and had a fine and well deserved reputation for Christ centered teaching and evangelical works such as missionary support, etc. I think that it is fair to say that, at any given time, a certain percentage of people attending a worship service there are seekers - people whose hearts are being prompted by the Lord to seek Him, and who may eventually make a personal profession of Christian faith and begin to walk with the Lord, but haven't yet done so. I don't see how anybody who calls themselves a Christian believer can call that a bad thing and still be true to Christ's commandment to carry the gospel to non-believers, which includes the subset called "seekers."03Lightningrocks wrote:Wow. So....uh...You have obviously visited ALL churches to be able to comment on them ALL in one fell swoop.SlowDave wrote:Wow. So... uh... You have obviously visited a LOT of "Megachurches" to be able to comment on them all in one fell swoop.Doug.38PR wrote:Megachurches being what they are, they are not the body of christ and they are not the Kingdom of Heaven's court. They are "seeker churches" that only care about bringing in numbers. (which in my view are just entertainment centers to give emotional people emotional experiences devoid of any depth or understanding who the King of Kings is)
Judge not...
Never mind.
Mind you, I'm not saying Mega-churches are terrific. On the contrary, what I'm saying is that all the churches that have humans as members come up well short. I've seen plenty of problems in small churches as well as large churches. That's what happens when you get a bunch of forgiven, frail people together. Kind of like how there's a lot of infection going around at hospitals.
I hear that the churches that don't have humans are generally a LOT better.
Just because a new believer is in his/her 40s when they first believe doesn't mean that they are mature in their faith - yet. And certainly a seeker has no faith. They might want to have faith, but they haven't gotten to the point yet where they are ready to surrender to Christ. (Indeed, many self-professed Christian believers have difficulty surrendering to Christ.) I have yet to see even a church which overtly acknowledges itself to be seeker driven make a theological argument that seeking is equal to salvation. But certainly the message given to seekers and new believers must be theologically simpler to understand, until such point as their growing maturity in faith enables them to understand theologically deeper subjects? You don't see missionaries in Papua New Guinea trying to explain the finer points of pre-trib and post-trib eschatology or Arminianism versus Calvinism to some poor soul who doesn't even know who Jesus is yet.
Micah 6:8 tells us that we are to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God. Justice demands that we not be hasty to condemn mega-churches because they tend to appeal to seekers. Mercy demands that we be merciful toward seekers, particularly since Jesus goes to meet them where they are, not where we think they should be (as he does for us too). And walking humbly with our God demands that we focus on our own walk with God, and not on everyone else's.
And to relate all of this to the original post. . . . it does seem to me, based on what we've been told second hand, that the security guard in question behaved inappropriately with the congregant who was rousted. But in all fairness to the the many ways in which God tries to reach us for His kingdom, that is entirely a separate issue from whether or not mega-churches are a proper expression of Christianity. After all, Christ himself preached to "the multitudes" (not counting women and children) during his Sermon on the Mount.