[Photo of Andy Stanley from here]North Point Community Church is located in Alpharetta, Georgia. It is huge by most any measure, serving much like a large shopping mall, offering a variety of religious/spiritual/piety opportunities for everyone.
North Point is a typical fundamentalist christianist operation which means several things. It teaches that:
In order to be "saved" and spend eternity with the deity, you must accept Jesus as your personal savior. That's because you're a filthy sinner with no hope and have no way to become acceptable to the one they call God. To become acceptable to this god, you have to believe that the Jesus of the New Testament was killed on a cross to save you from your sins, because God demanded (indeed "needed") a blood sacrifice by a sinless human and Jesus was the only "sinless" option available in the first century. This is where things become complicated because they also believe that Jesus is God. So God, in the form of Jesus, had himself killed because he needed a blood sacrifice (all ancient gods required blood sacrifices, you'll recall) and that satisfied his lust for blood so he could forgive the sins of all who believed that he did this.
Why it took God so long to have Jesus hung a cross is one of the great unknowns. It makes no sense that he wait for millions of years to set this wonderful bloody, sacrificial atonement in motion! All those people gone before are burning in hell!
There are other problems, too. Especially with the so-called "sinlessness" of Jesus. Remember how he got mad and sent demons into innocent pigs who then went flying off a cliff to their deaths? Why hurt the pigs? And remember how he refused to help the guy whose daughter was dying and let him go through all the terror of that death before he showed up to show off and raise the daughter from the dead? And remember when he cursed the fig tree because it hadn't borne fruit even though it wasn't the season for figs? And you must recall how he said that those standing in his presence would see the Son of Man come in all his glory before they died? That didn't happen. Was he lying? Confused?
Well, the folks at North Point insist that if you confess your sins and believe in this sacrificial atonement theory, then you've got it made and you will be recreated after death in physical form and will spend all of eternity with Jesus/God/Holy Spirit who are in fact, one "person," while everyone in the world who does not so believe will burn in fiery torment forever and ever. Amen.
North Point theology also includes the notion that the Bible is inerrant in all respects and is God's holy word to the human race. Of course, the Bible is incredibly confusing and difficult to understand and has all those passages where God murders thousands of people so it has to be interpreted and the leaders at North Point know how to do that, so it's best if you believe what they say about the Bible and try to follow the teachings of the Bible as they lay them out for you. If you fail to accept the Bible as inerrant in all respects and find that you can't follow these teachings your so-called "faith" in Jesus becomes suspect and it is likely that the Devil has entered your soul and caused to backslide or you're just a miserable sinner with no hope.
As I said, North Point is a massive operation. It has 22,000 members. The church building seats 4,800 people. You can imagine the amount of money they rake in every Sunday. You can also imagine the amount of money it takes to keep such an operation operative.
The co-founder and senior cleric of North Point is 50-year old, Charles Andy Stanley. Stanley's dad is Charles F. Stanley, pastor of First Baptist in Atlanta.
Andy, as he is generally called, did his seminary training at Dallas Theological Seminary which is a notorious fundy wingnut school in Dallas, Texas. If you wish to know more about the "theology" spewed out at Dallas Theological Seminary, click here. Andy falls pretty much right in line with the typical fundamentalist delusions.
But, it appears he is a good administrator and organizer. According to Wikipedia, North Point now has four campuses, and in 2007 Andy was voted as the 20th most influential Christian in America, and North Point in 2006 was voted the 3rd most influential church in America.
To gain further perspective on the size of the reach of this mega-church, click here.
But Andy and North Point have a problem. Too damn many people! There is so much congestion on Sunday morning that it seems some folks just give up and go home; or worse, go to the local Lutheran church!
According to an article in Christian Post, Andy is quoted thusly: "I have friends who say it's just too much like going to a Braves game." Yeah, but at a Braves game there's beer and hot dogs!
Here's the situation. The church can seat 4,800. But the infrastructure can't handle the traffic. Although there are 3,000 parking spaces and two exits/entrances, Andy told his congregants, "Once we go past 3,500 people at one time, it gets exponentially ridiculous in the parking lot."
The situation has been getting worse. In fact, nine years ago, North Point began working on putting together another way to get in and out of the church facility. Their efforts have finally paid off and they have now received the necessary permissions from the powers-that-be which means they can begin building a $5 million bridge "from its campus to a major highway" in order to mitigate the Sunday morning traffic jams.
Christian Post says, "The bridge will stretch across flood plains and wetlands and connect the campus to Old Milton Parkway via Brookside Parkway. It will be constructed as a three-lane concrete bridge with a walkway." Construction is expected to be completed in 2010.
Now, I really don't care what people believe or which god they worship so long as they don't try to force me to acquiesce to their nonsense. But it is very difficult to equate this kind of religion with a legendary 1st century Jewish rabbi who was, as described, very poor, without a place to lay his head, who spent most of his time wandering about in the company of people who were considered the nogoodniks of his time, and who had the irritating habit of telling people that they could experience the kingdom of God within them if they would keep all of the Jewish law, and do what so many other ancient teachers taught - live so as not to bring harm to others.
Five million buckaroos is a lot of money - even today, even for a mega-church. Especially to build a bridge to a religious nowhere; to a place where fundamentalist wingnuttery is proclaimed, where science is ignored, where the rankest biblicism is pounded into the heads of the ignorant so they can go into the world to preach this same christianist nonsense and strive to turn our nation into a replica of their own wingnuttery.
It is out of mega-churches like this that so much of the opposition to evolution, gay rights, health-care reform, the Constitutional separation of church and state, global warming, abortion, etc., derives.
This is a bridge that creates troubled waters.
2 comments:
Really, would you want to spend eternity with these people? I for one would rather *not exist* than worship their "god". And I, as I've said before, use that term loosely. The god of the Bible acts more like a spoiled five year old who throws a temper tantrum when his mom takes his toys away than some supreme deity.
I have often thought that if only the Christians would take their time, effort and money and attack the problem of poverty in the world, there'd be none left. But they're too busy wasting their time and money fighting gay rights and building mega churches with gold plated lobbies.
This is apparently not unusual, or is it? If this church should somehow fail, when the current pastor retires, dies or whatever, what happens to the bridge, since it serves only the church? Are tax dollars involved? If so, how do they justify the use for a purely religious use without violating a few laws?
If it is all with church money, on church land, paid for by the church, that is their business, but if not, it becomes everyone’s business, including the sinners that are willing to take their chances on what Jesus said and promised. That ain’t what these guys preach. Since there are over 200 different denominations of just the Protestant theology in the USA, which is what Jesus taught? I guess there is a huge gamble here. What if they are all wrong and Jesus meant to stick with the Jewish view and only the Jewish Orthodox one. That would reduce Heaven’s occupants to a tiny group of people, probably no more than a million or so today. How does one cope with that thought? Few people on earth today, practice the religion that Jesus did though out His life.
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