Yesterday found me sitting in Cincinnati's largest megachurch, Crossroads Community Church (pictured above). Once again I was doing something I swore I would never do. I swore that I would never set foot in, be a part of, or sell out to the Wal-Mart mentality of religious entertainment. But, there I was sipping damn good coffee and sitting in front of 49 small television screens with two larger ones on either side of the stage displaying the best house band I've ever heard. The only thing that didn't occur within this multi media presentation was instant replay.
The church building was a former HQ Warehouse and it is immense. I dropped Rosie and the girlies off at the East entrance and found a parking spot. I really wasn't expecting the shock that occurred walking through the front door. The atrium was as large than some airports I've been to and equipped with patrolling police officers. There was an Information Station, coffee bars and even the Starbucks like lounge area which I found out was open seven days a week with free wireless internet. The small chapel is offered as an after thought for prayer, but who wants to do that when you can surf myspace drinking free coffee? Needless to say my head was swimming and to add to my sensory overload I found Rosie watching the girls play in a kid's area that looked like something out of a Tim Burton movie. It was awesome! Both playhouses were two stories high with a movie theater type entrance, a second floor disco room and an adjoining swirly slide. This place was crazy insane and its just a place for kids to play before they go to Sunday school.
Rosie registered Casey and Harmony and we all received our ID numbers. I felt as if I were entering an Aldous Huxley novel. Apprehension consumed me. We separated to find the different classrooms and immediately I became overwhelmed. Casey and I were navigating through a sea of people and it was worse than a mall at Christmas time. I found her room and ran into a minor glitch because the computer didn't show her as registered (Papers, Please!). I was making my way back to the rendezvous point and passed Rosie and Harmony who were lost (imagine that). We got Harmony to her room and started the dodge and weave back to the auditorium.
The auditorium was all black adorning the most hip, slick, and cool ambiance of any sanctuary I have been to. Movie theater style seating with cup holders, I imagined Fr. Steven grabbing the cross on his chest at the mere mention of enjoying coffee in a sanctuary. The set, or worship, was only one song followed by the message which was about debt and how consumed our society is with creature comforts. I couldn't help noticing the irony of the situation. There we sat in the largest church in Cincinnati and the message was about minimizing our consumerism. It's almost like listening to Hunter S. Thompson telling you that excessive drug and alcohol use is a bad idea.
I didn't hear the name of Jesus mentioned once, but I am catching on to the format of user friendly religious gatherings and I'm noticing that the ideal concept is to be culture current, politically correct, and all inclusive. Saying God rather than Jesus won't offend people and will enable the message to be delivered and received without prejudice. In their pamphlet was a touchy feely description of why you don't see any crosses in the sanctuary, but I had to wonder why a faith would abandon the very catalyst its hope was forged from. I guess a cross is a reminder that people may not be OK and this contradicts the modern message of the megachurch that everyone is OK and all you have to do is grab a cup of coffee and let the multimedia frenzy send you. To my surprise I found myself enjoying everything. The speaker was great, the band was phenomenal, and the coffee, Oh! the coffee was fantastic. Once the service was over I told Rosie that if we couldn't find one another to send up a flare and doing my best Daniel Day Lewis I screamed, "I will find you!"
Navigating the sea of people once again, I heard a man on a bull horn notifying parents of one particular classroom that there was a record breaking eighty eight children in attendance. That was one classroom. Killing two birds with one stone he was telling them that this is the place to be and politely saying please be patient will get your kid to you within a 10-15 minute waiting period. Walking into Casey's class I witnessed her and about thirty other kids dancing up a storm. She ran up and hugged me and screamed over the music that this place was the best and she did the limbo. Well, there it was. I had just become another victim swallowed up by the evil Megachurch's maniacal plan; hook the parents through the kids.
Out of all the people I side stepped I didn't speak to one. I tried to catch the eyes of a few to say howdy, but the feeling I got was as if we were on one huge elevator where the unspoken rule is don't speak while in close proximity to strangers. This was the same result I experienced while attending the Vineyard megachurch. For five years I only spoke to four people that sat on the same row as me. The coming and going of seven services didn't leave time for relationship building. It was almost required that you get in and out to free up parking space. I have been thinking about this all night on how I would fair in such a large entertainment style setting after falling in love with intimate sanctuaries and simplistic temples. I had just started to accept my new culture current status when I came across an article by the Pew Forum that addresses today's religious experience.
"A major new survey presents perhaps the most detailed picture we've yet had of which religious groups Americans belong to. And its big message is: blink and they'll change. For the first time, a large-scale study has quantified what many experts suspect: there is a constant membership turnover among most American faiths. America's religious culture, which is best known for its high participation rates, may now be equally famous (or infamous) for what the new report dubs "churn."
Says Pew Forum director Luis Lugo, Americans "not only change jobs, change where they live, and change spouses, but they change religions too. We totally knew it was happening, but this survey enabled us to document it clearly."
According to Pew, 28% of American adults have left the faith of their childhood for another one. And that does not even include those who switched from one Protestant denomination to another; if it did, the number would jump to 44%. Says Greg Smith, one of the main researchers for the "Landscape" data, churn applies across the board. "There's no group that is simply winning or simply losing," he says. "Nothing is static. Every group is simultaneously winning and losing."
Lugo would not speculate on whether such a buyer's market might cause some groups to dilute their particular beliefs in order to compete. There are signs of that in such surveys as one done by the Willow Creek megachurch outside Chicago, which has been extremely successful in attracting tens of thousands of religious "seekers." An internal survey recently indicated much of its membership was "stalled" in their spiritual growth, Lugo allowed that "it does raise the question of, once you attract these folks, how do you root them within your own particular tradition when people are changing so quickly."
Sad but true, I am one of those fish flopping out of water that they speak of. My faith persuasion will change depending on the time of day you ask me. Now I felt guilty for succumbing to the bigger, brighter, louder mentality that has come to personify our Western lifestyle. I'm not sure what to do with all of this. So many times I thought God; notice I didn't say Jesus, had directed me to a particular persuasion of faith through dreams or mystical encounters only to be derailed because it didn't coincide with what my family desired. Will I become "stalled" in this huge caffeine pushing WiFi hotspot? I'm not sure but I do think I'll need to ponder this a few more Sundays over a cup of coffee. Did I mention they had great coffee?
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