The Crystal Cathedral was the perfect building for this goofiness: Gaudy, transparent, and bankrupt.
Frowning takes 68 muscles.
Smiling takes 6.
Pulling this trigger takes 2.
I'm lazy.
Posted on 11/12/2010 10:13:27 PM PST by hiho hiho
On 18 October 2010, Southern California's landmark Crystal Cathedral, the prototype of all late 20th Century American Megachurches, filed for bankruptcy. I drove up the following Sunday to get a look at the place while it was still in operation.
The Crystal Cathedral proper, a spectacular glass structure designed by Philip Johnson and completed in 1980, dominates a landscaped campus that includes the congregation's original church building, designed by Richard Neutra, Richard Meier's "Welcoming Center", and a variety of other buildings, reflecting pools and religiously themed statuary. A German tourist prevailed on me to take a picture of him and his wife posing in a larger-than-life tableau of Jesus as Good Shepherd.
The campus and decor are the culmination of a high-church revival in American Protestantism that began in the 19th century. It was then that evangelical Christians, who had traditionally assembled in meeting houses and preaching halls, constructed faux-Gothic edifices, dressed their preachers in gowns, and "beautified" their services, exchanging tedium for vulgarity. By the mid-20th century, they had appropriated all the "potent symbols of cinema secularism" theologian Reinhold Niebuhr described in his rendition of an evangelical Easter service conducted, as was not uncommon, in a movie theatre:
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I thought religion was a window into heaven, into another world of power, glory and intensity, to the contemplation of divine beauty. When I got religion, I never imagined this flat, dull evangelicalism.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
it seems they spent too much money on the pastor, his son and four daughters. I dunno how many rolls royces they had though..
Right, they squander the money on the things of this life that have no eternal value. IIRC, that welcome center in the pix above is newly built and perhaps got into MORE debt over that. But they sold property, the article stated for $55M and they are still in major debt.
I didn’t complete the article. Did it say if that property is for sale?
The Dutch Reformed Church remained the largest church body in the Netherlands until the middle of the 20th century, when it was overtaken by the Roman Catholic Church.
The rapid secularization of the Netherlands in the 1960s dramatically reduced participation in the mainstream Protestant church.
Exactly — but most of those who do veer, don’t intend to do so —> for example, here the Dutch Reformed thought that their austerity and stripped down places of worship were correct, but that was one extreme. This led to the other extreme — namely that of over-indulgence.
But there is nothing new under the sun. Saddleback and the Crystal Cathedral, Willow Creek and all the other evangelical megachurches that have had their time in the sun sell the same product: mind-power through talk-magic, which in secular packaging is just what all the innumerable therapies and self-help programmes on the market promise
Twelve-step programmes, beginning with Alcoholics Anonymous, appropriated the conversion scenario of revivalism, eliminating references to Jesus in favour of appeals to a generic "higher power". Later self-help programmes and therapies dispensed with supernatural intermediaries altogether. Learning the right tricks and gimmicks, thinking the right thoughts and acquiring the proper attitudes would directly, by a law of nature, make good things happen for you
Schuller, Warren and other new-style evangelical preachers, who focus on this-worldly improvement rather than otherworldly salvation, have not sold out Christianity in favour of secular self-help. They have simply reappropriated those bits of evangelical Christianity that cycled through the secularisation process and emerged as therapies, having in the process acquired the veneer of science.
Back to ‘man’ again. Their way instead of God’s Way. It’s the same old thing, just change the names. Deception comes in when The Word is allowed out.
God’s Word/His Way never changes. His Church never changes.
His church is His Body and each member of His Body has the Holy Spirit. They are the ‘temple/church’ of the Holy Spirit.
So churches can and will go bankrupt - but HIS CHURCH never will. He doesn’t live in buildings but in HIS children.
It looks a little bit like a church. Not like that $100-million cement plant Roger Dodger built.
Schuller has those gigantic old-man ears, but a teeny little pointed nose. I have always thought he must have had surgery on his nose.
Maybe some Muslims will buy the buildings and start another mosque.
I hope and pray that in all of the thousands that have passed through this place’s doors, there were some who were comfported, some who were healed and some who did find FAITH.
I always thought Dr. Schuller was a very good man. He gave an uplifting, forgiving and positive interpretation of Christianity that enabled a lot of people to drag themselves out of depression and negativity. In this way, he was totally unlike the current lords of the mainline Protestant churches, who are really liberal politicians with a pulpit. In his heyday, Sculler attracted tens of thousands to Christianity. But, then again, unlike the Guardian and many of his critics (apparently) the man had human faults.
So I suppose the same must be said about Westminster Abbey, St. Peter’s, the Duomo in Milan and St. Isaac’s in St. Petersburg — all massive megalith wastes of money that could have been better spent elsewhere. Sorry, i see them the same way I see the Crystal Cathedral - a building created by man to glorify God with soaring spires, grand internal spaces and architectural artwork telling us humans that there are better things that the mundane to worship and aspire to.
CC
The Crystal Cathedral was the perfect building for this goofiness: Gaudy, transparent, and bankrupt.
In some Chrsitian communities, showing off wealth is associated with being in "God's favor." Opulent ministers are seen as "credible" since it's difficult to argue with success, especially if it (supposedly) comes from God.
Protestants seem to conveniently "forget" or choose to ingore "socialist" parts of the New Testament speak negatively of the rich.
It really sasy a lot about these self-rigtheous sects of the Deformation that, on the one hand, stripped churches of their artistic decor dedicated to God, and turned their "churches" into naked rooms, while going to the other extreme to embellish their own homes and lives with weath and opulance.
As Fr. George observed in a in a homily, in a small Greek Orthodox church in Lynchburg, Va.: "God gives in abundance and we give him only crumbs."
Lutheran cathedral in Iceland
A picture is worth a thousand words.
compared to the Roman Catholic Basiclica in St. Louis, Missouri
or this cathedral in Moscow, Russia.
George Whitefield launched the Great Awakening from fields and cow pastures.
Why do they wear gowns? Are they affiliated with some denomination or is this their own creation?
My understanding is, Reformed Church in America.
A gown is not an unknown or unusual thing, except in American evangelicalism.
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