I was listening to the radio tonight as I drove through the rain to get my sister at work. It was a Christian radio station. I don't normally think like this but tonight when I heard this commercial on the radio I immediately started thinking about what they said and after I put everything together in my mind, I was pissed. The commercial said something to the affect of this man was planning to start a Christian production studio that would like help produce Christian media. I know that sounds fine and dandy but here is the catch...it is going to cost $150 million dollars to do all that he has planned with this studio and production stuff. That didn't make sense to me. I do think that there have been some pretty powerful sources of Christian media and I could name many bands that have impacted me and I would have to say that the NOOMA videos are the best thing out in a while but $150 million!!! I have other examples of this same thing, one from a book by Shane Claiborne. He was interning at Willow Creek in Chicago and they decided to build a massive family life center and it was going to cost a lot of money. He really turned against the church because the fact that they would spend that much money on themselves. His book really got me thinking about how Christ came and lived as a servant.
It just kills me that a group or people can spend that much money on something when there are so many other causes that it could be put to, even right here in America. So many people simply don't know about Christ. It isn't about apathy or disassociation, it is about not knowing and if someone has that kind of money then they have the tools to reach out and send people to the places, be it here or another country, and share the gospel because our world is in need of a savior and I pray that people who feel like that is the best thing to do will have their hearts broken and realize what could be done on a much larger scale with that kind of money. I pray that I stay humble and constantly attempt to reach out to any person that doesn't have Jesus in their life because it is the only way. It is the only way.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
you are right man, it seems like money is wasted on stuff like that all the time just so they can create the next big thing that makes Jesus appealable. I feel the same way about space exploration---why spend so much money studying our galaxy when it could be spent solving the many problems on our own Earth?
This is one of the reasons (among several others) that I wanted to leave FBC and why we're now visiting Crosswalk.
FBC's new campus initially had a price tag of around $38 million, I believe. I suspect it will end up being more by the time it's finished, but that's just a guess. They also got like 90% of the appraised value from PA for the existing campus, which is evidently unheard of in church sales (it's usually under 50%.) I thought they would be able to put that to good use and build something without it costing significantly more than what they got from the sale. I was wrong (and perhaps a little naive, too.)
They announced the cost ($38M) just after we'd become members there, and it's always troubled me. Some of that money would be covered by the sale of the existing campus, but much of it (more than 1/2) would not. It just seems to me that there's something fundamentally wrong in raising millions of additional dollars to spend on yourself.
Post a Comment