Shopping mall churches - a defense against intimidation

Pergamum · #1 (**permalink**) 04-30-2008, 10:01 AM

Shopping Mall Churches - Indonesia Matters

“Indonesians seek salvation in shops”:

Shopping malls in West Java are home to a growing number of Christian congregations. There are 10 in this mall alone.

Few of them want to talk publicly about why they are here, but off the record they admit it comes down to intimidation by Muslim groups.

According to Church groups more than 100 churches have faced attack or intimidation in the past two years.

Pilgrim Standard · #2 (**permalink**) 04-30-2008, 10:46 AM

In the US it is becoming the opposite. Not churches in the shopping malls but Shopping malls in the churches.
Megachurches As Minitowns - New York Times

Quote:

Southeast Christian Church here, where pumping iron and praising the Lord go hand and hand. Amenities at the gym include 16 basketball courts and a Cybex health club, free to churchgoers, where the music is Christian...

It is possible to eat, shop, go to school, bank, work out, scale a rock-climbing wall and pray there, all without leaving the grounds.
In Glendale, Ariz., the 12,000-member Community Church of Joy, which has a school, conference center, bookstore and mortuary on its 187-acre property, has embarked on a $100 million campaign to build a housing development, a hotel, convention center, skate park and water-slide park, transforming itself into what Dr. Walt Kallestad, the senior pastor, calls a ''destination center.'' ...

The churches have even become alternative employers. At the Brentwood Baptist Church in Houston, a McDonald's will open this month, complete with a drive-in window and small golden arches. Part of its goal is to create jobs for young people and the elderly, while offering a predominantly middle-class black congregation another reason to linger on church grounds....

The church was deliberately designed like a mall. (The sanctuary is the anchor tenant.) Hallways 20 feet wide with curves enhance ''people flow,'' said Jack Coffee, a church elder and chairman of the building committee. Preschoolers frolic at a Disneyesque play land, with mazes. There is an education wing for Bible classes, a concert-hall-size atrium with glass elevators, crisscrossing escalators and giant monitors that itemize the day's offerings: meetings to help smokers quit, a cross-trainers minimarathon and pat the Bible classes for 6-month-olds....

Southeast Christian churchgoers speak of a 22,000-person family, and visitors are regaled with statistics: the coffeepot that serves 5,000 cups an hour, the 403 toilets. Southeast's size has spawned the invention of the Greenlee Communion Dispensing Machine, designed by Wilfred Greenlee, 79, a congregant. It can fill 40 communion cups in 2 seconds...

For Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Tex., attracting young congregants, and keeping them, has helped it grow from 30 families to 20,000 members in a dozen years. Fellowship offers a 40,000-square-foot youth center with a climbing wall and video arcade and is creating a lake to encourage father-son bass fishing...

Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Tex., has a youth center so elaborate that some have called it Preston World: 15 ball fields, a 1950's-style diner and a fitness center, as well as classrooms and a 7,000-seat sanctuary. It is adding a $19 million school, coffee shop, food court, student ministry center, youth building, an outdoor prayer walk, a chapel and an indoor commons, modeled on the idea of Main Street. ''We're not a large church,'' said Mike Basta, the executive pastor. ''We're a small town.''...

Brentwood Baptist in Houston also offers a full range of family options, often based on a political and social agenda. Besides its choir and Bible-study classes, it has housing for AIDS patients and a credit union...

Not incidentally, it gives the 2,000 or so Brentwood congregants who flock to church for more than 80 activities each evening -- like children's theater and adult computer classes -- an excuse to stick around. ''If you have to go home for dinner, you don't come back out,'' Pastor Ratliff said, referring in part to the city's vast commutes...

Even the water park, which will be part of an Olympic-size aquatic center, will have a Christian theme, with laser shows depicting Jonah and the whale and David and Goliath...

Sadly it seems that instead of bringing the Church to the world there is a treand in the US of bringing the world into the church.

Leslie · #3 (**permalink**) 05-06-2008, 08:00 PM

Why are shopping malls a defense against intimidation? Is it a matter of taking advantage of the mall security services or is it a matter of m reluctance to do anything violent in such a setting? Might there also be the factor of allowing visitors to access the church without being observed as walking toward a separate building? Please explain the cultural factors a bit more.

Pergamum · #4 (**permalink**) 05-06-2008, 09:01 PM

The Indo gov';t has a law that makes community approval a prerequisite before a house of worship can be built.

I forget the details but something like 60 signatures of church members must be submitted to local govt' as well as signatures of 100 neighbors that say that they do not object to this house of worship.

How many of the churches on the PB would be able to do this?

In a Mslm majority country this is even harder, except in cities and more tolerant areas where large numbers congregate and some level of anonymity and tolerance is fostered.

This law is applied unevenly and most mosques do not pass this law either but radical Islm groups make it a "ministry" to close churches and demand presentation of many churches "letter of permsision" and if one cannot be produced, demonstrations and threats result until the church closed. Over a 100 churches in West Java has been attacked or intimidated in some way just in the past two years.

See this link for more:

Bigotry in Bandung - Indonesia Matters

Batak Church Attack - Indonesia Matters

Ramadan Fasting - Indonesia Matters

Bethel Church, Bandung - Indonesia Matters

Bandung Church Attack - Indonesia Matters

West Java’s Tolerance Problem - Indonesia Matters

Quickened · #5 (**permalink**) 05-06-2008, 09:05 PM

Ben,

That really makes me wonder how many of those people actually go to church for God.

Pergamum · #6 (**permalink**) 05-06-2008, 09:40 PM

?

What do you mean?

Quickened · #7 (**permalink**) 05-06-2008, 09:56 PM

Well i guess if you were referencing my post then i will elaborate a bit more.

When i read

Quote:

where pumping iron and praising the Lord go hand and hand. Amenities at the gym include 16 basketball courts and a Cybex health club

I wonder to myself why those things are there. I think of people going to church specifically for those reasons. Because church was made "attractive" to them by including these things.

I guess it just triggers a domino effect in my mind where i see people that go to church for networking, or for one of these trendy little additions as opposed to learning about God, or hearing his word, or singing songs to the Lord. Its all too often that things like this are the highlight of the church instead of the preaching, teaching, etc.

I guess it just saddens me a bit.

We are so fortunate in our country to be able to pick from a mulitude of churches where God's word is preached. Yet we think we need to entice people with an olympic size water center.

Its amazing how we soil worship services by trying to cater to the ungodly.

I guess i didnt elaborate because i didnt want to derail the thread. Apologies brother

Backwoods Presbyterian · #8 (**permalink**) 05-06-2008, 10:44 PM

Not to mention how little I bet those churches spend on missions (not just worldwide but locally).

JonathanHunt · #9 (**permalink**) 05-07-2008, 06:09 AM

Malls are the refuge of the saints
When storms of sharp distress invade

Pergamum · #10 (**permalink**) 05-07-2008, 07:21 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Quickened

Well i guess if you were referencing my post then i will elaborate a bit more.

When i read

Quote:

where pumping iron and praising the Lord go hand and hand. Amenities at the gym include 16 basketball courts and a Cybex health club

I wonder to myself why those things are there. I think of people going to church specifically for those reasons. Because church was made "attractive" to them by including these things.

I guess it just triggers a domino effect in my mind where i see people that go to church for networking, or for one of these trendy little additions as opposed to learning about God, or hearing his word, or singing songs to the Lord. Its all too often that things like this are the highlight of the church instead of the preaching, teaching, etc.

I guess it just saddens me a bit.

We are so fortunate in our country to be able to pick from a mulitude of churches where God's word is preached. Yet we think we need to entice people with an olympic size water center.

Its amazing how we soil worship services by trying to cater to the ungodly.

I guess i didnt elaborate because i didnt want to derail the thread. Apologies brother

I can guarantee that these believers are not meeting in malls to pump iron or go swimming.