Megachurch World.com: The Ron and Hope Carpenter Case

My Calvin Seminary Story

I began teaching at Calvin Theological Seminary in 2000--the first full-time woman professor in the school's 125-year history. In 2003, less than 3 months after Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. was installed as the new president, I was, without warning, removed from tenure track and given a terminal appointment. I have repeatedly asked that all the evidence be opened only to be blocked by a dishonest cover-up. When independent mediators were retained by the seminary board in 2005, they called for "retroactive pay to 2003," among other things. That report was buried. I finished my second terminal appointment on August 31, 2006, and shortly thereafter published my story at www.ruthtucker.net.

Leith Anderson on Walmart

Wal-Marts are huge stores with lots of employees. . . . Wal-Mart gives us lots of choices—more than any of the little stores around. Wal-Mart offers excellence. Mal-Mart is user friendly and consumer sensitive. . . . We need Wal-Mart churches: churches that will serve regional rural markets; churches that are friendly, carry lots of programs, are customer-driven rather than institution-driven; churches that transcend the deep traditions of small communities and give permission to worship without alienating family histories and relationships. [A Church for the 21st Century, (Bethany House, 1992), 58-60.]

Garrison Keillor's Turquois Temple

The Lake Wobegon megachurch blues: “Church was half full and restless. Pastor Ingqvist’s Lenten sermons have gotten longer. Val Tollefson has been after him to liven up his preaching. Sunday morning before church, Val tunes into “Power for Tomorrow” on TV from the Turquoise Temple in Anaheim, and there is a gleam in Reverend La Coste’s eye that Val wishes Pastor Ingqvist would emulate and also use more dramatic inflection, rising, falling inflection, cry out sometimes, use long pauses to give solemnity to the sermon.” [Keillor, Leaving Home (Penguin, 1987), 90.]

Confessions of Samuel Rima

“I personally experienced the misery of mega-church mania when I fell under its intoxicating influence during the late 1980’s while serving as a church planter in southern California. . . . In all honesty, I began my church planting effort with nothing but the most spiritually altruistic of intentions. I did not set out intending to build the next Crystal Cathedral or Willow Creek. My sole desire was, by God’s grace, to establish a foothold for the kingdom amid the rapidly growing area of southern California to which I had been assigned. . . . As our little church began to grow, even beyond my expectations, my initial standards for ministry success were no longer sufficient. . . . I began to believe that if only I did the right things, applied the proper techniques, and raised enough money I could simply manufacture church growth, just like a mortgage banker increases his or her market share. . . . I was experiencing the onset of full-blown mega-church mania and I was growing increasingly miserable in ministry.”

Eugene Peterson on Ministry Career Ladder

WORLD-CLASS MEGACHURCHES

American churches are small in comparison to the world’s granddaddys of megachurches, some claiming membership into the hundreds of thousands—though numbers sometimes appear to be rounded off to the nearest ten thousand. And some statistics on churches change almost overnight. “Churches which had an attendance of 300,000 a decade ago, such as ‘Ondas del Luz y Amor’ in Buenos Aires, now have ‘only’ 70,000.” And some numbers are over-stated. “Yonggi Cho’s church in Seoul claims a membership of 773,000, but an attendance of ‘only’ 253,000 in the main church and most important satellites.” This is the largest church in the world with three tying for second place—ones in Abidjan, Ivory Coast; Santiago, Chile; and Bogata, Colombia.

CHURCH GROWTH GREED

Eugene Peterson: "Some propagandists in the land are lying to us about what congregations can be. They are lying for money. They want to make us discontented with what we are doing, so we will buy a solution from them that they promise will restore virility to our impotent congregations. The profit-taking among those marketing these spiritual monkey-glands suggests that pastoral gullibility in these matters is endless. Pastors, faced with the failure of these purchased procedures, typically blame the congregation and leave it for another." [“The Jonah Syndrome,” Leadership (Summer 1990), 41.]

2007 Publication Date

Using extensive, broad-based, well-designed research, this book debunks popular myths and provides a clearer picture of the unique characteristics and influence of megachurches. The authors reveal what these churches are and are not, why they are thriving, what their members say about their experiences, and why they have a lot to teach smaller churches about the lessons they have learned. The book provides practical insights for pastors and leaders of other church organizations that can be applied to their own organizations and ministries. Dr. Scott Thumma (West Hartford, CT) is a researcher in the Hartford Institute for Religion Research and a faculty member of the Hartford Seminary. Dave Travis (Snellville, GA) is the Executive Vice President of Leadership Network.

Ruth Tucker's Reflections

If my great-granddaughter—yet to be born—were to follow in my footsteps as a church historian and look back in the year 2100 on the landscape of North American Christianity as it proudly pampers and grooms itself today, she would surely see a lot of glitz. She would recognize it as a multi-billion dollar enterprise—part of the world’s largest and well-financed religion. She would discover large suburban campuses that are home to churches the size of some denominations, and she would find literature and music and videos—too plentiful to scan—that tell the story of this gospel of prosperity. Such a landscape was unimaginable a hundred years ago in the world of my grandmother. There was very little glamor—at least in religion. This was an era before Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson and the fictional Elmer Gantry. The biggest event that a 1907 version of Christianity Today might have featured would have been the strange goings-on in a little left-behind church in Los Angeles. Here William Seymour, a largely self-educated black preacher, was praying with his head under a shoebox, and lots of folks, white and black alike, were finding God. There was no glitz. This Azusa Street Revival marked the beginning of the twentieth-century Pentecostal-Charismatic movement—a movement that is a leader in the competitive corporate Christian world of prosperity and glitz.

Rev. Johnnie Colemon

The Rev. JOHNNIE COLEMON, founder of Christ Universal Temple in Chicago, has been a leading advocate of prosperity and positive thinking for over 40 years. Cited for sermons of great emotional depth, Dr. Colemon began her ministry with five family members in 1956 and today leads a congregation of more than 12,000 members, one of the largest religious institutions in Chicago. Experts say her message of self-esteem and confidence speaks to a "yearning" for a piece of the American Dream that lies within the hearts of her listeners. "Her lessons and `affirmations of faith' have produced African-American giants," one respondent said.

American Religion (From Tucker, LEFT BEHIND, p. 42)

Today . . . mega-church marketing has spread around the world. But a century ago that perspective was thought by some to be uniquely American. Asia, on the other hand, especially in matters of religion, had been spared such a materialist, numbers-oriented religious mentality. That was the view of Kanzo Uchimura, a brilliant Japanese church leader and social critic of western culture: "Americans themselves know all too well that their genius in not in religion. . . . Americans are great people; there is no doubt about that. They are great in building cities and railroads. . . . Americans too are great inventors. They invented or perfected telegraphs, telephones, talking and hearing machines, automobiles. . . poison gasses. . . . They are great in democracy. . . . Needless to say, they are great in money. . . . They first make money before they undertake any serious work. . . . Americans are great in all these things and much else; but not in Religion. . . . Americans must count religion in order to see or show its value. . . . To them big churches are successful churches. . . . To win the greatest number of converts with the least expense is their constant endeavour. . . . Numbers, numbers, oh, how they value numbers! . . . Mankind goes down to America to learn how to live the earthly life; but to live the heavenly life, they go to some other people." [Kanzo Uchimura, “Can Americans Teach Japanese in Religion?,” Japan Christian Intelligencer, 1 (1926), 357-61, cited in Walls, “The American Dimension,”1- 2.]

Megachurch World.com

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

The Ron and Hope Carpenter Case

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Ruth A. Tucker, Ph.D.

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