WYSIYWG--Like the man said, "I only know what I read in the newspapers."

             But haven't you read about the Mega-Churches? I don't profess to understand the appeal, but they're out there. You can watch them on television if you don't have anything at all in the world else to do.

If I only knew what I read in the newspapers, I might think as you do, RS, but fortunately (for me and anyone whose life I touch) I don't settle for that level of knowledge about things I care about.

The appeal of most of the mega-churches isn't the polictical rigidity of the rigid religious right.... it's the way they pander to the me-me-me-me focus of today's society and use secular markerting tools and strategies to market themselves. (Most of the religious right are not in mega-churches.)

The smaller churches, were the greater percentage of USers worship, tend to focus on their own backyards-- serving the people around them in geographic proximity. The loss in membership is about the secularization of our society, not about a migration of people to the bigger or more rigidly-right churches, and about the need for older members to rethink the process of growing their memberships. Most older adults in churches inherited a society and a form of church growht based on the now-obsolete notion that you grew your chruch by bringing up your kids right as churchgoers-- all the good people went to church, didn't they??? People went to church, often, out of duty and obligation, because it was what they understood was the thing to DO.

How on earth did I get so smart. Well a lot of my smarts came to me and were developed freely long before I got involved with Church; however, that busy brain didn't run into anything stupefying or alarming once I got there. On the contrary, I find that my busy brain has MORE to think about than it had before, good tools to add to already-good tools I'd put in my tool box, and a context within which to think about them that is bigger and more challenging to my thought process that what were pretty advanced challenges, pre-Church. Maybe some of that would have come anyway, from getting older; a lot of it I am sure would have developed the day I began to call BillD my friend, because he's got a way of challenging one's thinking that is nigh onto irresistable. :~) (hi Bill)

But if watching mega-churches on TV is how you have gotten to know about them-- I watched a lot of the Anna Nicole trial stuff that concluded yesterday, and I'm not ready to consider myself a lawyer, nor a judge.

What I have written about in this thread, though, comes from living inside the structures I'm talking about, and from an uunderstanding of what-all they involve.

My main point just has been that people who are already paying a boatload of taxes should not be taxed AGAIN on the money they donate to a church for that church's work. They are the very same people who would have to raise the funds to pay the taxes on their donations. The church itself isn't "making" money-- it's just a place where people assemble and an organizational structure for the time, talents, and resources of those worshipping people and the ways they want to serve their communities.

In the churches so many people are mad at-- the MINORITY of organizations and the MINORITY of churchgoing folks-- their non-Sunday time may indeed go to political ends, with motivation whipped up on Sundays. A good amount of that ought to threaten their tax-exempt status. But in MOST churches where MOST of the people congregate, their non-Sunday time goes to good works either as organized formally by the church of their choice or in personal good works-- with motivation inspired by and nurtured on Sundays.

Of course, even most smart folks think churches only work on Sundays-- THAT must be why the "clergy only" parking space at our church is usually occupied, on weekdays, by hospital employees. So when my husband rushed to the adjoining ER at the hospital's request to help a family who had been passing through the area, whose son had jumped out of their moving car to leap to his death off an expressway overpass-- no chaplain to be found-- he wasn't sure where he'd be able to ditch the car. Cuz he only works on Sundays, you know. ;~)

I guess we should have put that in the paper?

~Susan