I've had this idea bouncing around in the back of my head for a few years for an idea to use technology to reimagine churches into "micro churches". I feel like with communication such as it is, you could turn churches back into what they once were 2000 years ago, small gatherings of a small number of people (10-30) in an informal space (coffee shop, home) for church. It was foster stronger sense of community, and would avoid 85% of the cost of a traditional church (assuming you still gave 10% as alms). Not something I've ever built, just something I've had knocking around back there. Someone else is welcome to take the idea and make something of it.
I grew up going to a lot of 'home churches', as they're very common in Evangelical/Pentecostal circles. And even in bigger evangelical churches there is still a strong focus on these 'micro gatherings'.
these bigger churches often treat the Sundays as the 'evangelism' meetings (simple sermons, a lot of often high-quality entertainment, etc.), and then have the more in-depth bible study and interpersonal connecting in the weekday 'small groups'. These are usually in someone's house, and while they have a 'leader' the evening is usually taken care of by a different person in the group each time. It's in these house meetings that people often share more personal things and make their deeper friendships.
It's a very nice and very successful model, and sometimes I wish the 'atheism 2.0' attempts would take their inspiration more from these evangelical movements rather than more 'established' religions and religious practices.
Actually, exactly that concept has actually been quickly growing in popularity for quite a few years now, it's especially been successful in developing countries like India and China. Small, highly reproducible groups which simply revolve around the core concepts of the gospel. Starfish vs. Spider, etc.
A few years ago, our small church here in Berlin moved from a model where we were paying thousands in rent for a "meeting space" to simply meeting in a living room and sharing our lives. It's been a wonderful change which has really been great, not only (but also) financially.
BTW, an influential book in that regard is particularly Neil Cole's "Organic Church".
In China it's out of necessity and safety, but the side benefit is that these groups become more tightly knit. I worked amongst many of the 'house churches' when I was in China. I wasn't a direct part of them, but the school I worked at had a huge underground of this type of thing. It made our IT security a bit more paranoid because from time to time we'd have government folks 'inspecting' this place far for frequently than at other schools in China in which I had worked. But that's another discussion..
I've heard that the Chinese governments attitude towards Christianity is somewhat bi-polar. In the East they discourage and harass Christians, but in the West they openly encourage Christianity, to the point of paying the salaries of missionaries (as a way to counter the Muslim communities). Is that true?
I've heard there is an established church that is legal and approved by the government, but the government closely monitors them to ensure they aren't teaching anything that's threatening to the Party.
> I've heard there is an established church that is legal and approved by the government, but the government closely monitors them to ensure they aren't teaching anything that's threatening to the Party.
There's actually two sets of government-controlled Christian religious organizations (one Catholic and one Protestant). (Similarly, there is a government controlled Islamic organization.)
When I was living in NYC, a friend of mine took me to such christian gatherings (about 10 people meeting at somebody's place). I'm an atheist, but I thought it was a very interesting experience. We were discussing various topics, sometimes there were special guests and so on...
I've been involved with a number non-religious attempts to set up similar 'small groups', and people loved these things. We'd pick similar topics, but just keep the discussion from being overtly religious (while respecting those who were religious).
the most common feedback was "I've always been looking for a group where I could have meaningful conversations about 'bigger' things in life, or more personal things.", and people would often keep returning.
I'm probably going to start something similar in Berlin in a month or so. It's really fun, and a great way to make friends.
> ...keep the discussion from being overtly religious (while respecting those who were religious).
I generally don't feel respected when people ask me to leave part of my identity and lifestyle at the door. I understand the aversion to fiery sermons (I'm not a huge fan either), but asking people to not be overtly themselves can be very exclusionary, especially if you are shooting for inclusiveness and authenticity.
But trying to have meaningful relationships is a great thing. It's certainly harder than it looks. Good luck!
I should've probably phrased it differently. 'Keep the discussion from fiery sermons' would have been a more accurate way to put it. Religious people were generally free to talk about their faith, and this was only 'discouraged' if they'd go so far down that road that nobody else could identify in any way. That almost never happened though. In fact, one of the organizers was a conservative evangelical Christian.
I've had similar thoughts, but add another buzzword: hyperlocal. So far, nothing beat shared geography for building communities.
Then, again, you mention "communication such as it is", which could alleviate some of that problem. But, for whatever reason, small church communities don't tend to use electronic communication much. It tends to be very face-to-face or speaker-to-audience these days. A microchurch (well, any healthy church) needs safe electronic places to have peer-to-peer and peer-to-trusted-friends communication.
And by safe, I mean medical records, bank balance, and legal advice safe. Despite the article in The Guardian (if coffee-induced anxiety is your biggest problem...), lots of real spiritual needs happen around very important but sensitive topics that any wise person would be discrete about: sex (in and out of marriage), marriage crisis, unplanned pregnancies, money, addiction, physical health, mental health, fertility problems, problems with coworkers, and the list goes on. Right now, electronically, the only options are to say nothing to nobody or post this sort of information on facebook or something similar.
So I still circle back to "hyperlocal" for now. People need a lot of courage and (usually) a lot of quality time to get to the point where they'll let down their guards and be honest. I'm not sure how to accomplish that unless everyone lives in the same neighborhood.
But in general, churches haven't scaled well. It's actually a serious issue that most people aren't thinking about. Microchurches might be one solution to the problem.
I hadn't thought about the idea of communication security, but you are right, with the things you discuss in church, you would definitely need to consider that. I think you are right that these churches would also need to be "hyperlocal". A lot of that could be handled by Facebook with those "I'm having trouble, can you come over so we can talk" comments, with the meat of the discussion handled in person.
You know, there have been points where I have wanted to go to alcoholics anonymous...not because of any particular problem with alcohol, but because I want to tell people the truth when they ask 'how are you?' I crave being able to really vent.
It's modeled after AA, but has a broader focus. I've been to meetings where people talk about struggles with problems like eating disorders, infidelity, anger issues, you name it. Even problems people might be surprised about like people-pleasing, perfectionism, and low self-esteem.
Like AA, it's a safe place to share (or not) what's going on.
...but good churches generally foster that sort of authenticity within smaller groups. One of the churches mentioned in the article has what they call "D-Groups" (https://www.c3sv.com/d-groups). The names for these sorts of groups vary, but good ones combine spiritual teaching, prayer, and very authentic friendship. Joining one of these groups would make that sort of sharing a more permanent fixture in your life.
Not sure where you are in the world, or where you are in life, but if you are looking for a secular answer to your dilemma, I would recommend looking into professional therapy sessions. While venting to others is a relief valve for life, working with someone who can help you restructure your thoughts and emotions so that that level of tension never arises is truly invaluable. I've found that working things out in private often then helps one to better handle group situations, such that you can get the camaraderie or acceptance feeling you truly crave out of those public interactions.
I believe its just a matter of time until churches will lose their 501c3 tax exempt statuses for one or more reasons. Once donations to churches are no longer tax deductible I foresee the big church building owned by the org going away and "churches" just gathering in public spaces or people's homes. It makes the most sense from all sides.
Why are church donations paying for a building that often remains mostly empty most of the time (I know, not all and not always as some churches try to keep their doors open and share the building with others) to heat it, upkeep it, take away land/property taxes from the local government/community? Those saved upkeep expenses could go directly into helping the poor and those in need.
Scrap ten buildings and get one, keep it open 24/7 and make it a shelter and soup kitchen. (But too many church goers/members treat "their church" like a country club or Malibu beach side home owners... "I don't want to mix let alone see those 'dirty poor rascals'".)
> Why are church donations paying for a building that often remains mostly empty most of the time...
Do you have any numbers for that? All the churches I know have activities and meetings all through the week, though not necessarily in the main sanctuary.
As for tax exemption, churches routinely do other charitable work, including things that would be called social work in other circumstances. In general, doing work the government would otherwise be responsible for qualifies a group for tax exempt status, even if with a different classification.
I suspect that if the religious tax exemption were revoked, the structure of giving would change, but churches themselves would stay more or less the way they are. After all, they predate the United States, its tax code, or the 16th Amendment to the Constitution.
I would imagine the majority of people tithing do not exceed their standard deduction and therefore don't include their donations on their tax return anyway.
I would imagine that the majority of financial support though comes from a minority, which probably make enough to exceed their standard deduction even without tithing (especially for the "country club" type churches).
$12400 is not difficult hit exceed for a married couple with state and local income or sales taxes, property taxes, mortgage interest, student loan interest?, medical and dental expenses, and charitable contributions.
Also, if churches have to pay property taxes I think many will ditch the building.
If you are looking for a more traditional model, then leaving out the 10% alms/tithe is pretty sensible. This only seems to be a fairly recent thing and not one really backed by any biblical teaching (there are no mentions of tithing for Christians in the bible).
Right. 10% is actually a low bar. Jesus was basically couch surfing. He had high praise for what would seem like absurd giving to us. He told a rich man to liquidate his life and donate the money. The early church would sell real estate to pay each others' bills.
Even in the old testament, tithes were more like 23% though they included taxes to support government. But there were additional social welfare rules on top of that, like not harvesting all of your grain so the poor could take the rest.
The percentage notion is pretty dangerous in my opinion. Even in old testament times, there was no fixed percentage. How much did a carpenter tithe? How much did a widow tithe?
The teaching I have seen at churches in San Francisco (not all churches mind you - I have only been to 3, and one of them didn't do this) was teaching this absolute lie that all people should be giving God (by which they meant the church) money, and that by giving money to the church, God would repay them with more. It isn't biblical, and it is really not helping with the huge homelessness problem in the city.
Anyone going to a church that is teaching this should be doing their own research, and then challenging the teaching at their church.
I used the term "low bar" in an opaque way. If the question is, "How much do I have to give?" then the answer is "You're asking the wrong question."
Jesus talks about money in Luke 12, and his opinions (on inheritance and accumulation of wealth) would run counter to God-loves-rich-people theology. Heck, they probably run counter to what most Americans would consider common sense.
Having visited a church in SF which seemed pretty similar to the ones in the article, the thing I found absolutely disgusting was the teaching that everyone should be giving money to the church. There were homeless people coming to church being told that giving up a minimum of 10% of what little they had would be the right thing to do. These are the people that the church should be supporting, not robbing.
The bible talks about cheerful giving for ministry. The notion that all people should be on the giving end of the bargain is nonsense. The city has a huge homelessness problem, and yet as a visitor, my perception of the churches was that they were just making things worse.
From a definition point of view that is not a tithe. A tithe is a legal principle described in OT law. If I go to a church and give someone money, then that doesn't make it a tithe. Before the law was given there was the tithe from Abraham to Melchizadek, but this was a once off tithe on the spoils of war, which is also very different to what churches seem to be teaching.
In the Acts passage, everyone shared everything they had with everyone else - the money was being distributed to people who needed it. This means that some people ended up gaining possessions and some ended up losing possessions. Viewing it as percentages doesn't really make much sense - it is just lots of people sharing what they have with each other. If I choose to combine my bank account with my wife's, then you probably wouldn't say that I gave away 100% of my money.
> In the Acts passage, everyone shared everything they had with everyone else - the money was being distributed to people who needed it.
Actually, in that passage from Acts, everyone who had property was commanded to sell all of it, and to lay all of the proceeds at the foot of the apostles, who would determine how to use it for the good of the community.
Right, and then they distributed it among the people so they all had enough.
People with property sold it. People without property didn't sell it (because they didn't have any to sell). The apostles took the money and gave it to those in need. It wasn't a black hole of money where the apostles took it and used it to pay rent on a church building that people were encouraged to visit, the distribution was to people to meet their needs.
Without having been there, I imagine that the way this played out was that everyone gave everything they had, then the apostles worked out what the needs of everyone were, and then divided things up so everyone's needs were met. If people tried to hold something back then this just makes the practical matter of dividing things up much harder (instead of being able to say "each family gets N things plus M things per child", they need to take into account whether the family already has stuff and reduce N and M to compensate). Yes, the sin of Ananias and Sapphira was not that they made logistics difficult, but I do believe that what they wanted to be able to do was to just do a simple job of just distributing things fairly and transparently, and people holding things back made that impossible.
Giving money to a church makes a lot of sense, and is clearly biblical. Using that money wisely also makes lots of sense and is biblical. Churches that invest this money in expensive mixing desks or outrageous rent when there are people in their congregation who don't even have a place to sleep are not making good use of the money they are being given.
My opinion is that if a church has a regular person in their congregation who is lacking food and shelter, and the church is collecting money from people to spend on things like sound desks and coffee machines, then that church is stealing. People who give money to a church are giving it with the expectation that it be used in a way which is in line with biblical principles, and to be spending it on luxuries for the affluent when there is such obvious need is unconscionable.
The problem with targeting "hipsters" (a term I dislike, btw) is that after a while they inevitably move on to the next new thing. And I don't think that religious belief systems are immune. A few years ago the new thing was Kabala, and before that western Buddhism.
I don't know, do hipsters go back to drinking crappy coffee? I think broad interests change with new experience. I don't know about community in Buddhism or Kabala, but in Christianity, once you experience healthy, constructive, no-judging, be-yourself community with other Christians, your tastes change. Going back to normal friendships is a little like getting used to great coffee then switching to instant coffee.
It's not offensive so much as you're generalising from personal experience to assert that Christian friendships are somehow qualitatively different from friendships as found in the Kabbalistic or Western Buddhist traditions, which is clearly a ridiculous thing to say.
If "hipster" engagement with faith is superficial or driven by fashion trends, there's nothing special they'll find in Christianity as compared to any other faith structure that will make the experience of engaging with that faith any less ephemeral or inauthentic.
I don't think all Christians are in "healthy, constructive, no-judging, be-yourself communities", and it sounds like you haven't had any exposure to one of those. I mentioned calling people on their crap in another post, and I've called Christian friends out for bigotry before. Part of a constructive relationship involves correcting people in a healthy and safe environment.
It's certainly not biblical to hate or judge anyone. That also means I can't hate or judge people for their hateful or judgmental attitudes. But it's not worth diving into a particular community steeped in those problems either.
Or where I live, there are a few "pretty" churches where it's more of a meat market than a fellowship or worship organization. They advertise on the radio and hold lots of singles mixers. Big beautiful campus near the lake. Some pastor must be doing pretty well in the eyes of his CPA.
> I don't know about community in Buddhism or Kabala, but in Christianity, once you experience healthy, constructive, no-judging, be-yourself community with other Christians, your tastes change.
Its generally an error to make general statements in the second person and the indefinite sense of the present tense based on experience in the first person past.
Further, I don't see why one would particularly expect "hipster churches" to feature "healthy, constructive, no-judging, be-yourself community with other Christians". Certainly, there are some Christian communities that feature that, and plenty of Christian communities that don't (particularly the "no-judging, be-yourself" parts.)
Isn't that true with all religious groups? You feel much closer with people you share your secrets. Wasn't that the one core principle behind the instant love study that was in the front page few weeks ago?
I missed the instant love study... do you have a link?
> Isn't that true with all religious groups?
I don't think so. I've been to Christian churches that were more like giant groups of acquaintances than places for growing real friendships. I would say that's missing the point of church, but I'll stay away from theology on here.
> You feel much closer with people you share your secrets.
That's a good point. But the feelings aren't the main point of the friendships I'm talking about. The good ones are certainly nice, but sometimes being a good friend feels terrible (calling someone on his crap, for example). Meaning, even if you could engineer the feelings, you wouldn't get the whole effect.
> I don't think so. I've been to Christian churches that were more like giant groups of acquaintances than places for growing real friendships. I would say that's missing the point of church, but I'll stay away from theology on here.
Well I feel that you can still have this bonding effect in any like-minded,tight-knit group, religious or not. Religion itself doesn't have any effect in that.
>“Have you ever looked at the ingredients in a McRib? What are pig innards?” “You don’t want to know!” called out a scientist in the second row, to rippling laughter.
Surprisingly the only pork product is actually pork shoulder AKA pork picnic [1]. The preservatives are the problem.
The Sunday Assembly is a godless congregation that celebrates life. Our motto: live better, help often, wonder more. Our mission: to help everyone find and fulfill their full potential. Our vision: a godless congregation in every town, city and village that wants one.
It's fun to read an article written from a somewhat "outsider" perspective (the descriptions of bands and music are particularly amusing). I'd also be interested in reading a more comprehensive insider-perspective study of churches in SF and the Bay Area. In particular, I'd love to see a deeper survey of the latent conservatism of many "hipster" or "emergent" churches here, once you scratch deeper than the surface. People get squeamish quickly if you delve too far into questions of homosexuality, past the "don't focus on it" attitude described in the article.
There's also a surprisingly large "God called us to live in this dark city of sin" contingent, which I find sad: if you can't appreciate a place like San Francisco, you're only half alive: surely the antithesis of the promise of Christianity.
The whole thing seem really strange to me, almost like a parody. In the technology center of the world secular community movements, which SF used to be famous for, are being replaced by churches and networking events. Why not get together and start a study circle instead, it seems a lot more apt for the place.
I've noticed that how churches look is really influenced by land prices and local zoning laws.
In places where people have money compared to the cost of real-estate (like Texas), you see giant superchurches. In places where real-estate is relatively expensive, churches tend to be smaller since large auditoriums are basically out of the picture.
Though especially in dense areas, I've also seen what I call "church franchises"; one "church" with maybe half-a-dozen locations spread across a metroplex. To different degrees, the pastoral staff and congregation will float around to different locations from week to week. It's a way to grow without having to make absurd capital expenditures.
If church has a good wifi and some tables, I am willing to give it a try, instead of coffee shop. I promise to keep video calls at minimum during mass :-)
Now bit more seriously. I could easily imagine some sort of two week 'hacker camp' organized by church. It works quite well for musicians, artist and other groups.
Traditional and contemporary (meaning full of baby boomers) churches tend to have many outlets for the artistically-inclined. I'm guessing that's because the church experience for them revolves around mass media and therefore performance: bands, choirs, sermons, and Bible studies (and accompanying books).
I think most faith groups fail to identify creative-but-not-artistic types (makers, hackers, builders, etc.) as having a lot of skills and passion to contribute. It's certainly not coincidental that both the tech-oriented (and more broadly, male) portions of American society are underrepresented and probably under-served.
How do people who are (probably) scientific-minded reconcile themselves with this sort of thing? I love community, and I'm actually fine with all the theological stuff. But evangelical zealotry like point 5 ("All people are lost and need a new birth through Christ.") turns me off strongly, and I hope it doesn't infuse people in the tech industry, like it has in Middle America.
> How do people who are (probably) scientific-minded reconcile themselves with this sort of thing?
There's very little in that "statement of belief" that is even within the domain of empirically-explorable fact, so I don't see what being "scientific-minded" has to do with it, unless by that you mean something beyond using science to explore questions within its domain like the epistemological view that anything outside of the domain of science is to be rejected as a valid matter of belief.
