we should have something like this
Posted on 08/22/2012 2:04:50 PM PDT by marshmallow
Three miles from Disneyland there is another famous theme park, which proclaims itself as “America’s Television Church.” The Crystal Cathedral, perhaps the first mega-church in the United States, is about to undergo conversion classes so that it can finally get the cathedra and bishop it has always wanted. The Diocese of Orange, California, has purchased the thirty-one-acre property and its four buildings for $53 million, a steal even in this real estate market. Realizing that recent cathedrals built from scratch have cost upwards of $200 and $250 million on the West Coast, retrofitting sounds like a financially savvy move. However, turning this prismatic beacon of televangelism into a house of God may be easier said than done.
Does this purchase signal a new role for Catholic charity: to buy up properties of bankrupt Protestant ministries? If so, there may be some good opportunities in the future. How does the bishop encourage full, active, and conscious participation in the liturgy by purchasing one of the buildings most associated with religion as theater? Begun as an open-air service at a drive-in theater, the church was designed around Rev. Schuller’s flamboyant preaching. Associated with glitz and money, it was the site of fancy and expensive holiday celebrations including trapeze artists, live animals for Christmas, and a lavish $13 million production called Creation.
Said to be the first all-glass structure built for religious purposes, it is associated with the feel-good theology of the 1980s. How to convert a building like this and at the same time disassociate it from its founder and his theology? Crystal Cathedral Ministries was a religion about self-promotion, and, appropriately, its main buildings were designed in disparate modernist styles by three well-known architecture firms: Richard Neutra, Philip Johnson and John Burgee, and Richard Meier. Each building is a personal expression....
(Excerpt) Read more at crisismagazine.com ...
I was afraid people would notice that.
Did you post what you did to me as a safe direction to make such comment, or have you mistaken me with those whom mistake buildings for being "the church", and "the church" for being God?
Thanks for mentioning the Thorncrown Chapel, I had never heard of it before, what a beautiful building, it deserves to have won.
Boy,go play with someone else , but have your fun on FR w/o me.
No, I understood your implication perfectly fine. However, you still stated that you don’t worship God in a church building, which also implies, perhaps unintentionally, that there is no worship going on in said building.
Wrong again. I said that a church building is not something we worship in, it is something we worship with.
In other words, it is not merely a building, it is not merely a place, it is a tool we use for worshiping God. If it were just a place we worship in, then it could be any building, but because we consider God to be so important, it is important to offer our very best to God, in the same way that Abel offered his finest lamb to God. If the best we can offer is a humble shack, then that is as pleasing to God as the finest cathedral. But if we offer a humble shack not because it is our best but because we PRESUME to know that God doesn't care one way or another, then we are behaving like Cain, who offered the waste of his fields.
Now, if you're of the belief that Christians gathering in your home is the proper way to worship, then of course you would want your worship area to be clean and nice--the very best you could make it. You might want to replace that velvet painting of Elvis with a cross to help the worshipers focus on their worship. Perhaps you would run down to the Swap Meet to buy a nice roomy terrarium for the rattlesnakes. You get the idea.
It's the same as the argument about how to dress for Mass. If our best is humble attire, then God will be as pleased as if it were finery. But if we dress like slobs because we PRESUME to know that God doesn't care how we present ourselves for worship, then we are telling God that we don't give a hoot.
Of course, if a fancy cathedral or fine clothes are merely for prideful reasons, then that's really missing the point.
“Wrong again. I said that a church building is not something we worship in, it is something we worship with.”
The first half of that statement implies exactly what I said, even if you didn’t intend it. I’m not disputing your other implication, just pointing out what I though was a pretty obvious case of imprecise wording. If you had said, it’s not JUST something we worship in, but ALSO something we worship with, then you would not be making the implication that there is no worship going on inside the building. However, you didn’t do that, so the implication is there.
The former.
we should have something like this
thanks for your insights. It’s always good to hear from someone on the ground
The Crystal Cathedral is light, airy, and constructed with as little substance as possible. It's a perfect representation of Schuller's church. If that's what the Catholic Church wants to be known for, let them have at it.
The Catholic Church has had many types of masses and liturgical rites in its 2000 year history. That's why it's the universal church.
Tridentine Mass was essentially unchanged for 1000+ years.
You would not have been able to find any other type of Mass in most of the western world.
Huh? The Tridentine Mass was established by the Council of Trent in the late 1500s. The pre-1570 Mass is NOT the Tridentine Mass and there are numerous differences. The Tridentine Mass was "based" on earlier Masses, but it's not the same thing. ALL latin-rite Roman Catholic masses prior to 1570 are classified as "Pre-Tridentine Masses"
Huh?
"Outside of Rome in the period before 1570, many other liturgical rites were in use, not only in Eastern Christianity, but also in the West. Some of the Western rites, such as the Mozarabic Rite, were unrelated to the Roman Rite that Pope Pius V revised and ordered to be adopted generally. But even the areas that at one time or another had accepted the Roman rite (see, below, "Middle Ages") had soon introduced changes and additions. As a result, every ecclesiastical province and almost every diocese had its local use , such as the Use of Sarum, the Use of York and the Use of Hereford in England. In France there were strong traces of the Gallican Rite. With the exception of the relatively few places where no form of the Roman Rite had ever been adopted, the Canon of the Mass remained generally uniform, but the prayers in the "Ordo Missae", and still more the "Proprium Sanctorum" and the "Proprium de Tempore", varied widely" <<
You were saying?
"During the Middle Ages it developed into a vast number of derived rites, differing from the pure form only in unimportant details and in exuberant additions ".
It's certainly true that the Roman rite of the Catholic Church has existed for 1000+ years and you would not have been able to find any other type of Mass in most of the western world. Even many modern protestant churches base their liturgy on the Roman rite of the Catholic Church and use Latin for liturgical statements.
But "The Tridentine Mass" has no such grand history throughout 2000 years of Catholicism. It didn't exist until 1570, and it is one of dozens of types of liturgical services in the Catholic Church. It was the predominate mass of the Roman rite from roughly the early 1600s until the 1960s, true, but certainly not the exclusive Mass for the Catholic Church.
Both the Tridentine Mass and "a Woodstock Mass" would be fall under the category of "the Roman rite" and be found in the western world.
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