Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Megachurch
43,500 weekly attendance
Posted on 08/27/2013 11:53:37 AM PDT by NYer
Megachurch. Two young ladies. Both had left the Catholic Church. Both were now attending “megachurches.” We had a good chat together. I wanted to understand their reasons for why they left the Catholic Church for a megachurch.
Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Megachurch
43,500 weekly attendance
I was at the bank and somehow I got into a spiritual conversation with two Hispanic executives that worked there.
When I asked why they exchanged the Catholic Church for the megachurch, they gave me a number of reasons:
Although these two ladies didn’t articulate it explicitly to me, I could tell that they were very proud of their new churches. I could also discern in them a surprise that I am so “spiritual” and yet I am very excited about being Catholic. They assumed the “with it” people were leaving Catholicism for the bigger and better and deal.
I asked them what they miss about being Catholic. They replied with two answers:
I asked both about the Eucharist: “Don’t you miss the Eucharist?”
This question didn’t phase them one bit. “Oh we still have communion. They pass out little crackers and cups of juice. I like this better because I thought drinking from one big cup is icky. Spreads germs.”
“But in the Catholic Church,” I replied, “we believe that the Eucharist is the real Body and Blood of Jesus?”
I may as well have said, “Don’t you know that there are Martians in my back pocket.” She was unaware that the Catholic Church taught this. No idea.
This, my brothers and sisters, is the crux of the problem. These girls were raised as Catholics, but did not know about the Eucharist. They did not know that the Eucharist is God. They did not understand the Holy Eucharist is the center of the Catholic tradition.
So when they compare our ho-hum Catholic music and pedestrian sermons to snazzy well produced musical productions and highly polished bulleted sermons from handsome professional speakers…where are they going to go?
If they had believed that the Holy Eucharist is truly the Lord Jesus Christ, then they would have stayed. This is the task of the New Evangelization if there is going to be one. Can we communicate the mystery of Eucharist. If we fail in that, everyone is leaving the building.
Godspeed,
Taylor
PS: I don’t mean to suggest that having the Holy Eucharist is an excuse for bad music, bad vestments, bad architecture, and bad sermons. The Eucharist is like a precious diamond. It deserves a platinum setting…not a plastic setting. We can’t say, “Well, we have the Eucharist – so you’re forced to stay and have a miserable experience every Sunday.” We can’t keep the sacraments hostage to mediocracy.
PPS: With 1 billion strong, the Catholic Church is the real megachurch!
Pope Francis at Rio de Janeiro
3 million people
# 841 The Church’s relationship with the Muslims. “The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day.”[330]
Of course they knew about the trinity. They just didn’t believe that Jesus was that Messiah.
Then Jesus didn’t get the Y chromosome? How was He a man if He only received DNA from Mary. The Y chromosome which determines the male sex comes only from the father. Your theory has some serious flaws.
If the Holy Spirit came upon Mary to conceive Jesus, then there is only one source from which Jesus could have gotten His human flesh and blood as the Holy Spirit had no flesh or DNA to give to Him.
It is beyond ridiculous to even to have to debate that.
Then where did his *Y* chromosome come from?
It certainly wasn't Mary. Women have only X's to contribute.
LOL GMTA
Or rather, the religious elite didn't.
There's definitely a parallel with today's churchianity. The more religious and structured the organization, the less of Jesus there is and the less of Him they recognize.
GMTA......
LOL!!!
We’re on the same wavelength tonight it seems.
That’s a fact.
We don’t have to wonder where that comes from.
OK, I guess someone just forgot to tell the Jews that there is a Triune God and they have rejected Jesus for nothing.
This conversation is getting more and more ridiculous.
The Jews did not and do not believe that God is or will ever be one God in three Persons.
They believe in ONE GOD and that the Messiah will be human and not God incarnate as they do not believe that God can be or will ever be human.
The doctrine of the Trinity is unique to Christianity and developed over time as questions arose as to how Jesus could be God and the Son of God at the same time.
Also, questions about the Holy Spirit were raised. In the OT, the Holy Spirit was sent out by God but was not God.
Please give me one Jewish source that says they believe in the Trinity and a God in three persons.
See post 1275 by metmom. Those were all Old Testament passages which were of the Jews if you didn’t know.
they rejected Jesus because God had blinded their minds to not see that He was the Messiah.
Jesus HAD to die and if they had recognized Him for who He was, they would not have had Him crucified.
1 Corinthians 2:7-8 But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
It wasn't a matter of amount of knowledge, but of understanding it.
The information was there. They didn't get it.
That’s post 1279.
And if that’s not enough, I’m sure a quick keyword search of the OT will produce LOTS more.
I feel like the rabbit that went down the hole in Alice in Wonderland.
The Son of God was going to be a male. Are we really and truly discussing this as if Jesus was conceived in the same way as all humans after Adam and Eve?
He is no normal human being, though He was truly and fully human. That means He truly and fully had a human body and that means that His humanity came from somewhere. And that somewhere is Mary.
There is a heresy which exists that claims that rather than conceiving Jesus in Mary’s womb, God implanted an embryo.
That is not the case as we know from Scripture that He would be from the seed of a woman.
“And I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your seed and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will crush his heel.”
Just as God was able to fertilize an egg within Mary without having a human nature, He was also able to make Jesus a male and not a female.
Are we going to continue to discuss how God could go outside our understanding of physical science to accomplish His will?
Ooops. Yep! You were responding to 1275. My bad.
Hello!
Paul, the Pharisee of Pharisee’s, did not have the NT to teach him the doctrine of the Trinity.
He wrote about what he knew all based on the OT Scripture, the only Scripture he had.
It’s not new teaching, it was just clarified by Paul. he didn’t make it up either.
So, based on your post here, reread what I originally
>>As I said in my previous post, the God that we know and understand today is not the one of the Jews of Jesus’ time, the God of the OT.<<
What again is wrong in that statement?
The Jews did not understand God in the same way that Christians do regardless of why that was then or remains so now.
I do believe it was YOU who claimed Jesus got ALL of His DNA from Mary in the first place. That’s an impossibility because a female has no Y Chromosome which Jesus had to have had to be male.
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