MegaChurch or Catholic Church?

taylormarshall.com ^ | August 26, 2013 | Dr. Taylor Marshall

[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.

Why the Megachurch?

When I asked why they exchanged the Catholic Church for the megachurch, they gave me a number of reasons:

1. “My new church has an iPhone app. I can go on my iPhone and get Bible studies, sermons (video and audio). When I travel I can still watch the sermon, either live or later. I feel apart of the community.”
2. “The preaching is dynamic and speaks to my life. I find practical encouragement.”
3. “I felt judged at the Catholic Church.”
4. “People were not friendly or welcoming at the Catholic Church. The first time I went to my new church, I was welcomed by so many people.”
5. “My new church has classes and courses that are interesting and helpful.”
6. “The music is better.”
7. “In the Catholic Church, they use a lot of words that I did not understand.”
8. “People pray for each other and know each other (in the megachurch).”

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:

1. “There are not any crosses in my new church. I know it makes some people feel uncomfortable, but I wish we had crosses.”
2. “What will I do when I die?” They were both unclear about whether they could get anything like Last Rites at the megachurch.

What About the Eucharist?

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.

The Problem

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

[metmom]

2) Saying that your opponent “will never get it, no matter what” (implying that I, and other Catholics, are exactly like the rich man in Luke 16—is there any chance you see how [unintentionally] arrogant that statement is?) is a fallacy known as “special pleading”; it implies that you have some sort of “secret knowledge” by which one can know the “enlightened” by finding those who happen to agree with you!

Um, Scripture promises the Holy Spirit to guide us.

1 Corinthians 2:6-16 Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. 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.

But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him”—

these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.

The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.

I could just as easily say that your hidebound and stubborn desire to cling to Luther and his man-made traditions has blinded you to the plain sense of the Scriptures you seek to hold alone... and that, until you have a change of heart, you’ll never be able to grasp the truth.

Luther who? I don't *cling* to Luther. He has no effect or affect on my spiritual life.

My *church* does not demand fidelity to him or adherence to his doctrines of pronouncements under penalty of ex-communication or eternal damnation.

Luther was an instrument God used to shake up things spiritually a long time ago.

My beliefs are based on my reading of the Bible, not influenced by him. I never have read any of his works and I really don't care to.

Everything we need for coming to Christ for salvation and growing and maturing in Him is found in Scripture. If it's outside Scripture and lines up with Scripture, then it's redundant. If it's outside Scripture and contradicts Scripture, it's a lie. Plain and simple.

[rwa265]

It is my understanding that the Septuagint was rejected by Jewish Rabbis partly due to anti-Christian bias. The Septuagint was widely read by the early Christians. When the Old Testament is quoted in the New Testament, 90% of the quotations are taken from the Septuagint. Because of this, the Septuagint had to be rejected along with the Gospels, the letters of St. Paul, and the other books of the New Testament.

[paladinan]

metmom wrote:

Um, Scripture promises the Holy Spirit to guide us.

Right: but there's far more to it than that... unless you think that the Holy Spirit is responsible for guiding thousands of Protestant denominations into contradictory beliefs:

worship on Saturday [Seventh Day Adventist] or Sunday [mainline Christianity]

baptism is regenerative [Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, many Lutherans, etc.] or merely symbolic [many evangelical non-denominational groups]

infant baptism is desirable [Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, etc.] or a grave mistake [Baptist, non-denominational, most evangelical, etc.]

the Eucharist is God [Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, some Lutherans] or a mere symbol [evangelicals, etc.]

abortion is morally allowable [Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, etc.] or an inhuman crime [most others, though the non-Catholic, number is dwindling]

contraception is morally allowable [virtually all non-Catholic and non-Amish/Mennonite/etc.] or morally illicit [Catholics, some "plain people"]

"gay marriage" is morally acceptable [many non-Catholic groups, Anglican, etc.] or a profound moral/physical/psychological disorder [Catholic, many evangelicals]

sins are mortal and venial [Catholic, Orthodox] or else "all the same" [most Protestant]

Mary is the Mother of God [Catholic, Orthodox] or not [most Protestants, especially evangelicals]

illness is real [non-Christian Scientists] or a mere illusion [Christian Scientists]

Do you get the idea? Which of these sincere, Bible-believing (and you'd find it difficult to contradict their claim to be Bible-believing) non-Catholics do you think were led by the Spirit "into all truth" (John 16:13)? And surely you don't think that the Holy Spirit led the others into error, do you?

This is one of the main additional problems with "sola Scriptura"--it spawns tens of thousands of "mini-Popes" who all believe that they're led "by the Holy Spirit" into all different directions! That simply can't be true... but you're in no position to say which is true, and which is false, while clinging to sola Scriptura.

Luther who? I don't *cling* to Luther. He has no effect or affect on my spiritual life.

Yes, he does... though you might not be conscious of it. If you subscribe to "sola Scriptura" (which he popularised), then you're a spiritual child of Luther. If you believe that the Protestant 66-book Bible is the complete Bible, you're a spiritual child of Luther. If you believe (in flat contradiction to James 2:24) that we are saved by "faith alone", you are a spiritual child of Luther. That's only scratching the surface.

Everything we need for coming to Christ for salvation and growing and maturing in Him is found in Scripture. If it's outside Scripture and lines up with Scripture, then it's redundant. If it's outside Scripture and contradicts Scripture, it's a lie. Plain and simple.

All right: you've now stated (yet again) your very strong, fervent, sincere raw opinion. Now, in order for anyone else to take that opinion seriously (i.e. as fact, and not your mere personal tastes), you need to PROVE your point... not simply restate it, again and again, with greater and greater amounts of emotional energy and rhetorical colour. Are you willing to try to do that, or are we done here?

[Seven_0]

Numerology is a straw-man. Too bad, people aren’t willing to take a look.

[paladinan]

It is my understanding that the Septuagint was rejected by Jewish Rabbis partly due to anti-Christian bias. The Septuagint was widely read by the early Christians. When the Old Testament is quoted in the New Testament, 90% of the quotations are taken from the Septuagint. Because of this, the Septuagint had to be rejected along with the Gospels, the letters of St. Paul, and the other books of the New Testament.

That's correct; another motivation (at least for removing 1 and 2 Maccabees) was that 1 Maccabees 8 and 12 were *lavish* in their praise of the Romans... the same Romans who obliterated Jerusalem in 70 A.D., who killed upwards of 3 million people in that siege and conquest, and who destroyed the center of their spiritual life (i.e. the temple); when the Palestinian Jews met at the end of the 1st century, they were in no mood either to "celebrate" the Romans in their own Holy Book, nor were they in any mood to welcome anything tainted by the "followers of the Nazarene and the Way", whom they at least partially blamed for the destruction.

[paladinan]

(*sigh*) Friend, believe me... I’ve seen that before, and many of its variants. Years ago, a commenter on another forum (Hannity’s forum, I think) was trying to sell people on the “Seven-Fold Symmetry of the Bible Wheel” (which was based on the 66-book Protestant Biblical fragment). He was an exceptionally nice and kind fellow, but his reasoning was based on flawed assumptions from the get-go. Just so, with your example. It’s a bit like hearing someone say, “My 10,000-word thesis will be based on the fact that water freezes at 212 degrees Fahrenheit...”; there’s really not much point (after making sure it wasn’t simply an innocent typo) in going forward from there.

[Seven_0]

I have never heard of a Seven-Fold Symmetry. If you look closely you will find that there are but 63 books, Samuel, Kings and Chronicles were divided later.

[CynicalBear]

>> When the Old Testament is quoted in the New Testament, 90% of the quotations are taken from the Septuagint.<<

I didn’t realize they had found manuscripts pre-dating the third century AD to prove that the quotes were from something available at the time of Jesus and the apostles. How interesting that you now say they quoted from the Septuagint. The Septuagint, as it is published today, is basically the text of the Old Testament as it appears in Codex B. No one has produced a Greek copy of the Old Testament written before 300 A.D.

Those in this conversation may want to do some research and here is a good start.

http://www.scionofzion.com/septuagint2.htm

[CynicalBear]

>>though you might not be conscious of it. If you subscribe to "sola Scriptura" (which he popularised), then you're a spiritual child of Luther.<<

I hope you don’t think your actually convincing anyone. Let’s see what Paul had to say about checking on what church leaders taught.

Acts 17:11 These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.

Checking with scripture to judge the teaching of man goes back a whole lot farther than Luther.

>> If you believe that the Protestant 66-book Bible is the complete Bible, you're a spiritual child of Luther.<<

True Holy Spirit inspired scripture does not contain errors nor does the Holy Spirit contradict Himself. Let’s look at some examples where there are direct contradiction between the apocrypha and scripture.

“Whoso honoureth his father maketh an atonement for his sins...Water will quench a flaming fire; and alms maketh an atonement for sin” (Sirach 3:3, 30).

Leviticus 17:11 states: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.”

Tobit 12:9 states that “alms doth deliver from death, and shall purge away all sin.”

“the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7)

How many more must we list to show that Catholics use books that are contrary to the Holy Spirit inspired scripture? There are many more.

In the New Testament there are 260 quotes and 370 allusions to the Old Testament. There is not even one quote from the Apocrypha.

If you believe the apocrypha is to be used as scripture you are a spiritual child of Lucifer.

[metmom]

Right: but there's far more to it than that... unless you think that the Holy Spirit is responsible for guiding thousands of Protestant denominations into contradictory beliefs:

First off, those doctrinal differences you listed are a result of NOT following Scripture, of setting themselves up as authority outside of Scripture. Unless you can demonstrate that they USE Scripture to back up their beliefs, then you can't legitimately attribute them to sola scriptura.

Not every issue is salvific either. Only cults make them that and that's a good way of ID'ing a cult. Any group that teaches something is needed besides faith in Christ, is a cult.

Additionally, there are some significant differences between the Roman rite and the EO, things that Rome says ARE salvific and the EO say are not. And both claim to be the *original* Catholic church with the other being the schismatics. Both the Roman church and the EO claim to use Scripture to back themselves up, so how are they any different from what you're condemning in non-Catholics?

And then there are plenty of offshoots of fringe groups of nuns and priests who are ordained or whatever they call nuns, and Catholics constantly remind us that those vows are irrevocable. *Once a priest, always a priest* is the byword. And these groups of nuns and priests are pro-abortion and pro-homosexual. And they're Catholic.

Romans 14:1-12 As for the one who is weak in faith, welcome him, but not to quarrel over opinions. One person believes he may eat anything, while the weak person eats only vegetables. Let not the one who eats despise the one who abstains, and let not the one who abstains pass judgment on the one who eats, for God has welcomed him. Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls. And he will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make him stand.

One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. The one who observes the day, observes it in honor of the Lord. The one who eats, eats in honor of the Lord, since he gives thanks to God, while the one who abstains, abstains in honor of the Lord and gives thanks to God. For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's.

For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living. Why do you pass judgment on your brother? Or you, why do you despise your brother? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God; for it is written, “As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God.”

So then each of us will give an account of himself to God.

[metmom]

Anyone who believes that God’s word alone is adequate for all things pertaining to salvation is a spiritual child of God.

They’re the only ones who believe that God is adequate, that the work of Christ on the cross and the Holy Spirit inspired word of God is sufficient for every need of the believer.

Those who think that God left something lacking will always go to something else.

Just like Satan said to Eve.....*Did God REALLY say....?*

[CynicalBear]

Satan is determined to corrupt the words of God in any way he can. Catholics try to impress us with those “church fathers” they like to quote and parade before us. What they forget is that corruption of scripture by men started already during the time the apostles were still alive. They like to spout about some guy who was “with the apostles but so was Judas for crying out loud.

[CynicalBear]

>> First off, those doctrinal differences you listed are a result of NOT following Scripture, of setting themselves up as authority outside of Scripture.<<

That’s not even taking into account that Catholics think that anyone who is not Catholic is Protestant. It’s actually a truer statement that Catholics are the first who protested what Christ and the apostles taught. One only need to show their non scriptural beliefs to understand that.

[paladinan]

metmom wrote:

First off, those doctrinal differences you listed are a result of NOT following Scripture, of setting themselves up as authority outside of Scripture. Unless you can demonstrate that they USE Scripture to back up their beliefs, then you can't legitimately attribute them to sola scriptura. Are you not aware that every last Protestant denomination CLAIMS to use "Scripture Alone" to come to these (different) conclusions? Your argument is with them, not with me... since you're flatly claiming that these tens of millions of "Bible-believing, sola-Scriptura-holding" Christians are all wrong, and that you're right. That's rather a bold claim, don't you think?

It feels rather odd to be defending their clazims, like this, but... here are a few samples of their claims to be following the "Bible alone":

Seventh Day Adventists: (who believe that worship on Sunday is the Mark of the Beast)
Seventh-day Adventists accept the Bible as their only creed and hold certain fundamental beliefs to be the teaching of the Holy Scriptures.

Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (who believe that abortion is morally permissible)
Today, nearly five centuries later, Lutherans still celebrate the Reformation on October 31 and still hold to the basic principles of Luther’s theological teachings, such as Grace alone, faith alone, Scripture alone. These comprise the very essence of Lutheranism.

Anglican Church(es), who believe that homosexual marriage is morally permissible
VI. Of the Sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for Salvation. Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation. In the name of the Holy Scripture we do understand those canonical Books of the Old and New Testament, of whose authority was never any doubt in the Church. (from the Church of England "Thirty Nine Articles" of required faith)

Does that help, a bit? I'm afraid I'll have to let you dig up your own references to the other Protestant denominations (Google works well), since this is fairly time-consuming; but suffice it to say that you (and/or your particular faith-group) are not the only one to use "sola Scriptura"... and, more importantly, there are millions of "sola Scriptura" believers who disagree with you strongly on one or more critical issues of faith (e.g. they claim that one's salvation depends on them).

[paladinan]

Er... friend, if you’d like to continue a conversation with me, the “price of admission” is more civility, and less snark/irritability. Calling me a “son of Lucifer” is not a good way to get me to take you seriously... and the moderators do frown on those sorts of ad homiem attacks, by the way.

[paladinan]

Whoops! My apologies; in my list of "Sola Scriptura" groups who disagree (presumably) with you, some of the links for the third paragraph (on Anglicans) were misplaced/scrambled; here's the corrected version:

Anglican Church(es), who believe that homosexual marriage is morally permissible:
VI. Of the Sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for Salvation. Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation. In the name of the Holy Scripture we do understand those canonical Books of the Old and New Testament, of whose authority was never any doubt in the Church. (from the Church of England "Thirty Nine Articles" of required faith)

[CynicalBear]

Then don’t call someone a son of Luther.

[paladinan]

Wow. So... in your book, “Luther” -— morally equivalent to -—> “Lucifer”. Gotcha.

I think I may just bid you a fond “adieu” for the purposes of this conversation, friend; if you change your mind about the irritability/incivility thing, do let me know.

[CynicalBear]

>>if you change your mind about the irritability/incivility thing, do let me know.<<

Nah, I think I’ll stick with the apocrypha being a ploy of Lucifer to deceive. As far as Luther is concerned, he was after all still a Catholic and held on to many of their errors.

[paladinan]

Suit yourself; I’ll stick to those who’re inclined to be polite.