From the Salmon

bestman says:

June 20, 2006 at 5:06 pm

Clearly, this isn’t real...but I’m not sure if I necessarily find that comforting.  Someone spent a lot of time setting up a pretty biting and detailed parody.  If it was done by a non-Christian/churchy-type-person, it reflects a surprising level of understanding and effort...which is sad and frustrating and a little insulting. 

If it was done by a Christian, it seems pretty uncharitable, to say the least.  Joel Osteen may be helping more than he’s hurting, or he may not--I disagree with a lot of his philosophy, from what I’ve seen and heard casually.  Still, I challenge the implication that “They will know we are Christians by our sarcastic superiority over other people who claim to be Christians but whom we consider cheesy”.

But the main thing I wanted to mention is that this weekend I heard that there’s a trend among some megachurchy types to use a new term for REALLY big churches (over 10K in attendance):  gigachurches. 

There’s about five or ten ways that I find that term depressing.

zalm says:

June 21, 2006 at 3:06 am

Y’all are totally messing with my experiment to see if I can reach absolute zero in the ol’ site stats. Sunday I got down to 12!

bestman, I know that this struck a nerve with you back when I posted it in February.  And I know what you mean about snark not being a fruit of the spirit and all.  Lord knows I forget that most of the time.  And I’m pretty sure I don’t have the time or energy right now to rehash my feelings about megagigachurches.  (What’s next, terachurches?)

But Osteen… well, I have trouble taking him seriously.  I’m getting ready to lead a study tomorrow night on Mark 10 (with a big assist from Mr. Jonathan), so maybe tonight the cognitive dissonance between “sell all you have, give to the poor, then come, follow me” and “think positively and God will bless you” is especially pronounced.

I guess the guy strikes me as being as much or more of an entertainer than he is a pastor � sort of a Norman Vincent Peale with sparklier teeth.  And with that in mind, turning the megachurch as entertainment on its head and making a game out of it struck me as pretty dang funny.

And yes, also depressing.

Nicole says:

June 25, 2006 at 4:06 pm

You’re not a zero, you’re a hero!

zalm says:

June 27, 2006 at 12:06 am

I’m a winner?!?  Good grief.

Come to think of it, that doesn’t exactly play nice with Mark 10, either.

As for the site stats, it appears that as long as people are searching for wife swapping in Sweden, I’ll have traffic.  Don’t ask me how.  My mom must be so proud of me.

And today I started to get hits for Jonathan Osteen.

So I got that going for me.

Nicole says:

June 27, 2006 at 11:06 pm

If Jonathan Osteen has teeth like Joel’s I might be up for some swapping just to see if those Osteen pearly whites glow in the dark. 

Oh, and my new hobby is posting weird comments on your blog just to see what kind of search hits you can get. Thanks for the idea.
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zalm says:

June 19, 2008 at 2:23 pm

This is clearly Nicole’s fault.