Building the wrong kingdom

When the church gets caught up in acting like the rest of the world, it shouldn't be surprised to share the world's problems:

Add houses of worship to the list of casualties of the mortgage crisis.

Foreclosures and delinquencies for congregations are rising, according to companies that specialize in church mortgages. With credit scarce, church construction sites have gone quiet, holding shells of sanctuaries that were meant to be completed months ago.

Congregants have less money to give, and pastors who stretched to buy property in the boom are struggling to hold onto their churches.

It's one thing to seek a facility in which to worship and congregate. It's quite another to build enormous "campuses" that allow the denizens of megachurches to completely isolate themselves in a self-imposed ghetto, instead of being salt and light in the world. Jesus didn't say "if you build it, they will come." He said "go ye therefore..."

Just as we exceeded economy of scale in governance and big business, we've gone to excess in the structure of our churches. Call it the synergy of the Welfare-Walmart-Warren World. Lots of big, imposing structures... that are empty inside. The fabric of society was stronger when people were more concerned with the city council than with Washington; when you knew your local storekeeper because he was also your neighbor, and when churches were the focal points of neighborhoods, not something you shopped around a 60-mile radius for.

Time to get back to the scale of the mustard seed and resume investing in people's hearts, not in property.