The Rev. Andy Stanley believes if you’re going to build a church in Buckhead, it ought to look like an office building.

(Son of Charles Stanley, incidentally)

From the reader who sent it in:

They have a huge church outside Atlanta and have a satellite church in the Buckhead area that shows him on a huge video screen – I have heard of people who have gone to entire services there and didn’t realize that there’s no actual guy there, just his image on the screen.  We know a Catholic family that goes there now, and apparently there are several more.  The woman I know is a writer and she wrote a column for a local paper that this church makes her feel good, not guilty like her ‘old church’. 

From the article:

"We’ve tried to remove any obstacle, whether it be tradition or whatever, from the experience," he said. "We present Jesus Christ and the New and Old Testament as written but with no other obstacles in the way."

The music is "like what you’d hear on the radio," McDaniel said. "You don’t have pipe organ music in your CDs. Why would you subject people to that on Sunday?"

A fascinating stance: That the unfamiliar, that which is outside of everyday experience, is an obstacle. I would imagine that the deeper explanation would be that Jesus met people where they were, that he was a man of his time, and so on. So what’s the Catholic/Orthodox response to that?

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