{"id":5515,"date":"2005-07-13T07:43:25","date_gmt":"2005-07-13T07:43:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/just-fitting-in.html"},"modified":"2005-07-13T07:43:25","modified_gmt":"2005-07-13T07:43:25","slug":"just-fitting-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/just-fitting-in.html","title":{"rendered":"Just fitting in…"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

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

(Son of Charles Stanley, incidentally)<\/p>\n

From the reader who sent it in:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

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’.  <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

From the article:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

"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."<\/p>\n

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?"<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nJust fitting in... - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/just-fitting-in.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Just fitting in... - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Rev. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5515\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}