Comments on: Has the Church Lost its Flippin’ Mind?

By: Francine

Francine — Mon, 17 May 2010 01:07:10 +0000

I've just started a blog as well called Naked Theology…to help me learn and search things out.
This post caught my attention Definitely too much money spent on too many temporal things.

By: James

James — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 03:59:12 +0000

I don’t know how fair it is to include Watermark in this discussion. This is not a church that is expanding or adding to it’s facilities. This is the first facility this church has had. Just 2 years or so ago this church was meeting at a local high school after bouncing around between various hotels and schools. Watermark will celebrate it’s 10th anniversary this weekend in fact.

I can’t speak for FBC or Gateway, but I first found out about Watermark because of their contributions (financially and otherwise) to the community, specifically West Dallas and their work with Sequoyah Elementary. You can go to watermarkconspiracy.com and learn about their work to bring clean drinking water to some of the poorest areas of Africa. I could go on.

$45 million is a lot of money. Unfortunately, that is how much it cost to build from scratch a facility capable of housing some 7,000 members and growing. As it stands right now, the children facilities are literally overflowing and children are sometimes turned away. It’s also worth nothing that the church leadership has not incurred one cent of dept to build the facility. Money that is specifically donated to facilities is put away and when enough has been saved, it is spent on the next phase. The church is currently in it’s final phase of construction.

By: Manny

Manny — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:13:01 +0000

I would be thrilled if they would send just a half of a percent of their budget for what we are doing in Spain. That is unbelievable.

By: Robert

Robert — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:06:54 +0000

You bring up a good point. It seems to me that many of these places will be museums if American culture continues to trend in the direction where people do not want anything to do with church.

$5 million a year to support these facilities is not too far off. Just think of how much that could help some needy people. I know a church in Irving (a big one) that spends a huge portion of their yearly budget on facilities and payroll. And people wonder why para church ministries exist? They exist because so much of the money that could be used to actually help people is spent on so much frivolous crap!

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 23:48:50 +0000

Wow…that’s absolutely INSANE! You know, there are ministries that are much smaller and have a deep and lasting effect on people’s lives that are suffering huge losses of support and yet 3 churches are spending a combined $240 Million dollars for buildings that I can only imagine will cost in excess of $5 million dollars a year to operate and maintain. Actually, I’m completely guessing on the operating cost…and I would bet just about anything that my estimate is extremely low.

What other period in history was the ‘church’ building the largest buildings and neglecting the greatest spiritual/physical needs of the people? How about the height of the Roman Catholic Church. If you follow what happened shortly thereafter, things aren’t looking too great for us.