Word: megachurch
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...University of Missouri, Lay is now trying to have the money returned. Last September, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, he personally sought to have the money - as yet unused - transferred back to Houston to assist 14 charities in relief efforts, including preacher-author Joel Osteen's megachurch. Five months later in February this year, the trustee for Lay's assets went to the campus in Columbia, Mo., seeking the money to pay for legal fees instead. The trustee went home empty-handed, but now university alumni - only recently apprised of the negotiations - are buzzing with indignation. The university, meanwhile...
...sidebar gathering of almost any church in the country but for a ceramic vessel of red wine on the dinner table - offered in communion. Because the dinner, it turns out, is no mere Bible study, 12-step meeting or other pendant to Sunday service at a Denver megachurch. It is the service. There is no pastor, choir or sermon - just six believers and Jesus among them, closer than their breath. Or so thinks Jeanine, who two years ago abandoned a large congregation for the burgeoning movement known in evangelical circles as "house churching," "home churching" or "simple church." The week...
Since the 1990s, the ascendant mode of conservative American faith has been the megachurch. It gathers thousands, or even tens of thousands, for entertaining if sometimes undemanding services amid family-friendly amenities. It is made possible by hundreds of smaller "cell groups" that meet off-nights and provide a humanly scaled framework for scriptural exploration, spiritual mentoring and emotional support. Now, however, some experts look at groups like Jeanine Pynes' - spreading in parts of Colorado, Southern California, Texas and probably elsewhere - and muse, What if the cell groups decided to lose the mother church...
CHURCH ON DEMAND An Illinois megachurch is catching flak for giving out a religious DVD, above, in lieu of having Sunday services on Christmas...
...planning meetings with Rwandan Cabinet ministers, governors, clergy and entrepreneurs. One dinner was attended by a third of the Rwandan Parliament. Says Scott Moreau, a professor of missiology at Wheaton College in Illinois: "I've never heard of this level of cooperation in the last 100 years between any megachurch, mission agency or even a denomination and a national government...