Popcorn in the pews

Movie theaters are the new churches. Some congregations plan to stay.

Ruth Moon | posted 1/14/2009 08:56AM

The distinction between secular and sacred space continues to blur as a small but growing number of churches meet in movie theaters and consider eschewing traditional church buildings altogether.

Currently 180 churches are renting movie theater space under one-year contracts with National CineMedia, which manages rentals in 1,400 theaters nationwide. That’s an increase from three churches six years ago.

“Movie-theater screens are postmodern stained glass. We’re using moving pictures to tell the gospel to a post-literate culture,” said Mark Batterson, lead pastor of National Community Church, which meets in Washington, D.C., theaters and hosts a conference for theater churches. “There are ways of doing church that no one has thought of yet. We have to live with the tension of being biblically true and culturally relevant.”

While most of the congregations eventually want to own a building, experts suggest about 10 percent plan on long-term portability — and the number is growing.

“In the beginning, a lot of people viewed portability as a means to an end,” said Kendra Malloy, marketing director for Portable Church Industries. “Now people see portability as a way to go and be part of the community.”

The majority of Malloy’s church clients rent schools, but about 15 percent rent movie theaters for worship space.

Although a LifeWay Research survey last February suggested that people who don’t go to church may prefer traditional, cathedral-style buildings to modern sanctuaries, the hope is that theater-style buildings will draw those who might not feel comfortable entering a traditional church.

Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, began in a movie theater in 1975 with 125 attendees. Today the church has 20,000 attend each weekend.

The Willow Creek Theater fit the church’s criteria: it was a low-cost, easily accessible facility with no religious symbols, giving it a neutral appeal, said Scott Pederson, who directs local missions at Willow Creek. Yet he said the theater presented unique problems, including makeshift arrangements such as Sunday school “rooms” partitioned out with burlap in the lobby and a nursery in the women’s restroom.

“I don’t know how many other churches are starting out in theaters, but I feel their pain,” Pederson said. “It’s a tremendous facility, but it does take quite a bit of work to make it go because … there’s a movie that’s going to show just as soon as the church service is done.”

Meanwhile, some churches are requesting buildings that feel like black-box theaters. Others are buying theaters to renovate, said Dennis Ehrman, president of Church Building Consultants. Existing theaters can work well because they are zoned for group use and built so the congregation can easily see the stage.

Greg Snider, project developer for the Aspen Group, an Indiana-based church building company, said he sees two developing trends. Out of the 40 churches under contract with Aspen, 10 are interested in theater-style auditoriums and seating, while four want smaller, chapel-style second buildings for extension services instead of expanding existing auditoriums.

“Everybody is looking for the next wave. We went from cathedrals to churches with pews and vaulted ceilings to the Willow Creek model — the theater seats and big screens and big production — and for me, the biggest movement right now is the intimacy issue,” said Snider. “How do we do ‘big’ small? If we have to get 500 people in a space, how do we get it to not feel like 500 people?”

Original story here.

On books

A reading people will always be a knowing people. A people who talk much will know little.

-John Wesley

Obama and higher education

The economy is the biggest thing on most people’s minds right now, and higher education is somewhere near the bottom. But in the long run it could have quite a bit of clout in determining the direction of our economy, and some in the higher education world have thoughts on how an Obama administration could help and hurt Christian higher ed.

Why Obama May Be Good News for Christian Higher Education

College administrators and observers say Bush administration tinkered too much. But some worry that new antidiscrimination laws loom.

Ruth Moon | posted 12/22/2008 11:56AM

Leaders in Christian higher education could be in for an easier time under Barack Obama’s administration than they had under George Bush.

Under Bush’s administration, the federal government became increasingly involved in accreditation for higher education, said Paul Corts, president of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. Corts and others in Christian higher education are hopeful that the Obama administration will back off from further involvement.

“Historically, you think Republicans are less intrusive on rules and regulations and stingier on money; Democrats usually are more liberal on money but want to be much more regulatory,” Corts said. “We’ll see. Obama keeps talking about change and a new day and he’s trying to do things a lot differently, so maybe we won’t find what everybody expects.”

The nomination of Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan as Obama’s secretary of education leaves many higher education predictions unanswered because of his K-12 focus, but those in higher education are watching closely for decisions on government involvement in accreditation.

The federal government became more involved in the regional accreditation process when the Bush administration created a structure for regional agencies to report on the federal level. It had stayed out of the actual accreditation process until the spring of 2007, when the department suggested requiring minimal standards and stricter data reporting from accrediting agencies.

“That’s where this feeling that it began to be heavy-handedness on the part of the administration came from,” Corts said. “Secretary [Margaret] Spellings made some pretty significant statements hinting at far greater federal leverage coming down — that gave a lot of heartburn to higher education, which wanted to resist that very strongly.”

A discussion of Christian engagement in politics with Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary in California, took place the day after the election at Wheaton College, an evangelical college in Illinois.

“Activist Republicans are sticking their hands into higher education,” said Duane Litfin, Wheaton’s president. “Democrats hear the same complaints, but Republicans feel like the foxes are in charge of the henhouse of higher education, and the result is a tremendous amount of intrusiveness coming at us.”

Christian colleges will also watch how the Obama administration handles government funding, which could lead to hiring restrictions outlawing faith-based discrimination. While campaigning in July, Obama laid out his plans to continue support for faith-based social services, saying, “If you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can’t discriminate against them — or against the people you hire — on the basis of their religion.” Since then, there has been extensive debate on the precise nature of the regulations Obama might impose.

But money always has potential strings attached, said Gene Veith, provost of Patrick Henry College, a Christian school in Virginia that does not accept government funding. The government, he noted, is generous in its higher education grants now, but there are already some conditions, such as privacy laws that restrict access to student grade reports.

“There’s concern at some point that the federal government might mandate, through antidiscrimination laws, laws about homosexuality and other things like that,” Veith said. “That’s possible. I don’t really see that on the horizon yet, but it could happen.”

Patrick Henry heavily emphasizes government involvement, and many in the college speculate about whether it can place as many students in political internships as it did under the Bush administration.

Some Christian colleges are also concerned that a national accreditation process could force schools to be more similar in their missions, creating problems for colleges that want to focus on research or the liberal arts because of requirements that must be met. The federal government is not involved in the process now, but the Bush administration headed in that direction.

“The diversity of institutions in the U.S. is one of the great strengths of our educational system — the assessment conversation tends to sound like there’s one type of institution,” says Chip Pollard, president of John Brown University, an evangelical college in Arkansas.

But as long as federal assessment mimics regional assessment and takes the mission of research, liberal arts, and religious schools into account, Pollard said more assessment will only help Christian colleges.

“I don’t think [assessment] will be a problem for us,” Pollard said. “But I don’t want to have one cookie-cutter way of doing assessment that assumes a state or research institution as the institution we’re assessing.”

Story also here.