My sister has been dating a man long distance who lives down in Florida. He has been a youth pastor at a large church, but in order to be closer to my sister, he’s taken a job in this area at a very small church. He’s set to move in to his new house this month. The house is provided by his new church. It’s vacant now, so we have access to it. So, my sister and her boyfriend plan to use it to store some things that she doesn’t have space for otherwise.
Tonight, my sister and I were making a trip to his new house to drop off some things for storage. The final stretch of the trip takes us down a pretty long two lane road. By the time you get to the church things have gotten very rural.
But what is so striking about this stretch of road isn’t its zoning. No, in the five or six mile stretch of road, we passed roughly two dozen churches of varying denominations and religions. It was like something out of the twilight zone. They’re often situated directly across the street from one another, or right next to one another with a clearly erected dividing fence between them.
Then, just as I was thinking it’d been a while since I’d seen a church, we passed an empty lot with a big construction sign announcing the plans to build… you guessed it, a church.
Now, I’m not convinced that church unity necessarily condemns splintered church denominations. But this was excessive. It just had me thinking, what church planting team sits down in a Starbucks to think and pray about where to plan their church and lands on a place where church buildings outnumber gas stations?
It’s weird. It’s very weird. It seems like someone ought to be taking a step back and asking some tough questions. Not me. Just someone.
