World Cup Churches 7. United States of America

It's World Cup year - taking place in November/December in Qatar instead of the Northern Hemisphere summer as it has always previously done.  Heading round the 32 qualifying countries I will pick out one church in each one.  I am not going to choose only churches that are to my liking.  This is a exploration not a recommendation! To see all in the series select the label 'World Cup Churches' below.

Well, this is the biggie.  A vast country, a huge population and hundreds of thousands of churches.  Can we possibly find one that epitomises something American?  As with England I found selecting one church surprisingly easy.

Christ Cathedral is the Cathedral of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange in California.  As such it is a reminder of the hugeness of the Catholic Church in America (including of course the current President), not least in California (reference Sister Act) and its burgeoning Hispanic population.

For all that it is very glitzy in Californian-American style - and that is for a reason. Until not so long ago it was called the Crystal Cathedral and the home of Reverend Robert Schuller's Positive Thinking TV empire.  Technically a Presbyterian Church it was more accurately a Television Church and its Hour of Power, birthed out of a 1960s Drive-Thru church, was vastly popular across the English-speaking world and beyond.  You can't get much more American than all that.  I thought that one day as I walked through the glass building alongside the fountains gently spurting out water in the middle of the aisles as the sun beamed in.

'If you can dream it, you can do it.'

'Let your imagination release your imprisoned possibilities.'

'Problems are never real problems unless they cause you to take your eye off your goals.'

It's not necessarily straightforward to derive these maxims from the carpenter of Nazareth and his disciples, followers, martyrs, prisoners, missionaries and attendant Holy Spirit- inspired operatives.  But in sunny California they made a whole lot of sense.

Until they didn't.

Because for all the positivity stamped on the side of free pens, glasses, eagle ornaments and handkerchiefs - and written in an endless stream of best selling books - some of the problems WERE real problems, whether you thought about your goals beyond them or not.

This whole caboodle cost an awful lot of dollars - orchestras, high-level staffing and prime-time level programming don't come cheap.  And in a long story played out in court and public the ministry filed for bankruptcy.

Unfortunately there was a marked lack of positive thinking in the family.  Firings and hirings, Schuller himself suing the ministry he had founded and energetic divisiveness from an angry, diminishing, and now online congregation.  In many ways among the most negative decades in any church's story in America from a church that had steadfastly refused to countenance sin in the interests of thinking positively. That is one great irony.

Another irony is that a building christened a cathedral simply to make itself sound important (a Presbyterian Church remember) has now actually become a Cathedral - the seat of a Bishop - in the Roman Catholic Church.

It happened in America.

Making Tomorrow a Better Place

This has not been a good weekend for Carillion, a megalithic construction company whose strap-line is (was) Making Tomorrow a Better Place.  Tomorrow (i.e. today) turned out to be a liquidation place.

Growing up on a fairly grim estate in a quiet town in post war decades I was not pessimistic about life but nor was I fooled into unfounded optimism by it.  It was with mild amusement that we heard distant stories of American preachers in Drive Thru churches churning out endless here-and-now optimism in exchange for a donation and a cheap pen by return. 

With a little envy, it must be said, we observed the 1970s arrival of Schuller's Crystal Cathedral, which might have been characterised as the Reformed Church of America's Southern California Church Plant but was more accurately Rev Schuller's entrepreneurial possibility-thinking mega project.  Today the old structure is a Roman Catholic Cathedral and the Reformed Church of America is as distant from influence in Southern California as it was when he started. Dream it and you'll have it, turned out to not be right at all.

Far from making tomorrow a better place, Carillion has succeeded only in leaving unbuilt roads, unfinished hospitals, bills for the taxpayers and unemployment and threats of bankruptcies to employees and other smaller businesses.

The contrast with the Gospel is amazing.  In its earthly promises the Gospel is full of challenge.  Yes. it will be amazing in its results but it will also be tough.  There will be persecution, misrepresentation, ostracism and cross-bearing of all kinds on the way.  All the sweeping promises of unmixed joy are for a New Order of things that we will likely not see until we see them on the dawning of a New Day.

It seems to me that if God himself does not promise an earthly fix of unbridled sunshine, it is singularly unwise to trust the human beings and agencies that peddle it.