Here’s an excerpt from an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
The city of Woodstock just got a building that can accommodate half its 14,889 residents. It’s a cavernous, 403,000-square-foot structure of concrete and glass built at a cost of $60 million. It has 7,500 theater-type seats, $2.5 million in digital audio and video equipment and 20-foot circular corridors. Its parking lot, with 3,600 spaces on an 83-acre campus, uses four trolleys to move people around.
That $60 million building is the First Baptist Church of Woodstock. Now I’m sure FBC Woodstock is a good church with good biblical teaching. I know enough about it to believe that. With that said, however, there’s a part of me that cringes at a church spending that kind of money on a building like that. Is that really the best stewardship of church funds?
Maybe it is. Maybe that building will allow them to impact a lot more people in the community, will be able to host other events and ministries (the article mentioned Red Cross), enable them to have a powerful presence in the area.
But I gotta think that maybe a whole lot of that money would be better invested in planting churches – both locally and internationally. How far would even $5 million of that money go in a place like Bangladesh? How many villages in Africa could have received health clinics and wells and churches? I don’t know. Maybe this is just a case of me being overly idealistic or even sanctimonious. Or maybe I’m not, maybe a $60 million dollar building is self-serving in a consumer world.
I’d enjoy reading anyone’s thoughts in the comments section. Click where it says comments.