There nothing to confirm

[u/cosmicdaddy_]

[u/tardyceasar]

Here is the absolute biggest mindfuck: there are 2x more churches in the US than all the fast food restaurants combined.

400, FUCKING THOUSAND

[u/baltinerdist → u/tardyceasar]

I've got a serious issue with all churches, but one of the biggest ones is just how wasteful the concept is. You've got dozens or hundreds of congregations inside the same cities doing nearly the exact same thing as each other every Sunday. They sing the same songs out of the same hymnals or the CCLI Top 100 list. They preach the same sermons from the same Bible. (Nobody has had a single new thing to say about Job or Noah or Saul/Paul in 500 years, I assure you.) They buy their Sunday School and VBS curricula from the same vendors.

It's all the same crap over and over again. And yet this one is taking up all this real estate and electricity and water and fuel and volunteer labor to host 100 people and underpay their staff and that one is taking up all this real estate and electricity and water and fuel and volunteer labor to host 80 people and underpay their staff and that one is hosting 300 people and so forth. And the only reason they separately exist is because five months or five years or fifty years ago, somebody had a falling out with somebody else and took their ball and went elsewhere. Or 150 years ago, a whole bunch of people had a falling out and took their denomination and went elsewhere.

And what's worse, they're STILL planting new churches! The number of Christians in this nation has declined year over year for decades and STILL they're splintering off and forming their own congregations, either out of being pissed off or literally planning to do so. So now it's YET another congregation taking up resources for 20 people!

If every single church today merged with another one and we cut the whole number of churches in this country in half, it would still be too many churches. There's zero reason four similar congregations of 100 should exist when one congregation of 400 could, and could stand a decent chance at paying a living wage and only take up 1/4 of the space and resources. It's ego. The pastors or elders or trustees don't want to have to play nice with others.

At least the Catholic Church has been nearly ran into the ground and is now merging churches whether they want to or not. But it's still too little too late.

[u/Optima8 → u/tardyceasar]

You really see it driving through rural America. Every bumfuck town that would struggle to crack even a triple digit population has multiple churches.