"we buy seat covers to hide the shame of not having enough butts in seats."

In seaching for an article on my last post:

• Two-stage shaming, Naked at the Cross, Trinitarian unity when separated

...I found this post copied below, which looks to have been deleted (I hope not due to the megachurch mentioned complaining):

Seat Covers and the Poor

Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at 04:18PM

So a friend just called me from out of state. He said he heard of a big mega-church in a big mega-city that had a problem. Attendance in their Sunday night services was dropping off bad, and that was embarrassing because you could see how sparse the crowd was on the webcast. So they bought

expensive dark colored seat covers for the back section of the auditorium so they wouldn't show up on camera. No roping off sections of unused seats. Why, that would only draw attention to the fact. Dark seat covers is the way to go when your image is at stake.

Does that strike anyone besides me and my friend as a pile of crap? ... Jesus died naked on the cross and we buy seat covers to hide the shame of not having enough butts in seats. My friend pointed out that its just deception, no matter how you look at it.

Then he went to feed the homeless at an overcrowded shelter. Needless to say, his experience in the shelter was refreshing after the whole seat cover thing. Because there he was able to follow the way of Jesus. The image didn't matter. The cameras were not rolling. And the poor were barely getting by, if at all.

Meanwhile, back at the mega-church, some folks are ticked about the seat covers. But the cameras keep rolling and enough people keep coming to keep the doors open.

My friend told me about two websites worth checking out. The first is International Sports Federation that has sent thousands of short-term missionaries around the world on a shoestring budget and a staff of 4. The other is iamnotok.org , and they have a vision to change the world. Check them out.

-Link, Crossbridge Blog