THE MOVIE THEATER PHENOMENON

At the end of last week I had two pastors contact me about doing church in a movie theater. Both of them are going to be planting a church next year, one in Ottawa and the other in Colorado and they wanted to pick my brain a bit about how things work in a movie theater.

We have done Sunday services in two catering halls, three hotels, two movie theaters, a regular theater, a school, a park and one other location that I can't immediately recall. But the movie theaters win hands down.

That's why an increasing number of new and not-so-new churches are catching on to the fact that a user-friendly building with tons of parking, any amount of auditoriums and a relatively low price tag is like the bargain of the century.

Heck, Mark Batterson over at National Community Church in DC reckons that with the price of real estate in our nation's capital, they will probably never buy a building or construct one. So he's just developing a network of congregations that meet in theaters all around the city.

In my legalistic, religious days (now thankfully long past!), movie theaters were from the devil. Who would have ever thought that they would turn out to be a gift from God?