Amusement Park Churches

We’ve been looking for a new church, but we keep running into “amusement park” churches.

When you go to Disney World or Busch Gardens they have “something for all ages!” The toddlers can go in a room with rubber walls. The younger kids can ride the tea cup ride or watch the puppet show. The teens can ride the roller coasters. The parents can hang out at the tiki bar. At the end of the day, when everyone has gotten their fill of amusement, they all meet up again at Parking Lot B.

A lot of churches have the same formula. Sunday school for all ages, of course. But after that, the kids go to “children’s church,” Godzkidz, AWANA, Patch the Pirate club—anything but “real church.”

When we talked to other adults at some of these churches, we learned that most of them were attending for the extra programs—not the preaching. And that’s how these kind of churches grow: by offering more and more peripheral programs ala Six Flags or Disneyland and watering down the actual preaching of the Word. But at the end of the day, they’re a mile wide and an inch deep. Not only do the children miss out on the preaching of the Word, but the parents are deprived of any substantive discipleship and doctrine.

One church we went to became overrun with traveling drama teams, puppet shows, professional “evangelists” swooping through town, national youth organizations, “special musical performances,” endless field trips, dessert socials…everything but doctrine. It became an amusement park. We kept looking for the verse where Christ said, “I will build my children's church,” but we never found it. We kept going there hungry for meat, but walking away with cotton candy.

Maybe we shouldn’t complain. One of the bigger Baptist churches we visited had a “happy hands club” (for all you Napoleon Dynamite fans) perform during the Sunday service. Girls with white gloves who did some kind of spasmodic gesticulation to what sounded like N’Sync music. I failed to get “the message” of it, but it earned a lot of applause.

One of the Episcopal churches in our town has—I kid you not—a yearly “Blessing of the Clowns” service, where they lay hands on and pray for actual clowns and (I guess) wish them a good year of clowning around. I literally laugh out loud every year when I read that in the paper.

If you have any anecdotes about “amusement park churches,” let us know. We could use the laugh.

We’re thankful the family-integrated church movement is taking hold in some parts of the country. We’re thankful for the churches that do allow families to worship together and for the churches that don’t dumb down their messages or substitute entertainment for the Word of God. Hopefully we can find one here.