Church Slams Other Church That Has Slightly Different Media Presence

Photo by Marta Reche, via Wikimedia

First Church of the Immaculate Justification, a large church practicing relatively conservative traditions in northern San Diego County, posted an article on their well-followed blog which made harsh criticisms of a somewhat larger, charismatic church residing a couple cities over, named Relevant Announcement.

The blog article claims that, if Jesus were to visit RA’s building today, he would “thrash at everyone with a whip,” making reference to the story where Jesus drove out people that were selling animals in the temple to people who had traveled there to make sacrifices.  

The article claims that RA has lost sight of the gospel, and become too caught up in making money and putting on a show every Sunday. The charismatic church employs a sophisticated audio/visual system and has an army of volunteers that work to put on a professional-level musical performance every week. FCIJ's blog labeled this as self-glorification and not worship. The article was posted not long after Relevant Announcement was featured in a Billboard article, mentioning the financial success of their worship band’s recent album.

RA’s leadership, after being questioned by local news groups, responded in part by pointing out that FCIJ makes a decent amount of money selling books on theology and from having their senior pastor broadcast his sermons on a local radio station.

KeyWeekly called up First Church to ask about this point and found that most people were only vaguely aware of the controversy. One person was quick to comment, however: “Yes, we make some money off what we write, but no where near as much as their music does. Yes, our pastor has a website and a popular blog, but that’s just to help promote the gospel. It isn’t all about him, obviously. I don’t know how you can compare that to someone up on a stage performing to a crowd.”

Soon after, we contacted RA and the story was similar, with few people being concerned about the arguments. The senior pastor made a point to say that they prefer to avoid nit picking about what he called the “window dressings” of church pragmatics.

However, one person there responded by immediately sending us a half dozen emails exclaiming that they, in fact, weren’t the heretics. Joel Osteen, the frantic emails argued, was the true deviant, and our article should be all about his abuse of his TV presence. 

Said individual has since started his own blog.