A weekly alternative newspaper in Seattle called The Stranger reviewed 20 churches in Seattle.  Here are their thoughts on the City Church.

City Church, Belltown

2700 First Ave

Sunday services: 9:30 am, 11:30 am

www.thecity.org

How do you run a four-campus megachurch with just two pastors? Hold one service and simulcast the video at all the others.

That's the operating principle behind City Church, which has campuses in Belltown, University District, Issaquah, and Kirkland. Every Sunday, in other words, City Church's thousands of members get together… to watch TV.

This can, for obvious reasons, be disorienting for a newcomer. At Sunday's 11:30 a.m. Belltown service, it took me a few minutes to figure out that the woman onscreen (Pastor Gini, a slim blonde in a hot-pink suit with white piping) was not, in fact, in the room. Weirder still, the virtual pastors could see their audiences around the city. As in watch on monitors. As in, "Stand up, Belltown! I can see you!"

Like many megachurches, City Church's canon is Fundamentalist and dogmatic. They believe Adam and Eve existed, literally; they think God created the world in seven days around 6,000 years ago; they think Satan is real and lives in a fiery place called Hell; and you can probably guess how they feel about the gays.

City Church's Fundamentalism, however, probably isn't the reason most of its members have chosen to go there. It's a friendly, laid-back, nonchurchy environment (no band; no organ; and certainly no icky crucifixes)—the kind of church, in other words, popular among urban youth. When Pastor Judah, a beaming thirtysomething with heavily styled hair and hipsterish horn-rimmed glasses, made a particularly salient point (this Sunday's sermon was about Saul, who drew the wrath of God when he saved the spoils of battle to sacrifice instead of destroying them) half the room raised their right hands (yeah, like that) and shouted. "Come on, come on!" "Tell it!" "That's right!"

City Church is thus the ultimate intersection of religion and technology: A closed feedback loop between pastor and flock.

A much kinder review than this blog has ever given.

(Tip of the cap to vacationing Chris Snethen.)

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