We still have Barnes & Noble, thankfully. And I’ve used my Amazon Prime shipping membership this year to fullest advantage. Nevertheless, it was Borders where we went most regularly, so it will be missed.

Religion News Service ran a feature on Sept. 16 on the push for Christian bookstores to take advantage of Borders’ closing.

After Borders announced its liquidation in July, Colorado Springs, Colo.-based CBA sent an alert to member stores: “Post Borders Growth Strategy: As Borders Shuts its Doors, Christian Booksellers Should Open Theirs Wider.”

“Today, Borders is irrelevant in the world of bookselling,” the document states. “If we do not adapt to the changing marketplace and new technologies, our influence will diminish or disappear altogether.”

The letter offers suggestions for retailers including discounts for customers with Borders loyalty cards and trying to lure former Borders customers into Christian stores.

“It is always sad when a bookstore that makes Christian materials available to the public can no longer do that,” said Curtis Riskey, CBA executive director. “However, the chain’s demise does create more opportunities for independent local Christian stores to fill the gap.”

Ain’t gonna happen. At least not with this book junkie.

Not until I can go to my local Family Christian Store or independent Christian bookstore and…

• Find serious works about theology by people who aren’t named Wayne Grudem.
• Find actual books about church history that explore what happened before the church growth movement.
• Find a good selection of books by mainline Protestant authors.
• Find a section in the store that contains a good selection of substantial contributions by Roman Catholic and Orthodox writers.
• Find books and resources that deal with the church year, the lectionary, liturgical worship, religious art, various church denominations and traditions, hymnody, and serious Christian thinking about the arts and sciences.
• Peruse a good stock of real Christian music such as Bach, traditional choral works, and renditions of hymns and gospel songs that don’t all come from the Smokey Mountains or Alexandria, Indiana.
• Not have to see Joyce Meyer, Joel Osteen, and T.D. Jakes, et al, smiling at me from piled-high displays at the front of the store.
• Find works of serious literature and fiction that aren’t about demon invasions, car crashes on the interstate because of the rapture, or forbidden Amish romances.
• Find useful pastoral resources other than attendance books, Sunday School prizes, and candles for the Christmas Eve service. And, for heaven’s sake, can we have some pastoral theology books and helps that go beyond “How to Grow Your Church” or “How to Organize Your Church”?
• Find a decent section of personal and corporate devotional resources that don’t have the word “Chicken Soup” in the title. Book of Common Prayer or a hymnal, anyone?
• Talk to a store clerk or manager who actually realizes that not all churches are named, “Replenish” or “Encounter,” that they do not all exist in white suburbia serving lattes at their coffee bars, and that it was possible to worship before Chris Tomlin started writing songs.
• Find serious commentaries and works of Biblical study written by actual scholars, and not by folks with names like John MacArthur or Beth Moore.

I found most of those things at Borders. I rarely find those things at my local “Christian” bookstore. As a result, I hardly ever stop by any more. They have defined “Christian” far too narrowly and are missing out on a vast market that they will probably never even consider.

Steve Potratz, the CEO of The Parable Group, which provides marketing for 109 Christian retailers, including 40 Parable franchise stores, says they are doing more online advertising to attract new customers while Borders liquidates. Some stores are offering more gifts, and by year’s end, e-books to accommodate demand.

Please note. We’re increasing the marketing push. No word about improving the quality and comprehensiveness of store inventory.

Their focus remains narrow, as they seek to serve “a niche audience that shares the same passionate beliefs.”

“We know where most of our customers are on Sunday morning,” Potratz said. “The opportunity to work with a church, and partner with a church, is critical, and I am seeing more and more of our stores looking for and gaining opportunity to help and resource the church.”

Sorry, Steve. What you are doing is seeking “to help and resource” a small segment of the “Christian” market. If the church even begins to do its job of bringing people to maturity in Christ, the pablum you offer will soon cease to satisfy. And meanwhile, those of us in the post-evangelical wilderness may stop by once or twice a year to buy a card for a religious occasion or something like that.

If you’d like to talk, you can find me at Barnes & Noble.

This editor’s note from Christianity Today this afternoon:

John Stott died today at 3:15 London time (about 9:15 a.m. CST), according to John Stott Ministries President Benjamin Homan. Homan said that Stott’s death came after complications related to old age and that he has been in discomfort for the last several weeks. Family and close friends gathered with Stott today as they listened to Handel’s Messiah. Homan said that John Stott Ministries has been preparing for his death for the past 15 years. “I think he set an impeccable example for leaders of ministries of handing things over to other leaders,” Homan said. “He imparted to many a love for the global church and imparted a passion for biblical fidelity and a love for the Savior.”

John Stott was one of my heroes. As a pastor, teacher, and leader in world missions, he had few peers. He was a prolific author whose books have benefited me throughout the years of my ministry. He also exemplified how God can use single Christians mightily by enabling them to devote their energies to the benefit of the church and blessing of the world.

Click the link for Christianity Today above to read their tribute to Dr. Stott.

Headline from Christianity Today: “Multi-Site Churches Go Interstate.”

Subject: Megachurches are now expanding beyond their localities and regions to other cities and states.

Example: “Pastor Mark Driscoll’s megachurch [Seattle, WA] recently announced plans to expand into Portland, Oregon, and Orange County, California, using multi-site campuses that feature live bands and a sermon piped in from the main campus in Seattle.”
They already have an off-site campus in Albuquerque, NM.

Rationale: “Oregon [etc.] needs Jesus Christ” (Mars Hill website)

Context: “The surge is being driven by technology breakthroughs…” (Warren Bird, co-author of Multisite Church Roadtrip). In other words, because we can.

Concern: “If you are a church planter in Portland, it’s a bit like reading the notice that Wal-Mart is coming and you are the mom-and-pop store.” (Pastor Bob Hyatt, Portland)

Critique: “It’s not just an extreme example of the church-celebrity model. It’s complete capitulation. It’s enshrining that into the DNA of the church” (Bob Hyatt). CT summarizes: “Critics fear the out-of-state campuses turn churches into franchises like McDonald’s or Starbucks.”

Questions and Comments:

• Really? Really?

• I can’t imagine ever, ever, EVER attending a “service” at a “church” like this. Can you?

• What kind of an ego must a preacher have and how controlling must one be to do something like this?

• Is there ever a time to say, “Just because we can does not mean we should“?

• Is it possible that evangelicalism will reach a point where it has emptied itself of historic memory, tradition, and practice so much that it will cease to be meaningfully “Christian”?

[insert phrase signifying speechless bewilderment and frustration]

By Chaplain Mike

That wonderful old Christian satire magazine The Wittenberg Door used to have a regular feature called, “Truth Is Stranger than Fiction.” That would be an apt way to describe this story I came across today.

I couldn’t have made this up in a thousand years. And I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. No, come to think of it, hand me a Kleenex.

Here are the facts:

• A group in Colorado Springs (let us all pause and bow toward our new Mecca) wants to develop and produce a movie in a new genre that is apparently ripe for picking: a “Christian Sex Comedy.”

• Rich Praytor, co-producer and writer, is doing so because he admires the films of Judd Apatow so much. Apatow has graced us with such fine, thoughtful, edifying films such as “The 40 Year Old Virgin,” and “Knocked Up”—“secular” sex comedies.

• Now he wants to (and I quote), “take something like that into the Christian arena.”

• His movie, “The Waiting Game,” tells the story of a man who remains a virgin until his wedding day then struggles with abstinence after his bride-to-be dumps him at the altar.

• The big laugh of the movie apparently comes when the disheartened guy states his intention to give up on staying pure, telling a friend in a restaurant, “I’m so frustrated. You know what? I’m just going to do what I want to do anyways. It’s not like it’s going to wind up on the front page of the newspaper,” So, guess who overhears their conversation and says, “Hey Buddy, I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”? Drum roll, please. Ted Haggard. Ha! I’ll bet Ted’s former parishioners will be rolling in the aisles laughing.

• The tagline for the movie? “Abstinence never felt SO good.”

• A comment by the movie’s promoters on the site’s Facebook page says, “We are still raising the money for this movie, but we are aiming for release in 2012–right in the middle of political season! We hope for it to add to the debate on family values and encourage the faithful to stay true to the word. So please keep praying for us.”

• You can watch the YouTube trailer here, if you dare.

• You can check out the film’s website here.

(Sigh.) Really?

Of all the ways Christians might “engage the culture” (oh, how I hate that phrase!), this is the best we can do?

Millions of dollars are going to be spent on this. Has anyone done a Kingdom cost-benefit analysis?

Could any example be clearer that today’s believers are “of” the world, but not “in” the world?

Is there no one out there willing to stand up and say “no” to ideas like this?

Are we all prepared to take another punch in gut from the world for our immaturity, tackiness, and the tin ear we have toward the words of our own Bible: “Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.”?

I’ll shut up now. By giving this movie a few moments of attention, I’ve done my part for the Evangelical-Political-Industrial complex today.

Pop culture is an insatiable beast, and it is swallowing American evangelicalism, one large bite at a time. I need to go listen to some Bach or something to try and make this bad dream go away.

By Chaplain Mike

Part way through my morning, I remembered it was Bob Dylan’s seventieth birthday. I scrolled through my iPod playlist and saw that I had a “Dylan Mix” there.

So, here are the 25 songs with which I celebrated Dylan today. There could have been a hundred more, but these 25 served just fine.

Comments welcome on all things Dylan today.

• The Times They Are A-Changin’
• Mr. Tambourine Man
• Like A Rolling Stone
  
• All Along The Watchtower
• Lay Lady Lay
• Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door
• Tangled Up In Blue
• Hurricane
• Forever Young
• I Want You
• It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
• Just Like A Woman
• Peggy Day
• Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You
• Slow Train
• Gotta Serve Somebody
• Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking
• When You Gonna Wake Up
• Jokerman
• I And I
• Everything Is Broken
• Summer Days
• Thunder On the Mountain
• Nettie Moore
• I Feel a Change Comin’ On

By Chaplain Mike

What Ken Ham is to evolutionary biology, David Barton is to American history.

Ham is not a scientist, nor is Barton a historian. Yet both claim to know and present THE truth about their respective subjects. And because they are such hard workers and good marketers, they have become the spokesmen of choice for the Christian Right with regard to the issues they represent.

David Barton’s bio at WallBuilders states:

David Barton is the Founder and President of WallBuilders, a national pro-family organization that presents America’s forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on our moral, religious and constitutional heritage.

…His exhaustive research has rendered him an expert in historical and constitutional issues and he serves as a consultant to state and federal legislators, has participated in several cases at the Supreme Court, was involved in the development of the History/Social Studies standards for states such as Texas and California, and has helped produce history textbooks now used in schools across the nation.

A national news organization has described him as “America’s historian,” and Time Magazine called him “a hero to millions – including some powerful politicians. In fact, Time Magazine named him as one of America’s 25 most influential evangelicals.

Barton is getting some attention these days.

On May 4, he made the first page of the NY Times. In a rather sketchy story by Eric Eckholm called, “Using History to Mold the Right,” he is described like this: “Mr. Barton is a self-taught historian who is described by several conservative presidential aspirants as a valued adviser and a source of historical and biblical justification for their policies.” According to the article, potential Republican presidential candidates Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, and Michele Bachmann seek his counsel. Huckabee, in fact, is quoted as calling Barton, “maybe the greatest living historian on the spiritual nature of America’s early days.”

However, Barton is not a historian. After getting a degree in religious education from Oral Roberts University, he was a teacher and school principal in a small Christian school started by his parents. He is an ordained minister. However, he holds no specific expertise in historical studies other than his own voracious interest in the subject. Martin E. Marty, in an emotional critique in the Christian Post, points out that Barton “has no training as an academic historian, is recognized and honored by no other workaday historians, follows few canons of scholarship…” Marty’s rant goes on to say:

Notice that self-identified “evangelicals” are not at the edges but in the center of the professional historian elite-among them, across the spectrum of non-secularists, Mark Noll, Joel Carpenter, Edith Blumhofer, George Marsden, Grant Wacker, Harry Stout, and dozens more who deservedly all but dominate their caste as it covers religious history. Find one who respects what Barton does to their field of work or through his methods. Ask them. Some other critics use the word “fraud” and more, with good reason, come up with terms like “distorter” or “ideologue.” Barton’s cause: to show from eighteenth-century documents that Founding Fathers determinedly and explicitly established a Christian state, which leaves all non-Christians as second-class citizens. He and his “Wall Builders” institute cherry-pick lines from the documents and banner them or engrave them in public expressions. Barton & Co. get to pick the history texts for Texas etc., and thus push out of contention authors and publishers who, for all their flaws, are vocationally committed to fairness and, yes, truth-telling.

This diatribe may be a little over the top, but it must be said that Marty, a Lutheran scholar, has impressive credentials and background on his side when evaluating someone’s teaching about American history and religion. (You can check it out for yourself HERE.)

In the NY Times piece, Erik Eckholm points out comments from a scholar in the Baptist tradition: “The problem with David Barton is that there’s a lot of truth in what he says,” said Derek H. Davis, director of church-state studies at Baylor University, a Baptist institution in Waco, Tex. “But the end product is a lot of distortions, half-truths and twisted history.”

GetReligion.org, a founded by Douglas LeBlanc, now an associate editor at Christianity Today, is a website that analyzes how the American media covers religious matters. If you go to their recent article on Barton, you can watch a clip of Barton’s recent appearance on the Jon Stewart show, another evidence of Barton’s new found notoriety. But the focus of their attention is on the NY Times article we mentioned above. Sarah Pulliam Bailey asks some hard questions in her analysis of Eckham’s piece, and ends up with this take on how the Times handled the story:

The profile is not a hit piece or anything. It gives some biographical info and explains Barton’s background pretty well. It’s the context—the idea that his controversial ideas could be infiltrating the 2012 election—that confuses me. Instead the profile could have highlighted questions about what makes a historian, how historians view the whole church-state divide and how that has implications for the courts. It’s not as sexy as continuing the election 2012 guessing game, but it might be more compelling.

In other words, the NY Times is not really interested in the subject of history or in doing any kind of in-depth analysis of Barton’s approach to history or the issues it raises. Their focus is on identifying the characters who may have some clout in the next election. It’s no surprise that those on the political left are going to react against Barton. It is also clear that the closer we get to 2012, if candidates keep going to Barton for advice and proclaiming him an “expert” in American history and religion, then we’re going to hear a lot more about him and he will become a polarizing public figure. But we probably won’t be any more enlightened about serious religious issues in America.

David Barton at the 2000 Republican Convention

Because all of this is not really about history. It is about using history to gain the advantage in culture war politics. As a result, in all this talk about David Barton we’re not really seeing any informative discussions and debates between legitimate scholars about matters of historical interest and concern. Instead we are hearing the same kind of fundamentalist rhetoric that takes place in the “creation” wars. Expect more of the same from both the political left and the right.

However, there are many legitimate historical scholars out there, and it would be a shame if we missed a moment like this when Christians could put aside political agendas and engage in some serious discussion about the place of religion in American life, past, present, and future. I don’t think we will get that from people like David Barton.

As Paul Harvey at Religion Dispatches says:

The Christian Nation “debate” is not really an intellectual contest between legitimate contending viewpoints. Instead, it is a manufactured “controversy” akin to the global warming “debate.” On the one side are purveyors of a rich and complex view of the past, including most historians who have written and debated fiercely about the founding era. On the “other side” is a group of ideological entrepreneurs who have created an alternate intellectual universe based on a historical fundamentalism. In their drive to create a usable past, they show little respect for the past as a foreign country.

Randall Stevens, Associate History Professor and Dept. Chair at Eastern Nazarene University puts it even more strongly:

Nearly any trained historian worth his or her salt who takes a close look at Barton and his hyper-politicized work will see glaring gaps in what he writes and talks about. He dresses his founders in 21st-century garb. He’s not interested in knowing much about the history of colonial America or the US in the early republic. Why? Because he’s using history to craft a very specific, anti-statist, Christian nationalist, evangelical-victimization argument in the present. . . .

In history circles this is what we call “bad history.”

Join us in welcoming Silas Michael, just over seven pounds, to Noel and Ryan, daughter and son-in-law of Michael and Denise Spencer.

All are well, and we thank God for love and new life.

I will extol you, my God and King,
and bless your name for ever and ever.

Every day I will bless you,
and praise your name for ever and ever.

Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised;
his greatness is unsearchable.

One generation shall laud your works to another,
and shall declare your mighty acts.

On the glorious splendour of your majesty,
and on your wondrous works, I will meditate.

The might of your awesome deeds shall be proclaimed,
and I will declare your greatness.

They shall celebrate the fame of your abundant goodness,
and shall sing aloud of your righteousness.

The Lord is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

The Lord is good to all,
and his compassion is over all that he has made.

• Psalm 145:1-9

Today is the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of what is considered the official beginning of the American Civil War—the bombardment and surrender of Fort Sumter, near Charleston, SC (April 12-13, 1861).

Ft. Sumter was one of five Union forts that remained in the newly formed Confederacy. In the months preceding the battle, U.S. Army forces held the fort but found themselves increasingly under seige, short of men, food, supplies, and weapons. This was the first crisis faced by President Abraham Lincoln, who had just taken office in March, shortly after seven states, led by South Carolina, had declared secession and formed the Confederate States of America. Lincoln notified South Carolina’s governor Pickens that he would be resupplying the fort. In response, the Confederate government ordered that the U.S. army forces evacuate Ft. Sumter at once.

At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, Confederate forces under the command of Brigadier General P.G.T. Beauregard began bombarding the fort with artillery fire. Within thirty-four hours, the army forces, significantly outmatched, agreed to evacuate. Not a single person was killed in the battle (though one perished because of an accident). Yet this “bloodless” battle inaugurated our nation’s bloodiest conflict.

The American Civil War.

The "Anaconda Plan" to blockade the South

In response to the battle, Lincoln called each state loyal to the Union to raise a volunteer army to oppose the secessionists and recover government property. Four more states then seceded. Several northern governors had been quietly getting their state militias ready for action, and on the day after the surrender of Ft. Sumter, they began to move. Lincoln soon announced a Union blockade of all southern ports, which proved to be a major factor in the Union’s ultimate victory.

By the time the great conflict was over and the Confederacy had surrendered, the Union had suffered 630,000 casualties, 360,000 of whom were killed in action or by disease. The Confederacy suffered 340,000 casualties, with over 250,000 killed in action or who died from disease. Two percent of the entire population of the United States died in the Civil War.

In an overview to Ken Burns’ great documentary on the conflict, we read this summary:

The Civil War has been given many names: the War Between the States, the War Against Northern Aggression, the Second American Revolution, the Lost Cause, the War of the Rebellion, the Brothers’ War, the Late Unpleasantness. Walt Whitman called it the War of Attempted Secession. Confederate General Joseph Johnston called it the War Against the States. By whatever name, it was unquestionably the most important event in the life of the nation. It saw the end of slavery and the downfall of a southern planter aristocracy. It was the watershed of a new political and economic order, and the beginning of big industry, big business, big government. It was the first modern war and, for Americans, the costliest, yielding the most American fatalities and the greatest domestic suffering, spiritually and physically. It was the most horrible, necessary, intimate, acrimonious, mean-spirited, and heroic conflict the nation has ever known.

Whether we understand it or not, the Civil War has shaped each and every one of us who is an American. I am still learning to appreciate this as I grow older and reflect upon my own sheltered life. I am particularly moved when I consider the state of racial relationships in our country. Though measurable progress has been made, we have far to go.

As a privileged white man in America, I take so much for granted and far too often ignore the ongoing plight of those whose lives have continued to be difficult and discouraging since our greatest national conflict. And yet the circumstances have been all around me, crying out, every day of my life. My youth was salted with television news accounts of the Civil Rights movement, my heart stirred by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s dream. Members of my family were part of the “white flight” from Chicago’s city neighborhoods to the suburbs, as the descendants of slaves whose families had traveled north in the Great Migrations moved in.

I now live in the city where Bobby Kennedy calmed the crowds after Dr. King’s assassination, a city that ironically once housed the headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan, whose mission was to stir up racial hatred and violence. I visit her neighborhoods in my work; neighborhoods that remain largely segregated by race and class. I still wince when I have to speak of “the black church” after attending a service in the city for one of my patients of African-American heritage. Why not simply “the church”?

Returning to my small town residence south of the city, I drive past homes where Confederate flags still fly, where people of color remain few and far between, and where prejudice still speaks, albeit in quieter tones. Even in recent years,  a few schools in our region have been penalized for overt demonstrations of racism at sporting events. You won’t find African-Americans in the local congregation where I worship, I’m ashamed to say. For the most part, black is black and white is white, and we maintain our distance.

Biblically, tolerance of this state of affairs is unacceptable. My fellow Christ-followers and I have been redeemed from the slavery of sin by a Savior in whom “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:27), “a renewal in which there is no distinction between Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and freeman, but Christ is all, and in all.” (Col 3:11) Yet our world is still divided by color, race, ethnicity, class distinctions, and in some ways, it seems as polarized by rhetoric as it ever has been (though our words may be more carefully chosen). And frankly, where I live, I don’t see much difference in the church that claims to follow a Savior who loves the world. The “Christian Activity Centers” in the communities around me cater almost exclusively to middle class suburban white families. We can still point out the “black” churches and the “white” churches easily. We have to look hard and long to spot cooperation or participation with one another in the Body of Christ and the Missio Dei.

The aftermath of the Civil War is still with us.

Writing in The Opinionator, a New York Times blog, Edward Bell says,

We cannot come to terms with the Civil War because it presents us with an unacceptable kind of self-knowledge. We think, as Americans, that we possess a heroic past, and we like to think of our history as one of progress and the spread of freedom, even transcendence. But the Civil War tells us that we possess a tragic history instead, over which we must continually paste a mask of hope.

Now, you might regard the Civil War as the birth hour of modern liberty and equality. In this view, a quarter of Southern white men of military age, and one in 50 of all Americans, were killed for justice. The war redeemed a barbaric society in which the whole nation tolerated slavery into the salvation of widening rights and freedoms.

Except, of course, that it did not: the stream of blood that started at Fort Sumter passed through Jim Crow and into the civil rights era, right down to the present. Southern whites, having gone down in the fight, turned their recollections into rage and resentment at being displaced — fuel for politicians ever since.

Likewise, for blacks emancipation was not a jubilee, but rather the beginning of a long season of bitter disappointment. Black national memory in some ways is still commensurate with despair. Redemption turns out to be a false idol.

Speaking about the commemoration of the Battle of Ft. Sumter, Bell goes on to say, “They are sad, these memories and this knowledge, and Americans don’t wish to occupy a landscape of sorrow. Many people stick to the military story of the Civil War, especially in the South. But not all is playtime in the commemorations here. During the pre-dawn hour of the re-enactment’s first shots, the Charleston Symphony, sitting under the oaks near the site of one of the gun batteries, is to perform sorrowful songs in a concert called ‘When Jesus Wept.’ “

He is still weeping.

By Chaplain Mike

“This is the culmination of my life’s work as a priest. I felt inspired to fulfill Jesus’ will, and today I give thanks to him for allowing me to fulfill his will,” said Father Sylvester Zawadzki, known as the “builder priest” by the people of Swiebodzin in western Poland. He was speaking of the new statue of Jesus that is one of the tallest monuments to the Savior in the world. The priest commented that his first vocation was to be a priest, his second to build a statue of Jesus.

The statue itself stands 33 meters high (one for each year of Jesus’ life according to Father Zawadski). That’s 108 feet. When you add the gold crown that sits atop Jesus’ head, it brings the height to 118 feet. If the mound on which it stands is taken into account, this giant statue is measured at 167 feet, which makes it the world’s tallest Jesus statue.

Other tall depictions of the Savior include the 133-foot Cristo de la Concordia in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and the 130-foot Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The figure of Jesus in both of these monuments is likewise 33 meters to symbolize his years on earth. The Brazilian statue, which has become an icon for Rio and Brazil, is made of reinforced concrete and soapstone, and was constructed between 1922 and 1931, though it was first suggested in the mid-1850′s. The designers of Bolivia’s landmark modeled their work after Christ the Redeemer. It is made of steel and concrete, and its construction was completed in 1994.

These statues dwarf the former 62-foot King of Kings statue (aka “Big Butter Jesus”) in Monroe, Ohio that was destroyed in a lightning strike earlier this year. The church plans to build a new statue to take its place which will be about the same height. When asked about rebuilding, the church’s pastor said, “The first Jesus was resurrected in three days. It’s going to take us a little longer than three days but he will be back. He’s like the Terminator. He’s coming back.”

The new statue in Poland has divided public opinion among Poles, with detractors calling it tacky. But many residents in Swiebodzin believe it will put their town of 22,000 on the map for tourists and that it will transform their community into a popular site for religious pilgrims. The statue will be dedicated on November 21.

Here’s a video showing the completion of the statue. Heywood Banks has not yet been heard from.