Thursday, February 28, 2008

WalChurch or ChurchGreens, neither is very catchy

My church is on the virge of completing our new facility. We'll be moving next week, and indeed, already are to some degree.

Across the street from our current building, there's all sorts of new construction, and in passing by I asked my friend what was going in: "A Walgreens from what I understand."

My scoffing reation was that we already had 7 Walgreens around, see:


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Wikipedia says this:

"There are 6,179 Walgreens (as of January 31, 2008[2]) in operation with a current goal to have 7,000 stores by 2010...In its current business model, new Walgreens locations are most commonly set up as freestanding locations at the corners of busy, intersecting streets -- literally making it a "corner drugstore"

Well that is exactly what they're doing. In fact two of the Walgreens very close to me are actually replacing existing walgreens that were located in a strip mall. Walgreens has bought property literally a stone's throw away from the current store, demolished an older building, and built a new store.

To me this seems sort of silly, especially when you see the big mess being made and the sign hanging up in the store window that says "We're moving" and they're really only moving about 70 yards.

So it got me thinking: I wonder if this is how some people feel about my church moving?

Is "Do we really need another Walgreens?" equivalent to "Do we really need another church?"

3 comments:

Rev. Daniel Irving said...

Will the church offer prescription drugs... cause that seems to be the real issue. They seem to be quite popular nowadays with the 20/30 crew...

Kara said...

We're getting a new walgreens by me! But everyone's excited here cause there's nothing else around here. Even the wal-mart is somewhat far away....

Professor RJ Gumby said...

Jesus said that more workers are needed in the field. So from that alone, do we need another church? Yes. Personally, I think the church in the universal sense evolves. So we come in, working right along side of other churches to build the kingdom. Being human, we will work with different approaches. Those that resonate with people will stick and those that don't will fade away.

Also, while Walgreens is a newly visible sign of "Generica", they are actually a pretty smart company. You should read about them in Good to Great. They understand the population is getting older, and as all of us Boomers start hitting old age, we will need more drugs - this time, though it will be the prescription kind (I take 4 already). There is a method to their madness.

Besides, have you counted Starbuck's lately?