01 August 2008
U.S. Megachurches Thrive in Climate of Faith, Tolerance, Bigness
Offering broad programs for adherents, they reshape religious landscape
Washington -- The United States is fertile ground for questing, experimental religious congregations. In recent decades, one of the most striking trends has been the emergence of so-called megachurches that serve the needs of an increasingly suburban culture.
These new-style churches offer their members a broad range of religious and social services. They also provide a sense of community and fellowship -- not to mention parking, child care and, often, some high-tech entertainment.
Megachurches owe much to the late management expert Peter Drucker, who urged evangelical pastors to create a more customer-friendly institution, lighter on overt religious symbolism and providing plenty of facilities. In a 1998 Forbes magazine article, Drucker termed megachurches “the most important social phenomenon in American society in the last 30 years.”
As the prefix “mega” suggests, size is a key factor in categorizing these church groups. A standard definition is a congregation with a weekly attendance of more than 2,000, although many boast adherents in the tens of thousands. The very largest, the nondenominational Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, claims average weekly attendance of 47,000.
If the worshippers can’t come to the church, the church comes to the worshippers; about a third of the megachurches hold services at satellite locations via live video feeds of the pastor’s sermons. In central Florida, the 12,000 congregants of Northland, A Church Distributed, watch sermons from four locations, including a high school auditorium and -- in a spirit of interdenominational cooperation -- a Presbyterian church.
Discussion of megachurches tends to focus on Protestant congregations. To be sure, other religions often have large houses of worship, but it is generally Protestant churches that seem to have adopted the megachurch model:
-- Most share a conservative theology and more than half are evangelical, a 2005 survey conducted by the Hartford Institute of Religious Research found.
-- Although located in almost every state, megachurches are most highly concentrated in the “sunbelt” states of California, Texas, Florida and Georgia, and are heavily in the suburbs of sprawling cities like Los Angeles, Dallas, Orlando, Phoenix and Houston. Many are near major traffic arteries; most provide large parking lots for worshippers.
-- The senior pastor “often has an authoritative style of preaching and administration and is nearly always the singular dominant leader of the church,” the Hartford study found.
-- Megachurches typically provide multiple social, recreational and aid ministries. And, Hartford reported, most “employ intentional efforts at enhancing congregational community, such as home fellowships and interest-based small group meetings.”
Megachurches have proliferated since the 1970s, in what some researchers see as a response to societal shifts in an industrialized, urban and suburban-oriented culture. The Hartford Institute estimates that 1,363 churches fit the category by 2007.
The institute also says, “A large and growing number of megachurches are multi-ethnic and are intentionally so.” And it points out that megachurches grow “because excited attendees tell their friends.”
Rick Warren, senior pastor of the Saddleback Valley Community Church, which attracts 22,000 worshippers weekly to its services in Lake Forest, California, put their growth in a historical context in a 2006 interview on NBC-TV’s Meet the Press.
“The history of America … is faith-friendly, it’s pragmatic and it’s pluralistic,” said Warren, a pioneer of the megachurch movement and author of the bestselling The Purpose Driven Life. “I believe that the reason why faith has thrived in America is because we have a free market economy for religion, not just for economies, that [declares] ‘may the best idea win.’”
In the case of megachurches, those ideas include the use of high-tech sound and video projection systems at services, contemporary worship music played on electric instruments, and such auxiliary services as book stores, coffee shops and child care facilities.
Warren calls Saddleback’s Sunday morning services “the least significant part of the church.” Far more important are the 3,300 small groups that meet in 95 cities and towns across Southern California, and “over 400 ministries [that] reach out into the community,” he told an interviewer in December.
Saddleback’s mission has expanded to include hosting an annual global conference on AIDS and the church; last year the conference attracted an in-person speech by Senator Hillary Clinton and video messages from other presidential candidates, including senators John McCain and Barack Obama.
The megachurch movement is not restricted to America’s South. The New Yorker magazine recently reported on Faith Church in New Milford, Connecticut, which, while not yet at the “official” megachurch level of 2,000 worshippers, should reach it within two years.
Faith’s brochure advertises many accoutrements of the megachurches: Bible-study classes, a day-care center, a pre-kindergarten-to-12th-grade school, and a variety of ministries. The church has a coffee shop, a bookstore and a sanctuary set up like a concert hall with more than a thousand seats surrounding a stage. A band plays during services.
The church runs groups for “single women, basketball players, scrapbook-makers, museumgoers, and… people learning to trade on eBay,” the New Yorker reports.
Megachurches, say the authors of the Hartford study, “offer a form of organized religious life that responds to the needs of modern Americans. There is considerable resonance between what ordinary people in society value and what the megachurches have to offer.”
See Religious Organizations Go High-Tech and Diversity - At Worship.
