As we know, there are only a few things that really get written about much on this blog. One is theological-doctrinal controversies and the other is church governance controversies. In a way, all these things are theological in some shape or form, but it is more convenient to separate them for this blog. There are a lot of different aspects to a megachurch, of which one is that they usually have multiple sites or campuses controlled under a single centralised leadership team. Barna Research of the US, which is well known for faith-related surveys which it specialises in, released results in May 2023 showing that megachurches and celebrity pastors have a low level of approval even amongst church people, around 18% each. Celebrity pastors are usually running megachurches, so it can be implied that the device of the megachurch is that it is intended to increase the prominence of its senior leadership in a similar way to other people who run large enterprises, causing them to become celebrities over time.
Let’s look at a real world example (all of the stated information is factual, but as is usual with this blog, has been anonymised). A Western nation has three “megachurches” that we’ll call Church A, Church B and Church C (these are arbitrarily assigned letters that bear no relation to the actual names of the churches).
- The senior pastors of Churches A and B (let’s called them Pastors A and B) are both from church backgrounds, are affiliated with major denominations, and have Bible college degrees from recognised institutions. The senior pastor of Church C (Pastor C) has no church background or related tertiary qualifications, so he gets a “degree” from an unaccredited institution or “degree mill”. His church is not affiliated with a major denomination.
- Pastors A and B are quite successful in building their churches up with plantings in various places and their church locations grow and become quite numerous. They achieve this by putting well qualified and experienced people in charge of the new churches. Pastor C tends to choose people who are young and inexperienced to fill roles, and Church C’s planting efforts experience many failures including multiple separate attempts to establish a branch in a nearby country over several decades.
- Pastors A and B have significant ministries such as worship music production in their churches with long unbroken records of success. Pastor C’s worship music ministry has an intermittent record with several disjointed periods of operation due to lengthy delays in finding the right leadership for the ministry. This implies similar issues are likely to exist with other major ministries in Church C.
- Churches A and B tend to be made up of new church plants with large congregations. Church C tends to be made up of existing churches that have been merged into it, with small congregations.
- All these churches hold annual conferences. The Church C conferences tend to look like imitations of the much better attended and successful Church A or Church B conferences.
- In summary the success of Churches A and B tend to imply more competent and skilled administrative senior leadership in those churches combined with advantages of leaders coming from a church background, having appropriate qualifications and having the backing of major denominations, compared to Church C’s situation. Pastor C may well be a gifted evangelist but for whatever reason has had more difficulty in recruiting enough suitable people of the right calibre to leadership in Church C. Nevertheless, all three pastors enjoy some level of celebrity worldwide, but Pastor C and Church C clearly operate very much in the shadows of Pastors / Churches A & B, and in some respects, Pastor/Church C look like copycats and wannabes compared to A and B.
Is there a lesson from this example? One way of looking at megachurches is that they essentially are built on a combination of faith and recognised secular principles already well-known in business management and leadership educational circles, and the people running them are well versed in applying these principles to the management of a church. This enables the church to grow and become ever-larger over time. Technological innovations in particular have made it possible for a live broadcast message from a central location to be streamed to remote locations, hence the multi-site model that is central to most megachurches. In fact a live stream broadcast is another megachurch staple, due to the high costs of setting up a TV studio and cameras within the auditorium to record and stream messages as they are preached, and the messages so recorded can also be used as part of a major media ministry such as TV or radio broadcast. The livestream is also a clever method of helping to create new locations. Anyone can host a church service in their town or suburb with the live stream, and then if they succeed in building up sufficient numbers, then their site can become a new church location of the future. So there is a combination of faith and general leadership skill that comes together in the building of the church. Megachurches essentially come into existence because the senior leadership has decided to keep all their locations together in one organisation rather than having separate autonomous locations, and they rely on large populations of areas where they are established to build up impact and numbers rapidly. Most of the megachurches in the world are in the biggest cities, particularly in the USA, and they thrive because the pastors build strong leadership networks with members with professional experience.
Clearly, however, the low trust rating that megachurches and their celebrity pastors receive imply the megachurch model must be assumed to be, in general, too focused on growth and not enough on what Christians think a church should actually be about. One thing that the simple free version of the Barna results isn’t able to give us is why megachurches and celebrity pastors are held in such low esteem. Other sources, however, lead to a list of concerns. The main concern is with the issues created by the size of the church. Some of these issues are:
- Megachurches run too much like a business, and with too much leadership control vested in the senior pastor, some of whom treat the church as their personal empire. Significant questions are often raised over accountability for the leadership and the independence of the board of elders or managers.
- For some megachurches, the focus has shifted too much to what God can do for you (prosperity gospel) and less to the core message of Christianity (salvation gospel). In other cases, theological teachings are felt to compromise core Christian beliefs.
- There is often a heavy focus on tithing with a specific segment of the programme set aside lasting several minutes to pressure the congregation to contribute significant amounts of money to the church programme. Some churches have a “Miracle Offering Week” or similar held annually in which there are weeks of preaching from the pulpit exhorting people to prepare themselves to give everything they have to this special offering.
- Some megachurches focus largely on the Sunday service experience, and do not have community outreaches that run during the week. They do not need to focus on much more than getting people through the door on a Sunday because so many people are coming in, even where there is a high churn rate. The problem with this church is people needing extended ministry support won’t be able to get it from these types of churches.
- Megachurch leaders are often politically engaged with specific perspectives or positions being articulated and represented publicly and privately regardless of the beliefs of their individual members. This is particularly pronounced in the USA, where most of the world’s megachurches are based.
- The specific structure of megachurches is intended to produce a large organisation. This is the most fundamental question, and it is difficult to justify against the alternative of planting separate autonomous churches with their own independent leadership under the umbrella of a denominational structure.