By
Warren Bird, Ph.D.
Worldwide,
the practice of forming very large-attendance churches goes back many
centuries. The New Testament refers to certain
banner-attendance assemblies, such as Pentecost when “about 3,000” were converted
(Acts 2:41). The overall church continued to grow to 5,000 (Acts 4:4) and
beyond (Acts 21:20). But the weekly meetings were not akin to today’s
megachurch because the earliest Christian communities generally met as smaller
groups in homes, according to New Testament record. The first known church
building was not built until 201 A.D., and many churches continued to convene
in homes even after the Roman Empire legalized Christianity in, 313 A.D.
Yet
over the centuries occasional large-attendance churches developed including the
great Abbey of Cluny, the great cathedrals of Constantinople and Europe,
and also the tabernacles build around the ministries of such evangelists and
teachers as Charles Spurgeon in England. As a case in point, Spurgeon
preached regularly—often 10 times in a week—to audiences of 6,000 and more. He
once addressed an audience of 23,654 (without aid of amplification). He grew
the congregation of New Park Street Church, later named the Metropolitan Tabernacle, from an attendance
of 232 in 1854 to 5,311 in 1892, making it the largest independent congregation
in the world for a time. Prime Ministers, presidents, and other notables
flocked to hear him. However, attendance there today has been considerably less
than 2,000 for several decades.
These were not Europe’s first megachurches either. The last ten years of John Calvin’s life in Geneva (1555-1564) were preoccupied with missions in France, such as in Bergerac: “From day to day, we are growing, and God has caused His Word to bear such fruit that at sermons on Sundays, there are about four- to five-thousand people,” he wrote. Another letter from Montpelier rejoiced, “Our church, thanks to the Lord, has so grown and so continues to grow every day that we are obliged to preach three sermons on Sundays to a total of five- to six-thousand people.” A pastor in Toulouse wrote: “Our church has grown to the astonishing number of about eight- to nine-thousand souls.” (For additional examples, see this scholarly article by David Eagle.)
Today
the world’s largest-attendance churches are in Korea, Africa, and South
America—symbolic of the geographical shift in Christianity noted by historian
Philip Jenkins in The New Faces of Christianity.
Most
of the world’s biggest churches were started in the last century, many in the
last decades. It is still unknown which church globally was the earliest both
to exceed 2,000 in attendance and to continue at that size to this day (see
list of global megachurches at www.leadnet.org/world).
Four
Reasons to Study Megachurches
All
that to ask, “Why study these big churches, given that 99% of churches out
there are not megachurches?” Here are a few reasons:
1.
Churches with large attendances tend to be growing churches. Much can be
learned—for better or worse—about why they grow and how they grow.
2.
For better or worse, large churches tend to be influencers, pacesetters
who spark methods and practices that often scale to churches of ALL sizes.
3.
Large churches tend to be innovators and entrepreneurs. This ranges from
how they use technology to how they impact their communities for Christ. They
have more capacity to experiment as well as openness to change, and so they
tackle problems that frequently stump other churches—again, for better or for
worse.
4.
Large churches shape the general public’s perception of church. This is
again for better or worse, but it’s helpful to understand the messages these
churches are conveying to my neighbors and yours.
Where
Did the Word Megachurch Come From?
The
word church
has been with us for centuries, but the prefix mega first emerged
in the 19th century. Most uses were specialized such as megalith (stone
of great size), megalopolis (very large city), megaphone (device
that makes the voice sound much bigger) and megahertz (a
million cycles per second). In the 1940s, it became part of common speech with
the terms megaton and megabuck. In the
1970s, institutional uses arose such as megacorporations and megamall, both of
which described new developments associated with controversy. The word megachurch was
used by scholars and researchers in the 1970s, likely coined by them.
The
term megachurch first
appeared in a newspaper the week of Easter 1983 in the Miami Herald describing
the 12,000 people anticipated to attend the 3,400-seat Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church
in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where D. James Kennedy was
pastor at the time. Soon other newspapers and magazines were using the
term megachurch to
describe big-attendance churches with very large facilities. The new term
filled a vacuum: a small number of large-attendance Protestant churches had
existed for centuries in metropolitan areas, with fewer than 100 in the United
States by 1983, but there was no unique term to describe them other than
perhaps super
church, a term used only occasionally. (And currently Coral Ridge
is no longer a megachurch in attendance.)
Megachurch
Researchers
Here’s
a bit of history of U.S. megachurch research, naming a few firsts:
•
First to identify and track the world’s and nation’s largest attendance
churches: Elmer
Towns, first in magazine articles, and then in books like The Ten Largest Sunday
Schools and What Makes Them Grow (1972), The World’s Largest Sunday
School (1974), and The Complete Book of Church
Growth(1979).
•
First to use the word megachurch in a book: Francis Dubois, How Churches Grow in an Urban
World, 1978.
•
First book with specific chapters on megachurches: Prepare Your Church
for the Future, Carl George with Warren Bird, 1991.
•
First book to use the word megachurch in a book title: John N.
Vaughan, Megachurches and American
Cities: How Churches Grow, 1993.
Finding the
Latest Megachurch Research
ECFA’s “The Changing
Reality in America’s Largest Churches” report runs 22 pages and is the
largest national study EVER of trends in U.S. megachurches. If you want other
ministry friends to download it (hint, hint), it’s free at http://www.ECFA.church/surveys. And
certainly if you want to join the number of churches of ALL sizes that are ECFA
members, please see https://www.ecfa.church/JoinEZ.aspx.