Mega-Church Burnout
By Clint Rainey, Journalism Student
"Our studies consistently show that churches base their sense of success on indicators such as attendance, congregant satisfaction, dollars raised and built-out square footage. None of those factors relates to the kind of radical shift in thinking and behavior that Jesus Christ died on the cross to facilitate." Pollster George Barna
Forgive the irreverence, but there`s irony in the fact that my 10-year stint inside a local megachurch began in the same decade as the fall of the `90s lip-sync imposter band Milli Vanilli.
In a decade-the time it took the country to totally forget those dance-pop boys-my church developed religious Beatlemania and went from a small community of several hundred members to a behemoth megachurch of nearly 10,000.
My generation, the offspring of the megachurch`s most loyal fans, isn`t quite so gripped.
I understand that this thriving model comes from the baby boomers` rejection of hellfire-preaching ministers who so beleaguered the idea of church that fleeing churchgoers brought their children to megachurches in hopes of saving them from what theirs had become. But we were saved only to be part of a new problem: a church philosophy massive and impersonal in every way.
As megachurches go, ours is the quintessence: a skate park, a sports league with enrollment exceeding the city YMCA`s, a cafe and a game room outfitted with a half-dozen Xboxes. When baptisms take place during the service in the nearby "baptismal sanctuary," the word "LIVE" appears in the corner of our auditorium`s three Jumbotrons as the event is telecast to us.
All of this, we`ve been reminded interminably, is to "attract seekers." I`ve grown very disenchanted with this concept. Attract seekers to what? A sanctuary worthy of Broadway production? An auditorium mimicking a convention center? A complex of expensive buildings?
Thumbing through the biblical church model in Acts, I can`t find anything about seeker-friendly buildings. What`s there is a lot about seeker-friendly Christians.
Big numbers and a big building aren`t wrong on their face, but they often accompany bad motives. Case in point: The newest monster of megachurch monsters, Houston`s Lakewood Church, shelled out $75 million to renovate the NBA arena of the Compaq Center. Lakewood credits much of its success to Pastor Joel Osteen`s New York Times best seller on Christian "self-discovery."
While many Christian bookstores consider the book a hodgepodge of biblical shallowness and have pulled it, Lakewood is in no hurry to denounce-or even clarify-its pastor`s work after seeing how the feel-good message attracts surface-level seekers. Is it just coincidence that spectators once cheered the Go-Gos and the Rockets in this same building?
Evangelicals should want to attract seekers; that`s what evangelicals do. But most megachurches do this in an impersonal way. Jaded by this philosophy, my generation has seen how being a mile wide and an inch deep allots, unsurprisingly, a whole mile for approximately an inch`s worth of deepness. As my church has grown, so has the frequency of cell phone interruptions and families sneaking out early under cover of the dark movie theater environment.
These churches attract middle-age adults like iron filings. If they can be spiritually filled there, then bully for them. But my generation isn`t in such awe.
Amid a culture inundated with bigness and cellular technology, iPods and TiVo, the technologized megachurch is no longer impressive. In fact, many young Christians come to church to get asylum from this worldliness. Infinitely more than the megachurch`s "stuff," my generation wants religion. We want everything our parents didn`t, and that seems increasingly to be summed up in the word "meaning."
Studies say our generation is the most conservative in decades on issues of religion, suggesting we`re averse to the risks that churches with a flashy, pop-culture bent take to appeal, ironically, to us.
So when we grow up, we`ll likely look for religion elsewhere. This leaves the surface-level seekers who are looking to plumb new spiritual depths for the first time, but for whom the church instead wastes time crafting pop culture analogies and brewing espressos, as the meat-and-potatoes churchgoers. They`ll come on Sundays in search of significance and find it in the same place they do the other six days: in "stuff," in "things."
In Europe, mass religious apostasy left its churches people free, but the American megachurch could bring this irony: We, unlike the Europeans, have people in our big, empty churches.
