The Wal-marts of Religion

Once upon a time in America, before the days of six-lane freeways, super-Kmarts, and SUVs as big as the garages people park them in, the massive megachurch was unusual enough to raise eyebrows among members of nearly every Christian denomination. In the days when walking to a small neighborhood church on Sunday morning was the gold standard of religious expression, giant, 2,000-plus-member churches were an impressive anomaly, attended by a narrow cross section of aging baby boomers and crowded into the suburban hinterlands.

All that changed sometime in the late Eighties, as consolidation hit the banking industry, fluorescent-lit megamarts became the norm, and mom-and-pop stores began to shrivel up and blow away. Changing consumer attitudes affected every area of American life, including religious practice. And so, by 1999, nearly 500 churches nationwide had attained the status of "megachurches," and the number appears to be growing. These gigantic churches, which range from several thousand members to upward of 20,000 (Second Baptist Church in Houston claims 26,000 members), share a few common characteristics: They are most often located in the suburbs, and have predominantly white congregations; their members tend to share a literal interpretation of the Bible, sometimes but not always coupled with more liberal social beliefs; they offer a variety of amenities in addition to worship service and Sunday school; and their religious beliefs tend toward the Protestant and evangelical persuasions, although some Catholic megachurches exist.

John Witvliet, the director of the Calvin Grand Rapids Study Center at the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, makes his living keeping track of worship-related trends. He says that megachurches have taken more than just their expanding size from American popular culture; they've also borrowed their marketing strategies, which center on making the church atmosphere comfortable to people who might not otherwise bother attending services. "In many cases, megachurches have attempted to design their spaces to look like shopping malls or some other space in which people would feel comfortable," Witvliet says. "They've tried to do away with a lot of things that people think of when they think of a church, like big crosses on the wall, the pipe organs, and the people sitting in straight rows. In many cases, they design the space to look like other buildings we're very comfortable in, like shopping malls or corporate headquarters." Generational market segmenting, Witvliet says, is another way large churches make their services more appealing to specific audiences; often, he says, "they'll have special services targeted to different generations, which in itself is an idea straight out of popular culture and the 1990s."

Although megachurch services are increasingly tailored to suit disillusioned twentysomethings' less-conventional religious tastes, their theological orientation tends to be conservative, especially among fundamentalist denominations like the Southern Baptists. Rob Marus -- coordinator for the Mainstream Missouri Baptists, a group which works to combat fundamentalist incursions into Missouri's Baptist convention -- says that Southern Baptists are uniquely fond of the megachurch concept because, more so than other evangelical faiths, Baptists measure their success in terms of how many converts they can attract. "The more conservative and evangelical the church, the more important growth is," Marus says. "It becomes almost a jockeying contest to see how many you can attract, how many you can convert, and how many you can baptize." All the men elected president of the conservative Southern Baptist Convention in the last 20 years, Marus points out, have been pastors of churches with more than 2,000 members.

Marus, who grew up in a large church in suburban Little Rock, says he is alarmed not only by such churches' often fundamentalist bent, but by their tendency -- and capacity -- to grow at all costs, often to the detriment of the neighborhoods that surround them. In the case of churches like Hyde Park Baptist, he says, "It's an attitude of, 'We want to be the biggest and the best and prove to everybody how special we are, and by the way, it's God's will because we're getting more people to know Christ'" -- when in reality, such churches may be stealing members from other churches that aren't doing as well. "It's a spiritualized version of the American idea of manifest destiny: it's our right, our destiny, and God's will for this expansion to happen," he says. But "in many ways, it's the most un-Christian thing in the world" for churches to pave over neighborhoods in order to expand.

But much as all-purpose megamarts compare to traditional grocery stress, megachurches are often more convenient than traditional congregations, providing many services -- day care, fitness centers, Sunday school, singles groups -- under a single roof. In many ways, the traditional, single-purpose church -- which offers fewer amenities and requires congregation members to take more responsibility for the church's well-being -- pales in comparison to the megachurch. But Marus says there are a few reasons for traditional churches to hope. "Because we live in such fragmented communities, people are increasingly looking for community, and they often will find it in a smaller setting," he says. "These churches are not going away, just as massive malls aren't going away and chain restaurants aren't going away. But, by the same token, just as you see more people wanting to go to the neighborhood bistro instead of Chili's, I think you'll see more people returning to their neighborhood church."