You are my dream reader. What a great job you did on your ten points. I might quibble a little but not much. I posted a link to you on my site (www.christinewicker.com) There’s so much here I’d like to comment on.

But I’ll answer just one question. Why am I interested in this?

I’m a journalist. I’ve covered religion for a long time. I set out to write about the great power of megachurches, but evangelicals kept telling me that I was missing the bigger story. “The Fall of the Evangelical Nation” started as storytelling with some investigative elements and then turned into a much more investigative book.

The subject matters for many reasons.

One is that as the word evangelical has come to mean more and more different things to practitioners, it has been defined more and more narrowly in the public and especially the political square. As it has been tied with politics, it has seemed angrier, meaner, narrower and less reasoning. At the same time, many, many evangelicals who are not part of the Religious Right have been going in the other direction.

I think the public square definition of evangelical faith as identical to Religious Right political positions has damaged American Christianity enormously.

Why do I care? Just for starters, Christians contribute enormously to the health and welfare of American life. Losing them would not be a good thing, in my opinion.

Like fighting the Battle of the Booze and making Young Earth Creationism ex cathedra dogma while everything melts down around them?

That’s like what happened at my first job back around 1980. The company was melting down into bankruptcy and the pointy-haired top management started ruthlessly enforcing DRESS CODES! We had vice-presidents doing surprise inspections (even with rulers to measure Approved hair length) while the company was fast-tracking its way to Chapter 13!

Talk about displacement behavior…

I can testify to that as well. At my last Baptist church, I was concerned about the lack of visition to visitors and new members. I called the pastor and offered to go visit them, but I needed a partner and a list of names. (I was even willing to say that I would say or do nothing to discourage them from the church, because he might have known that I was on my way out.)

The response that I got was a suggestion that I do visits to the sick.

11. Pastors are inaccessible to most of their members, especially women. Many won’t make appointments or have any personal conversations with their members.

People don’t like this, but it is very common. And a lot of younger pastors like this model a lot. Study, don’t visit.

Most megachurches don’t have members, so I don’t know who they are talking to.

Also, I think we have to take one thing as a strong possibility: I think evangelicals routinely answer surveys in ways that portray their ideal selves, not their real experience.

I’d like to see a survey of 5,000 people who attended a mega in the last 5 years.

Also, I think the Baylor study needs to meet Willow Creek’s self study, which says that a third of Willow Creek’s members are ready to walk.

peace

ms

Question, Bob: How does that differ from a cult leader with delusions of godhood? Or at least a sense of Absolute Rule by Divine Right?

I can meet you halfway with the mega churches. I guess I could agree that the pastors don’t load the people down with a whole lot of stuff that they have to believe (which, in a twisted way, might be a problem in and of itself, but anyway …) But, in my time in a mega church, what the pastor and senior staff did was never criticized or questioned publicly — no matter how mildly or charitably — by anyone at all.

There was a recent study at Baylor University reported here that seems to contradict what you are saying here.

Among the findings:

1. “Congregants find megachurches offer more personal worship and sense of community than smaller churches”

2. “members were twice as likely to have friends in the congregation than members of small churches.”

3. “They also displayed a higher level of personal commitment to the church — attending services and tithing more often than small-church members.”

4. “megachurches tend to be more evangelical than small churches.”…”megachurch members said they shared their faith with strangers in the past month and more than 80 percent witness to friends — far more than those who attend small churches.”

5. Theologically more conservative. “Ninety-two percent of megachurch members believe that hell “absolutely exists,” compared with just over three-quarters of small-church members”, the survey found. And eight in 10 megachurch worshipers believe that the Rapture — when followers of Jesus Christ believe they will be taken to heaven — will “absolutely” take place, compared with less than half of those who attend small churches.”

6. More small group discipleship. “To achieve a less impersonal environment, researchers said, megachurches consciously break down the congregation into smaller groups that meet regularly.”

Like any size church, there are going to be good churches and bad churches. The mega churches that I have personal experience with have no problem preaching the gospel plainly and clearly.

Are Christians gathering together? Is the good news of Jesus Christ being shared?

As the saying goes “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then chances are we have a species of the family Anatidae on our hands.”