Church Voices

After talking to Brant Hansen on this podcast I’ve been doing some thinking about the state of the church in America, and though there may be big churches the death of the megachurch will occur.  Or at least the typical structure of them as exemplified by the typical baby boomer megachurch (in this case I’m not defining megachurch simply as greater than 1,000 members).  Essentially these churches are a top-down model heavily influenced by the structure of corporations.  That means there’s a lot of passiveness on the part of members and lots of leading on the part of paid staff.  Paid staff set up programs that are attended by members.  Members sit down and are taught at.  The shape and structure of the church is wholly decided and enacted from the top.

To give you an idea of this type of thinking, I was discussing the possibility of a church website being a wiki (a wiki is just a website that anyone, or at least lots of people, can add to it, and change) with a guy who is familiar with the inner workings of a megachurch. The idea would be that many, most, or all members of a church could add to and modify the website on a continuous basis. He told me it would never happen, that the church leadership would never be willing to give up that kind of control over such a public instrument.  We shouldn’t view this as a single incident, but indicative of the philosophy of boomer megachurches. 

There’s two problems with this philosophy.  The first is that our society is moving away from a centralized, top down model in everything.  People aren’t content to be told what to do by the powers that be. A recent study by Newsweek found that 65% of people aged 14-21 are interested in starting their own business.  Or consider, for a moment, the various internet darlings like myspace, facebook, and even ebay which have de-centralized networking and garage sales respectively.  Their success has come by allowing their communities to shape their sites.  People are more interested than ever in actively shaping their world (whether its electronic, or otherwise).  Businesses, communities, clubs, and other groups that successfully allow the rank and file to take part in shaping what they do are becoming more common, because they’ve started to become wildly successful.  Boomer style megachurches can’t do that.

The second problem is that the top-down style of megachurches let a lot of resources go to waste.  Essentially, unless your skills, interests, abilities and passions mirror the direction the church leadership has decided to go your gifts go to waste.  This leaves you passively following, or back to church hunting.  Churches that manage to create a community that shapes and forms what the church is going to look like will be more successful than churches that don’t.  And by success, I mean any measurement you want to use.  But, not only are they putting all of their resources to work (or at least more of their resources) they also create a church full of pastors.  Instead of having a church with a few pastors and everyone else cheering them on and supporting them, the entire church will be filled with pastors looking for opportunities to minister. 

I could be wrong, I have been in the past (heck, just a month ago I managed to predict every major fight on a UFC show wrongly) but this is more than just a guess on my part, this is the way society is going, contrasted with the way a specific type of church is.  While terms like "the death of megachurches" is dramatic, I doubt that death will mean they simply stop existing, I believe in many cases, as the leadership changes the boomer style megachurch will shift to become different, more closely mirroring the de-centralized communities I’ve described here.