Megachurches: How They Really Work

1. What Counts as a Megachurch

A megachurch is a Protestant congregation whose average weekly attendance reaches 2,000 people or more, counting adults and children together across every service and every campus. The number is a research convention adopted so that scholars could study a class of congregation that behaves differently from a church of 200. Nothing doctrinal hangs on it. A church of 1,900 and a church of 2,100 may be identical in theology, worship and governance, and one lands in the database while the other does not.

Definition and threshold: Hartford Institute for Religion Research, which maintains the standard megachurch database and has published megachurch surveys since the 1990s.

Two things follow from how the category is drawn. First, the definition is explicitly Protestant, so Catholic parishes are excluded even when they are far larger than the threshold. A single urban parish with several Sunday Masses can pass 2,000 attenders without ever appearing in a megachurch count. Second, the label covers an enormous doctrinal range. Reformed Baptist congregations, Assemblies of God congregations, seeker-model nondenominational churches, Word of Faith churches, and historic mainline congregations all appear in the same list. Knowing a church is large tells you about its logistics and says nothing about what it preaches.

How Common Are They

Megachurches are rare as institutions and heavy as a share of attendance. The Hartford Institute for Religion Research has put the United States total at roughly 1,700 congregations meeting the threshold, out of hundreds of thousands of American congregations. Those 1,700 hold a share of total Protestant attendance far larger than their number suggests, and Hartford's researchers have repeatedly found attendance concentrating: the largest congregations keep growing while the median American congregation shrinks. The typical American church is small and getting smaller, and the typical American churchgoer is increasingly likely to attend somewhere large.

Congregation counts and the concentration of attendance: Hartford Institute for Religion Research and the Faith Communities Today research partnership.

The Global Picture

The largest congregations on earth are outside the United States. Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, which the congregation itself reports as the largest single Christian congregation in the world, built its size on Pentecostal worship and a cell-group system. Nigeria produces gatherings on a scale with no American parallel, including the camp meetings of the Redeemed Christian Church of God and the auditorium built by David Oyedepo at Winners Chapel, a story told further in our guide to Christianity in Africa. Brazil, Guatemala and Indonesia all have congregations that would rank near the top of any American list. The megachurch is a global Protestant form, and its centre of gravity has moved south.

2. Where the Model Came From

The megachurch is older than the suburbs it is associated with. Charles Spurgeon preached to congregations of several thousand at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London from 1861, in a building designed so that a single unamplified voice could reach the whole room. Aimee Semple McPherson opened Angelus Temple in Los Angeles in 1923 with seating in the thousands, added her own radio station the following year, and preached with a brass band and a theatrical staging that anticipated almost everything a modern production team does. Large single-preacher congregations have existed for as long as cities have been able to fill them.

The Postwar Turn

What changed after the Second World War was the car, the suburb and the parking lot. Robert Schuller began preaching in 1955 from the roof of a snack bar at a drive-in theatre in Garden Grove, California, so that people could hear a sermon without leaving the vehicle. He built that ministry into the Crystal Cathedral and the Hour of Power television broadcast, and he taught a generation of pastors that a church could be designed around the habits of the people it wanted to reach. His ministry later went into bankruptcy, the building was bought by the Catholic Diocese of Orange, and it was dedicated as Christ Cathedral in 2019. Few buildings carry the argument of this page more plainly.

Church Growth and the Seeker Service

The intellectual engine was the Church Growth Movement, begun by the missiologist Donald McGavran and carried into American practice through Fuller Theological Seminary from the 1970s. McGavran studied why some mission fields grew and others did not, and his followers applied the same analysis to American congregations: study the local population, remove the barriers that keep outsiders away, and measure the results. Bill Hybels founded Willow Creek Community Church in the Chicago suburbs in 1975, meeting first in a rented cinema in Palatine and moving to a purpose-built campus in South Barrington in 1981. He surveyed local residents about why they did not attend church and built a service designed for the answers they gave. Drama, contemporary music, plain language, no liturgical vocabulary, no offering pressure on visitors. The seeker service was born.

Rick Warren founded Saddleback Church in Orange County in 1980 and turned the method into a curriculum. The Purpose Driven Church and later The Purpose Driven Life gave pastors everywhere a replicable system, and Willow Creek's association conferences trained tens of thousands of leaders. By the 1990s the model had become a genuine tradition with its own conferences, its own consultants, its own vocabulary of vision and mission and next steps, and its own alumni network. Most of the churches now called megachurches inherited it rather than invented it.

3. Multisite Campuses & Video Venues

A multisite church is one congregation meeting in several locations under one budget, one staff and one board. The teaching is centralised: the same sermon is delivered at every campus, either by video from the central auditorium or by the preacher driving between locations to repeat it live. Each site has a campus pastor who leads the local service, runs the ministries and handles pastoral care, and who does not normally preach. The Hartford Institute for Religion Research has found that a large majority of American megachurches now operate more than one site, which makes multisite the default architecture of the category rather than an experiment within it.

Prevalence of multisite among American megachurches: Hartford Institute for Religion Research megachurch surveys.

Why Churches Go Multisite

The reasoning is practical and mostly sound. A congregation that has filled its building faces a choice between building a bigger one, planting an independent church, or opening another room. Opening another room is cheaper and faster than a capital campaign, and it keeps the new site inside a proven system of staffing, finance and child safeguarding rather than sending a young pastor out alone with a launch team and no support. A leased school gym in a growing suburb can hold a service within months. Growth by site is the least capital-intensive way for a large congregation to keep growing.

Craig Groeschel built Life.Church on this architecture from the beginning, running dozens of locations on centralised video teaching and building the technical systems to support it. Andy Stanley developed North Point Community Church in suburban Atlanta into a multi-campus network with the same logic. In both cases the church treats teaching as a product produced once and distributed, and treats everything else as local.

The Video Venue Question

The disagreement inside Protestantism about video teaching is real and worth stating fairly. Defenders argue that the sermon is the proclamation of the Word, that the Word does not depend on the physical proximity of the preacher, that congregations have listened to recorded and broadcast preaching for a century, and that a strong preacher on a screen serves a congregation better than a weak one in the room. Critics, many of them within the same evangelical world, argue that preaching is a pastoral act performed by a man who knows the people in front of him, that a screen cannot look anyone in the eye, and that a campus with no preacher of its own is a satellite audience rather than a church. Both arguments are made in good faith by people who love the same Bible.

The Catholic structure sidesteps the question in a way worth noticing. A parish cannot be a video venue, because what happens at a parish is the offering of the Mass at an altar by a priest who is physically present. Watching a Mass on a screen is a real spiritual good for the homebound, and the Church is clear that a broadcast does not satisfy the Sunday obligation and that Communion cannot be received through a screen. The reason lies in what the Church believes is happening: the centre of Catholic worship is a sacrament that requires a body in the room.

4. How a Weekend Service Is Produced

A megachurch weekend service is produced the way a broadcast is produced, on a schedule that begins the previous Monday. Understanding the production is the fastest way to understand what the model values, because a service like this is an expensive object and everything in it is there on purpose.

The Weekly Cycle

A typical cycle runs something like this. Early in the week the teaching team reviews the previous weekend's attendance, giving, and response numbers, then works on the coming sermon. Midweek the creative or programming team locks the service order: song list, transitions, video pieces, announcements, the length of each element to the minute. The band rehearses midweek and again on the day. Volunteer teams for parking, greeting, children's ministry, hospitality and production are scheduled through software weeks in advance. On the weekend the whole thing runs multiple times, sometimes five or six identical services across campuses, held to a runtime of roughly seventy to ninety minutes.

The Room

The room is built for sightlines and sound. Seating is theatre-style and raked so that everyone can see one point, which is the stage. Lighting is designed to darken the congregation and illuminate the platform, which focuses attention forward and lets a newcomer sit unobserved. Many churches choose that deliberately, because a visitor who fears being singled out will come back. Sound is mixed for a band, which is a different engineering task from carrying a room full of voices. Screens carry lyrics, sermon points and camera feeds. There is no altar and no tabernacle, and the platform is a working surface that is redressed with each teaching series.

The Order of Service

The shape is remarkably consistent across thousands of congregations: three or four songs of contemporary worship, a welcome and announcements, a giving moment, a sermon of thirty to forty-five minutes, a closing song, and an invitation to a next step. The Lord's Supper appears monthly or quarterly in most of these churches rather than weekly, which is the single largest structural difference from a Catholic Mass. The sermon carries the weight that the Eucharist carries in a Catholic liturgy. It is the reason the room exists and the longest element in it.

The worship music itself is an industry now, and a small number of megachurches supply most of what the rest of the Protestant world sings. Hillsong in Sydney, Elevation Worship in Charlotte and Bethel Music in Redding write and license songs that reach congregations of every size and denomination. That concentration means a handful of churches shape the sung theology of millions of Christians who have never visited them.

5. Who Is Actually in Charge

Most megachurches are governed by a board, usually called the elder board, the board of overseers, or the board of directors, which holds legal and spiritual authority over the church and its senior pastor. The senior pastor is an employee of that board in law and a member of it in practice. There is no bishop above the board and, in the large number of megachurches that are independent or nondenominational, no denomination above it either. The board is the ceiling.

How Boards Are Filled

The critical detail is how members reach the board. In many of these churches the board is self-perpetuating: existing members nominate new members, and the congregation either ratifies a single slate or has no vote at all. Some churches elect elders congregationally, particularly those in the Baptist tradition, where congregational authority is a matter of principle rather than of bylaws. Our guide to Baptist belief and practice explains that polity in its own terms. Where the board is self-perpetuating, and where the senior pastor has influence over nominations, the people who can fire the pastor are in a meaningful sense chosen by the pastor. That loop is the structural weakness of the model, and it is the one that shows up in nearly every failure.

The Executive Layer

Below the board sits a staff structure that looks like a mid-sized company: an executive pastor or chief operating officer running operations, campus pastors, a teaching team, directors for worship, students, children, groups, missions, communications and facilities, plus finance, human resources and legal. A church of 8,000 may employ over a hundred people and manage several thousand volunteers. The competence required is genuine, and many of these organisations are run well by people who could earn far more elsewhere.

Denominational and Network Ties

Some megachurches sit inside denominations with real authority over them. Assemblies of God congregations answer to district and general councils, a structure described in our guide to Pentecostalism. Southern Baptist congregations are autonomous in governance and yet can be removed from the convention, as Saddleback was in 2023 over the ordination of women. Many others belong to voluntary networks that provide training, conferences and church-planting support with no power to discipline. The practical spectrum runs from real accountability, through soft affiliation, to a single congregation accountable to nobody outside its own bylaws.

6. The Founder & the Concentration of Authority

A founding pastor holds a kind of authority that no set of bylaws can describe. He raised the money, chose the site, preached to the first forty people in a rented room, married and buried the families who now form the core, and gave the church its language and its instincts. Members joined because of him. Staff were hired by him. Board members were often recruited by him. The formal structure says he is accountable to the board; the emotional structure says the board exists because of him.

Why This Is Not Simply a Flaw

Founder authority does real work. Congregations that grow fast need decisions made quickly, and a trusted founder can move an organisation through change that a committee would stall for years. Charisma in the ordinary sense is a gift, and Scripture treats leadership itself as a gift given for the building up of the body (Romans 12:8, Ephesians 4:11-12). Many founders use that authority to hold a church to the gospel and to spend themselves on people who will never repay it. The concentration is a genuine asset for as long as the man is sound.

Where It Turns

The turn happens when the founder becomes the thing the church cannot afford to lose. Attendance, giving, staff morale, book sales, conference bookings and the church's public identity all run through one person, and every board member knows it. Confronting him is personally hard, and it also threatens the institution that employs everyone in the room. Staff learn what cannot be said. Complaints get handled quietly to protect the mission. The word most often used afterwards, by former staff of many different churches, is culture: a culture where raising a concern about the leader was treated as disloyalty to God's work.

The pattern has recurred often enough to be predictable. Bill Hybels resigned from Willow Creek in 2018 amid allegations of misconduct, and the following months brought the resignation of the church's lead pastors and its entire elder board. Ted Haggard resigned from New Life Church in Colorado Springs in 2006. Robert Morris resigned from Gateway Church in 2024 after acknowledging sexual conduct with a twelve-year-old girl in the 1980s, and was indicted in Oklahoma in 2025 on charges of lewd acts with a child. Brian Houston resigned from Hillsong in 2022 following an internal investigation. Our guide to church scandals treats these cases and the Catholic Church's own far graver record at length, and it should be read alongside this page rather than summarised here.

7. Where the Money Comes From

Almost all megachurch income is the weekly giving of members, and most of it now arrives by automatic recurring transfer rather than through a plate. A church of several thousand attenders typically runs an annual budget in the millions, weighted heavily toward staff salaries, then facilities and debt service, then ministry programmes, then missions and benevolence. Building campaigns are raised separately as multi-year pledge drives for capital projects. Secondary income comes from bookstores, cafes, conferences, curriculum sales and, for a few churches, worship music licensing.

The Disclosure Gap

Churches in the United States are not required to file the IRS Form 990 that other tax-exempt organisations file, and they are not required to publish salaries or audited accounts. Disclosure is therefore a choice. Some megachurches publish annual reports with audited financial statements and are accredited by the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, a voluntary body whose standards require an independent board and financial transparency. Others publish nothing at all, and a member has no legal route to find out what the senior pastor earns or how much the church holds in reserve.

Filing exemption for churches: Internal Revenue Service rules on tax-exempt organisations. Accreditation standards: Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, a membership body that churches join voluntarily.

Where Money Becomes Doctrine

A minority of large churches teach that giving to the ministry produces financial return to the giver. That teaching, usually called the prosperity gospel or Word of Faith, is a doctrinal position with its own history and its own defenders, and it is treated in full in our guide to the prosperity gospel. Most megachurches do not teach it. Conflating the two is the commonest unfair move made against these congregations, and it lets the churches that do teach it hide inside a crowd. Judge each church by what it preaches on the Sunday it asks for money.

The Catholic Arrangement

Catholic parishes are structurally different in a way that is easy to state. Canon law requires every parish to have a finance council of laypeople (canon 537), requires every diocese to have one as well (canon 492), and requires the pastor to administer parish goods under the norms of law rather than at his discretion. Parish property belongs to the parish as a juridic person within the diocese and not to the pastor or his family. A pastor cannot sell the building, cannot set his own salary, and does not own the name. None of that prevents theft, and Catholic parishes have been robbed by their own pastors. It does mean that a Catholic layman asking to see the parish books is asking for something canon law already says he is entitled to have a council overseeing.

8. Small Groups: The Pastoral Layer

Small groups are how a megachurch does the work a parish priest does. Ten or twelve people meet in a home on a weeknight to study Scripture, pray, eat together and know each other, led by a volunteer trained by the church. Every serious megachurch runs a groups system, and every serious megachurch pastor will tell a new member that the weekend service is where you meet the church and the group is where you belong to it. The line is repeated so often because the leadership knows exactly what the auditorium cannot do.

The Design Is Sound

The theology behind it is defensible and old. The first Christians met in the temple courts and broke bread in their homes (Acts 2:46), and the New Testament letters are addressed to churches meeting in houses (Romans 16:5, Colossians 4:15). A large gathering for teaching and a small gathering for care is a genuinely apostolic pattern. When a groups system works, it produces something Catholic parishes frequently fail to produce: adults who read Scripture together every week, know each other's marriages and jobs and troubles, bring meals when a baby arrives, and notice within days when someone stops coming.

Where It Strains

The strain shows in three places. Participation is the first: churches that report large attendance often have a minority of attenders in a group, and the rest receive no pastoral contact of any kind. Competence is the second: a volunteer leader with a workbook is carrying conversations about addiction, abuse, suicidal thinking and dying parents, and the church's ability to escalate those to trained staff varies enormously. Sacramental limits are the third, and they are structural. A group can pray with a dying man. It cannot absolve him or anoint him.

That last point is where the Catholic difference is sharpest and least about size. A Catholic in crisis has a right to a priest, and the priest brings something the parish does not generate socially: confession, the anointing of the sick, and the Eucharist carried to a hospital bed at two in the morning. The Church's sacramental system exists so that pastoral care does not depend on whether someone happened to join a group. Our guides to confession and to the Catholic priesthood set out what those ministries are and why they require an ordained man.

9. What Happens in a Succession

Succession is the hardest structural problem the megachurch model has, because the institution was built around a person and the person eventually stops. There is no external authority that appoints the next pastor, no seniority system, no pool of clergy assigned to the body. The board must find, hire and install a successor, usually while the founder is still alive, still known, still loved and still in the building.

The Three Routes

Churches take one of three paths. The family handoff passes the pulpit to a son or a son-in-law, which preserves continuity and invites the obvious criticism that a congregation of thousands has become an inheritance. The internal promotion elevates a long-serving teaching pastor who already knows the church, which is the safest route and often the least exciting to a congregation used to a star. The outside hire brings in a preacher from elsewhere, which is the highest-risk option and the one most likely to be followed by a sharp drop in attendance, giving and staff retention as members who came for one man discover that they did not come for a church.

Successions do work. Rick Warren stepped down from Saddleback in 2022 after more than forty years and handed the church to a successor chosen through a formal search, and the congregation continued. Andy Stanley and Craig Groeschel both built teaching teams over years precisely so that no single voice would be irreplaceable. Where boards start the work a decade early, name the successor publicly, give him the pulpit regularly before the handover and then get the founder out of the building, the transition holds.

When It Goes Badly

The failure modes are consistent. A founder announces a handover and stays, and the successor preaches to a congregation that keeps looking past him. A church splits when a faction leaves with a staff member and starts a congregation three miles away. Giving falls faster than attendance because the largest donors were personally attached to the founder, and a building financed against past giving becomes unpayable. In the hardest cases the congregation closes and the members scatter, some to other large churches, some to nothing at all. Our guide to why people leave church follows what happens to those people afterwards.

10. What the Model Genuinely Does Well

Millions of people have met Jesus Christ in these churches, and any Catholic account that skips past that fact is dishonest. The megachurch does several things with real competence, and most of them are things Catholic parishes have permitted themselves to do badly for a long time.

Hospitality to the Outsider

A first-time visitor to a well-run megachurch is met in the parking lot, greeted at the door, shown where to put a child, handed coffee, given a service they can follow without knowing any vocabulary, and told plainly what to do next. A first-time visitor to a typical Catholic parish parks unaided, walks into a liturgy full of unexplained postures and responses, and leaves without a single person having spoken to them. Both experiences are the product of choices. Only one of them was designed.

Assumed Adult Formation

These churches expect adults to keep learning. Sermon series run for weeks on a single book of Scripture, group curricula are produced and distributed, classes on marriage, money, parenting, grief and addiction run continuously, and the expectation that a Christian adult reads the Bible daily is stated from the platform without embarrassment. Catholic parishes often stop forming people at confirmation and then wonder why confirmed adults cannot explain the faith.

Volunteering as Normal Christian Life

Megachurches ask a great deal of ordinary members and get it. Parking teams, greeters, children's workers, tech crews, group leaders, benevolence teams and recovery ministries run on lay volunteers who are recruited, trained, scheduled and thanked by name. The model treats every member as someone with something to give, which is a straightforwardly biblical conviction about the gifts distributed through the body (1 Corinthians 12:4-7).

Service That Reaches Outside the Building

Food pantries, addiction recovery programmes, foster and adoption ministries, prison work, disaster response teams and international partnerships are staples rather than exceptions in these congregations. The scale that makes the auditorium uncomfortable also makes a serious relief operation possible, and when a hurricane hits a region, large churches are frequently among the first organisations distributing supplies.

Answering the Question of Belonging

People stay in these churches because they are known there. A well-run group system, a serving team and a mid-week rhythm can produce the strongest experience of Christian community a person has ever had. That is worth saying plainly, because the Catholic critique that follows is about structure and not about sincerity, and the people in those rooms are frequently more devout, more generous and more scripturally literate than the Catholics who dismiss them.

11. How the Model Fails

The failure modes of the megachurch follow from its design, which is why they repeat across churches that have no connection to each other. Five recur.

The Preacher Becomes the Church

When a congregation is gathered by a voice, the voice becomes load-bearing. Attendance tracks the preacher, giving tracks the preacher, the church's public reputation is the preacher's reputation, and the board's independence erodes in proportion to how much the church needs him. Paul confronted exactly this in Corinth, where the congregation had sorted itself into parties named after its favourite preachers, and his answer was to ask whether Paul had been crucified for them (1 Corinthians 1:12-13).

Crowds Without Membership

Large weekend attendance can conceal how few people are actually connected. A church reporting 6,000 attenders may have a fraction of that number in groups, serving or giving, and the remainder are attending a service the way one attends a lecture. The consequence appears in a crisis: people who have been present for years discover that nobody in the building knows their surname.

Accountability Wired to the Wrong Point

A self-perpetuating board chosen with the senior pastor's involvement cannot reliably discipline that pastor. The fault sits in the design of the safeguard rather than in the character of any particular board, and it explains why so many of these failures follow the same script: years of internal concerns, a culture that discourages raising them, an eventual disclosure to journalists rather than to the board, and a collapse that surprises the congregation and surprises nobody on staff.

Measurement Distorting the Mission

What gets counted gets pursued. Attendance, giving, baptisms and group sign-ups are the metrics available, and they are all real goods, so it takes discipline to remember that repentance, perseverance, holiness and the endurance of a long marriage cannot be counted at all. A church that manages what it measures will slowly optimise for the measurable, and the measurable is the weekend.

The Lord's Supper as an Occasional Element

Communion in most of these churches is celebrated monthly or quarterly, with elements distributed by ushers or collected at the door. What it is held to be varies: many of these congregations teach the memorial view associated with Zwingli, while the Reformed among them teach that Christ is truly received by faith in the Supper, in the sense Calvin defended. Neither position is the Catholic doctrine that the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ. From a Catholic standpoint this is the deepest loss on the list, because it means the central act of Christian worship since the apostles is present as an occasional appendix to a sermon. Our guides to the Eucharist and to the Mass set out the Catholic claim and the scriptural case behind it.

12. An Altar & a Bishop, a Stage & a Board

The Catholic difference from a megachurch is structural before it is moral. Two arrangements are being compared, each with a centre and each with a line of authority, and the honest way to compare them is to ask what each one does when things go well and what each one does when a leader fails.

The Centre of the Room

A Catholic church is built around an altar because the Mass is a sacrifice offered on it, and the Second Vatican Council called the Eucharist the source and summit of the Christian life (Lumen Gentium 11). The tabernacle holds the Blessed Sacrament so that Christ is present in the building when no service is running, which is why Catholics genuflect toward a fixed point rather than toward a platform. A megachurch auditorium is built around a stage because the sermon is the central act, and the stage is reconfigured for each teaching series precisely because nothing permanent is meant to live on it. Each building tells the truth about what its tradition believes is happening in the room.

The Line of Authority

A Catholic parish exists because a diocesan bishop erected it, and its pastor holds office by the bishop's appointment (canon 523). That bishop can remove him, and canon law sets out a procedure for doing so. The bishop himself is accountable to Rome, holds office in a succession the Church traces to the apostles, and serves as what the Council called the visible source and foundation of unity in his particular church (Lumen Gentium 23). Ignatius of Antioch, writing around the year 107, already stated the principle: let that Eucharist be considered valid which is celebrated by the bishop or by one he appoints (Letter to the Smyrnaeans 8). Authority in a megachurch, by contrast, terminates at a board that the congregation frequently did not elect and cannot reach.

The Test Case

The clearest way to see the difference is to run the same disaster through both systems. A pastor is credibly accused of serious misconduct. In a Catholic parish, the bishop can remove him from ministry, appoint an administrator that week, and the Sunday Mass is offered at the same altar by another priest, because the sacrament does not depend on the holiness of the man who confects it. The parish, the school, the building and the sacramental records survive the man. In an independent megachurch, the accusation must be brought to a board he helped select, and if the board acts, the church can still lose its preacher, its identity, a large part of its attendance and giving, and sometimes its building. The people scatter.

Catholics have no grounds for smugness here. The abuse crisis proved that a hierarchy can be used to move offenders quietly between parishes for decades, and the structural advantage described above was turned into a structural weapon by bishops who chose to protect the institution. The claim is narrow and it survives that history: the Catholic arrangement is designed so that the Church outlasts the failure of any individual minister, and the independent megachurch is designed so that a congregation and its founder rise and fall together.

For the wider theological argument behind these differences, including Scripture, Tradition, justification and the sacraments, see our guide to Catholic and Protestant differences, and our map of the families in Christian denominations explained. The Catholic Church's own account of how it relates to these congregations is set out in our guide to ecumenism.

13. Questions Worth Asking Your Own Church

The useful conclusion of a page like this is a short list of questions that work on any congregation, large or small, Protestant or Catholic. Ask them about the church you actually attend.

The Governance Questions

• Who has the authority to remove the senior pastor, and how did those people get their seats?
• Is there any authority above this congregation, and has it ever intervened here?
• Where would a member take a serious complaint about the pastor, and what happened the last time someone did?

The Money Questions

• Does the church publish audited financial statements that a member can read without asking?
• Who sets the senior pastor's compensation, and is that person independent of him?
• Is outside income, from books, conferences or music, disclosed to the congregation?

The Pastoral Questions

• If you were hospitalised tonight, who in this church would know, and who would come?
• What proportion of weekend attenders are in a group or a serving team?
• When someone stops attending, does anyone follow up?

The Question That Sits Underneath

What is at the centre of the room, and what is it for? A congregation gathered around excellent preaching has something valuable and fragile, because preaching depends on the preacher. A congregation gathered around the Eucharist has something that does not depend on the man at the altar, because Christ acts in the sacrament regardless of the merits of the minister. That is the Catholic claim, and it is either true or it is not. Nobody should decide it by the quality of a band or a car park.

If you are Catholic and this page has made your parish look shabby by comparison, the right response is to fix the parish. Greet strangers. Start an adult Bible study. Volunteer for something. Learn the faith well enough to explain it to a neighbour who asks. The megachurch's strengths are all things a parish could do tomorrow, and none of them require giving up the altar. If you are attending a large Protestant church and this page has raised questions, take them to your own leaders first and ask them plainly. A healthy church can answer them.

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