As illustrated in a recent Christianity Today article, {
Willow Creek and Harvest Struggle to Move On The departures of Bill Hybels and James MacDonald leave churches waiting for new leadership and hoping to rebuild trust. - by ABBY PERRY} the transition period for churches that have grown to prominence under a charismatic founder can be extremely dangerous, especially if that founder leaves suddenly under a cloud of moral failure. Churches both large and small are in danger when their pastor(s) is guilty of gross immorality, whether that revolves around sexual sin, financial theft (or gross luxury; i.e. a private jet and a mansion, even if authorized by the church board such compensation is a theft of funds that should be used for the ministry of the church), or simply an ego run amok. It stands to reason that a small church, one perhaps barely able to pay its bills, if that, with only a few dozen faithful members would have difficulty in finding a new pastor following a disastrous tenure of a minister who was, or became, unqualified to lead God's people. Much of that difficulty revolves around the limited resources available, both financial and manpower, to conduct a search and find an effective replacement. Such constraints would seem to be less of an issue at a mega church with attendance upwards of 10,000, multiple sites, a large paid staff, and a weekly million dollar budget capable of paying a well established and experienced minister to be their next senior pastor. And yet, as the article by Abby Perry shows, the emotional scars and questions of repentance revolving around those who failed to act earlier, are a common problem for both the tiny church and its seemingly very different mega cousin.
Cults of personality are deadly to a church no matter how big it is. This may seem obvious when that minister is leading the church down a path of unorthodox heresy, and/or displaying dangerous apocalyptic fanaticism (like, for example,
David Koresh), but it is also true when the church simply depends upon the personal leadership of that pastor so much that it cannot function without him/her. Some churches are able to transition relatively smoothly to a second generation of leadership, many struggle mightily, some don't make it at all. Coincidentally, this same phenomenon exists when a business attempts to replace an iconic founder, and on a smaller scale is equally challenging when a much simpler family business attempts to move on to a second generation.
Which brings into focus the larger question of mega churches. I myself am not the pastor of a mega church, although if I would have been this church's 12th pastor instead of its 31st, I would have been preaching regularly to a crowd of over 1,000; likely one of the largest congregations in America at the start of the 20th Century. Franklin today, however, has less than half the people living here than it did then, and 1st Baptist of Franklin is a small church (in a big building) in a small town. Venango County only has about 50k people, so we're not going to have a church in our area with weekly attendance of 5,000+ (500 seems to be about the height at this point, we have one church a mile away at that number and another a block away a bit under that). Thus while the mega church explosion is not directly impacting Church ministry here in rural Pennsylvania, and not likely to directly impact most of the sparsely populated areas of the globe, they still have a tremendous indirect influence upon the Church as a whole, especially given their high-profile ministers and multi-media products (think Hillsong's music {songs sung by 50 million people worldwide each Sunday}, Joel Osteen's books and TV show {7 million weekly viewers}, or Rick Warren's
The Purpose Driven Life {32 million copies sold}. Personally I appreciated Rick Warren's book, am ambivalent about Hillsong's music (not a strong music opinion person anyway), and think that Joel Osteen's theology would be dangerous at a church of twenty, but whether or not a particular manifestation of the mega church trend is in itself an overall positive or negative for the Church as a whole is actually a secondary question, for the Church has always had to contend with examples of poor leadership, with heretical authors/theologians, and cults of personality. What has changed, differentiating these mega churches from anything previous in Church history is their very size.
The Early Church began with house churches, limited in size by their obvious location constraints, after the legalization of the Church by Constantine {
The Edict of Milan}, the trend toward an organized system of parish churches began in earnest. Churches were established where another church was needed, and they were spread out sufficiently so as to not overlap, given that they were not in competition with each other. Local Christians, at Christendom's height that meant everybody in the village or town, excluding any Jews or other religious minority, were expected to attend their local parish, and instances of going further away (travel being limited to walking or riding a horse) to another parish must have been rare. A church in such a system could grow, if it convinced an even higher percentage of the local population to attend, or if the local population itself was growing, but it couldn't become any type of 'mega' church. The cathedrals in principle cities were large, but they too were constrained by the simple fact that a 10,000 seat church was not an architectural possibility.
Things have changed. Many (if not most) Christians don't attend the church that is closest to their home, they drive past several seeking the one that they're connected to, thus even large rural churches, let alone mega churches, are drawing from a wide geographic area, not simply a neighborhood.
The parish system, by and large, functioned well for more than a thousand years. We know that mega churches will not replace the far more numerous smaller churches, nor will they drive out of business, as it were, small churches like Walmart did to the small retailers. Assuming that the reality of mega churches isn't going anywhere, seemingly a safe assumption, what role will they play in the Church of the future? How stable will they prove as they transition from the first generation of their leadership? Without the charisma of the founder, will such a massive organization be able to bring in the people and money it needs to continue? These are certainly questions with implications for the Church as a whole, and largely ones that seem beyond our ability to have more than anecdotal answers to at this juncture; time will tell. If the struggles outlined in Christianity Today's article at both Willow Creek and Harvest are harbingers of things to come, individual mega churches may not have the longevity of the small local church.
