TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/080591/0805610.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.6 KB | 141 lines

                                                                                RELIGION, Page 62

Superchurches and How They Grew


American Protestants are turning to one-stop spiritual shopping

BY RICHARD N. OSTLING -- With reporting by Minal Hajratwala/
New York


    Protestantism in the U.S. has always been the domain of
small, cozy congregations with 100 to 300 members; Catholic
parishes are often large, but few Protestant churches have ever
reached the 1,000-member point. Now, rapidly and dramatically,
that pattern is changing with the rise of superchurches that
boast mammoth memberships and facilities to match. Forty-three
Protestant congregations in the U.S. claim 5,000 or more Sunday
worshipers, says John N. Vaughan of Missouri's Southwest Baptist
University in his Church Growth Today newsletter. Moreover, 116
congregations in 28 states say their attendance jumped by 300
or more in just one year. Such centralization is unprecedented.

    The superchurch, a mall-size, high-profile house of
worship, is the natural counterpart of the super-supermarket and
the multiplex cinema. Brimming with self-confidence, these
congregations -- many of them independent of established
Protestant denominations -- have an increasing edge in the
competitive marketplace of U.S. religion and an inexorable
attraction for choosy consumers. Superchurches represent many
denominational labels or no label, but nearly all are
Evangelical, Fundamentalist, Charismatic or Pentecostalist,
preaching a conservative theology.

    And they are busy. So many people turn up at the Willow
Creek Community Church northwest of Chicago, for example, that
a traffic controller atop the building is needed to supervise
the uniformed attendants who direct cars across the acres of
asphalt. Befuddled visitors are greeted with information booths
in the lobby. At Calvary Chapel in Santa Ana, Calif., converts
are so numerous that they are baptized in the Pacific Ocean,
dozens at a time.

    Bigger almost always means better, at least in certain
ways. "Superchurches can offer a great youth program for all
ages, with professionals in charge, and great music, with choirs
and orchestras doing it the way it ought to be done," remarks
Edward Plowman of National & International Religion Report, a
newsletter in Springfield, Va. Plowman recently switched from
a small denominational church to a bustling independent
congregation with 2,000 members. At the 4,000-member Grace
Community Church in Sun Valley, Calif., the Rev. Lance Quinn
says, "We have lots of things that might also be true of smaller
churches. We just have them in megadoses."

    Along with enthusiastic, often entertaining, worship, a
major attraction is the churches' spiritual equivalent of
one-stop shopping. They provide not only Sunday school but also
long lists of elective courses for adults or specialized
ministries, for instance for the hearing impaired or
developmentally disabled. Groups can be targeted to Vietnamese
immigrants, young divorces, 50-plus singles or compulsive
eaters. "When you help people, your congregation grows," says
Pastor Tommy Barnett of the mushrooming First Assembly of God
in Phoenix. Barnett's church has programs for AIDS patients, the
wheelchair users, transients and alcoholics.

    Superchurches are unapologetic about passing the offering
plate, and giant incomes make possible multimillion-dollar
facilities that are another drawing card. The Texas-size Second
Baptist Church of Houston, for instance, features a movie
theater, weight rooms and saunas, a TV production center and
outdoor and indoor gardens. The Family Life Center at Arizona's
North Phoenix Baptist Church has its own gym, roller rink and
racquetball courts.

    Once a church reaches the critical mass of 1,000 members,
sheer size alone enables it to lure more followers. But what is
it that gets growth going in the first place? Not glitz,
Vaughan insists, but "a biblical vision of reaching a city for
Jesus," plus plenty of old-fashioned evangelistic toil and
mass-media savvy. Geography also helps. Big-growth churches
develop mostly in Sunbelt states or near limited-access highways
in growing suburbs with zoning boards that are willing to foster
expansion.

    There are exceptions. The nine-year-old Metropolitan
Assembly of God, located in a Do the Right Thing neighborhood
in Brooklyn, N.Y., goes all-out to recruit restless teenagers
and has a 9,000-student Sunday school. While many of the
fastest-growing congregations are young, First Baptist Church
of Hammond, Ind., famous for its armada of Sunday-school buses,
has been a Fundamentalist fixture for decades.

    The impact of superchurches on dowdier and smaller
congregations is not as threatening as doubters might expect.
Christianity Today magazine discovered that neighboring pastors
do not seem alarmed by their elephantine rivals. Small-church
pastors praised the varied programs offered by nearby
superchurches and said everyone got a boost when self-confident
Christianity became more acceptable.

    The most serious weakness of big churches is that they are
inherently impersonal. Perhaps some recruits join precisely
because they want to get lost in the crowd. But Vaughan thinks
the key to long-term prosperity is steering as many members as
possible into intimate groups such as Sunday-school classes or
at-home Bible studies. Lawyer Larry Jones says he and wife Linda
were initially "scared off" by Houston's Second Baptist,
thinking it would be "some stale place that has no heartbeat."
Instead they found all kinds of opportunities for close-knit
fellowship and joined last December.

    Critics also grumble that superchurch clergy, astride
their self-contained empires, are often completely independent
of effective oversight from denominations or locally elected
boards. Lyle Schaller of the Yokefellow Institute in Richmond,
Ind., who counsels congregations, notes that a superchurch is
guaranteed future trouble if it is built largely around a single
star preacher, who will be leaving someday.

    The majority of Protestant congregations are not huge,
expanding or glamorous, and tens of millions of U.S. believers
are content with their more traditional and modest surroundings.
Still, the superchurches have come to represent something new
and powerful in most metropolitan areas. Calvary Chapel has even
cloned itself, creating 370 daughter congregations across the
U.S. Experts expect to see more of these Christian emporiums --
and a consequent permanent alteration in the ecology of American
Protestantism.