Sunday at a (not so) megachurch
Posted July 16, 2006
I attended University Park Church in Fort Worth, Texas this morning -- one of the 1,200 Protestant congregations which have been labeled "megachurches" by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research.
To qualify, churches are supposed to have average attendance of about 2,000. According to the Institute's database, University Park runs 2,500 people every weekend. But that's not what I encountered. University Park's 900-seat worship center was half-empty.
There are megachurches, of course, that are jammed into 900-seat sanctuaries. Some of them hold four or five services -- drawing thousands every week. But University Park only has one Sunday morning service (and none on Saturdays).
Members I spoke to explained that the congregation had split within the last year or so after allegations of misconduct were levied against their former pastor. Even before the breakup, average Sunday attendance had never topped 1,200 or 1,300, one of the current pastors told me.
So how did the church make the megachurch list if it's never been mega-sized? That's a question I'll ask the folks at Hartford Institute for Religion Research next week.
My guess is that they use an honor system. There's no way academics in New England can tally the numbers, week after week, service after service for 1,200 churches nationwide.
It may also be that the church at one time had 2,500 members -- but megachurch status is supposedly determined by counting the people in the pews, not the names on the rolls.
When I get answers, I'll post them.
To look for congregations in your area which have been designated megachurches, go to: http://hirr.hartsem.edu/megachurch/megachurchresearch.html
COMMENTS:
AUTHOR: Caleb Powers
EMAIL: Lexington40502@aol.com
DATE: 07/20/2006 04:36:35 PM
This is a very interesting post, which leads directly to the question of whether to believe much of any statistic regarding churches or church attendance in America.
As far as I know, no organization does anything approaching a weekly census of church attendance, and most people (wanting to look "good") over-report their church attendance, I suspect.
And, most reporting of statistics like this, I think, tend to over-report the influence and attendance of people at evangelical churches, as opposed to more mainstream and progressive congregations.
For example, your other post about "influential" congregations tends to leave out congregations that influence the more progressive christians, congregations like the Riverside Church in New York that was for so long associated with the anti-war movement, and your own Harvard Memorial Church, with University Chaplain Peter Gomes, a gay black Baptist minister to a largely straight and white "congregation," consisting of all the university's students.
Not all churches are evangelical, and not all churches are friendly. But it was these not so friendly not so evangelical churches who were there supporting blacks during the civil rights movement and all of us during the Vietnam War.