About a week ago, the video embedded at the end of this post was forwarded to me. I’m still processing it. It’s a presentation by Skye Jethani, editor of Leadership Journal, to a gathering in Dallas, Texas, of evangelical (including many mega-church) pastors. Other than the fact that Jethani equates evangelical mega-churches with “the American church” and “American Christianity” (as though no other kind of church exists in the U.S.), his presentation was pleasantly surprising to me.
Jethani did not say anything particularly new. He’s been reading the same research that a lot of us in ministry have been absorbing over the past few years. But I can only imagine how his frank words must have been received by the pastors he was addressing. He challenged their basic orthodoxy of church growth in two ways. First, he shared data to prove that the mega-church movement has failed to advance the cause of Christ in America. Overall church membership and attendance in the U.S. have been in decline as the mega-church movement has grown, and public trust in organized religion has eroded during the same period. Second, he asserted that the mega-church movement is reaching the end of its effectiveness. The appeal of mega-churches is pretty much limited to the “boomer” generation, which sees “big” as “successful” and “popular,” and the bigger the better. On the other hand, the children of boomers – Gen X-ers and millennials – see “big” as “not to be trusted,” and assume that any big organization must have done something corrupt in order to be that successful.