Megachurch
Based on Wikipedia: Megachurch
The Stadium Where Sunday Happens
In Abuja, Nigeria, there is a building called the Glory Dome. It has one hundred thousand seats. That's not a typo. One hundred thousand people can gather there at once—more than most professional football stadiums hold. It opened in 2018, and it is a church.
This is what the megachurch phenomenon has become in the twenty-first century: buildings that dwarf sports arenas, congregations that rival small cities, and a global movement that has fundamentally transformed what it means to gather for worship.
But the megachurch didn't start in Africa, and it didn't start recently. It began in Victorian London, with a man named Charles Spurgeon and a six-thousand-seat auditorium called the Metropolitan Tabernacle. The year was 1861.
What Exactly Is a Megachurch?
The definition is surprisingly precise. According to the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, a megachurch is any Protestant Christian church where at least two thousand people show up on a typical weekend. That's the threshold. Cross it, and you're in megachurch territory.
The word "Protestant" matters here. Catholic parishes can certainly draw crowds—some three thousand individual Catholic churches in the United States have two thousand or more people at Sunday Mass—but they aren't called megachurches. The term belongs specifically to the Protestant world, and within that world, it belongs overwhelmingly to evangelical and Pentecostal congregations.
There's also a bigger sibling: the gigachurch. If your Sunday attendance exceeds ten thousand people, that's what you are. In 2015, about one hundred American churches qualified for this designation.
The largest megachurch ever measured, at least by membership rolls, was South Korea's Yoido Full Gospel Church. In 2007, it claimed more than eight hundred thirty thousand members. That's larger than the population of Seattle.
The Suburban Strategy
If you've ever driven through the outskirts of an American city—particularly in Texas, Florida, California, or Georgia—you've probably noticed them. They don't look like churches. They look like convention centers, or corporate headquarters, or sometimes like actual sports arenas.
That's intentional.
Megachurches almost never build downtown. They position themselves in suburbs, near major highways and intersections, visible from as far away as possible. The goal is accessibility by car. Many install enormous crosses—not just as symbols of faith, but as beacons. If you're looking for a church and you see that cross from the highway, you know where to turn.
The architecture has evolved over time. Older megachurches often borrowed from traditional church design—spires, stained glass, organs. But starting in the late 2000s, the aesthetic shifted dramatically. Stadium seating became standard. Stages replaced altars. Video screens proliferated. The overall effect is less "house of worship" and more "arena for a really well-attended concert."
Lakewood Church in Houston takes this to its logical conclusion. It doesn't resemble an arena. It is one. The congregation purchased the former Compaq Center—home of the Houston Rockets basketball team—and converted it into their permanent home. When you attend Sunday services there, you're sitting where NBA games used to be played.
The Multi-Site Revolution
Here's something that might surprise you: most American megachurches aren't in one location anymore.
A 2020 study found that seventy percent of megachurches operate what's called a multi-site network. Instead of one massive building, they run several locations—sometimes dozens—all showing the same sermon, often via live video feed. The average megachurch in this study held seven and a half services every weekend across all its campuses.
This model solves several problems at once. It's cheaper than building one enormous facility. It lets the church penetrate multiple neighborhoods. And it creates a franchise-like consistency: wherever you go, you get the same preacher, the same message, the same brand.
The word "brand" isn't accidental. Megachurches operate with a level of organizational sophistication that would be familiar to any corporate executive. They have marketing departments. Communications teams. Production crews that rival television studios. Some even have their own record labels—Hillsong Worship, the music arm of Australia's Hillsong Church, has won Grammy Awards.
The Televangelist Connection
Megachurches and televangelism grew up together, and they've remained intertwined.
The pioneer was Aimee Semple McPherson. In 1923, she opened the Angelus Temple in Los Angeles—five thousand three hundred seats, making it one of the first American megachurches. But McPherson didn't just preach to the people in those seats. She broadcast her sermons on radio, becoming one of the first religious figures to grasp the power of mass media.
The pattern repeated throughout the twentieth century. Robert Schuller built the Crystal Cathedral and hosted "Hour of Power" on television. Oral Roberts ran both a megachurch and a television ministry. Jerry Falwell did the same. Today, Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church services are broadcast to millions, and T.D. Jakes has built a media empire alongside his Potter's House congregation in Dallas.
The logic is straightforward. If you can draw two thousand people to a physical building, and you can also reach two million through television or internet streaming, which audience matters more? The answer, for many megachurch pastors, has been "both"—but the broadcast audience often becomes the primary focus. The people in the seats become, in a sense, a live studio audience for the real show happening on camera.
The Global Phenomenon
Americans sometimes assume the megachurch is a uniquely American invention. It isn't.
Sub-Saharan Africa has embraced the model with particular enthusiasm. Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania—all have thriving megachurch scenes. The Glory Dome in Abuja, that hundred-thousand-seat behemoth, belongs to Dunamis International Gospel Centre. Winners' Chapel, another Nigerian church, has a similarly massive sanctuary.
South Korea was, for decades, the global capital of megachurch Christianity. The Yoido Full Gospel Church, mentioned earlier, is a Pentecostal congregation affiliated with the Assemblies of God. In 2007, five of the ten largest Protestant churches in the world were Korean.
Australia has produced internationally significant megachurch movements. Hillsong Church, founded in Sydney in 1983, has planted congregations across the world and created some of the most widely sung worship music in contemporary Christianity. The C3 Global Network, also Australian, has similarly expanded internationally.
Indonesia hosts megachurches despite being a Muslim-majority country. Graha Bethany Nginden in Surabaya is one of the largest churches in Southeast Asia.
The Hartford Institute counts over eighteen hundred megachurches in the United States alone, plus thirty-five in Canada. A separate count by the organization Exponential found two hundred seventy evangelical megachurches in the rest of the world, excluding North America. But that count is almost certainly incomplete—tracking churches in developing countries is difficult, and new ones are being founded constantly.
One in Ten
Here's a statistic that captures the scale of the phenomenon: on one weekend in November 2015, approximately one in ten Protestant churchgoers in the United States attended a megachurch. That's about five million people.
The growth has been explosive. Between 1997 and 2017, the number of American megachurches more than quadrupled. This happened during a period when overall church attendance in the United States was declining. Megachurches weren't just growing—they were growing while smaller churches shrank. They were consolidating American Protestant Christianity into fewer, larger, more professionally managed institutions.
Some researchers call this the "Walmart effect." Just as Walmart drove smaller retailers out of business through economies of scale, megachurches can offer programming—youth groups, support services, professional-quality music, celebrity preachers—that smaller congregations simply cannot match. If you're looking for a church, and you compare the local congregation of two hundred members to the megachurch down the highway with its concert lighting and famous pastor, the megachurch often wins.
The Controversies
Not everyone is impressed.
The criticism comes from multiple directions. Baptist pastor Al Sharpton, in 2005, attacked megachurches for obsessing over what he called "bedroom morals"—positions on same-sex marriage and abortion—while ignoring broader questions of social justice. Why, he asked, were these churches so concerned about who was sleeping with whom, and so unconcerned about war, poverty, and the erosion of civil rights?
Others have pointed to a specific kind of hypocrisy. Some megachurches market themselves as inclusive and welcoming communities while maintaining strict policies against LGBTQ participation. C3, the Australian network, has faced criticism for this—presenting a progressive, modern image while prohibiting sexually active gay members from full participation. The accusation is that these churches want the cultural cachet of openness without actually being open.
A more structural critique comes from theologians like Scot McKnight of Northern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has warned that many megachurches, particularly nondenominational ones, have dangerously weak accountability structures. In a traditional denominational church, the pastor answers to a hierarchy—bishops, synods, regional bodies—that can remove them for misconduct. In an independent megachurch, the pastor often answers to no one. The board of directors, if there is one, may be handpicked by the pastor himself. This creates conditions ripe for abuse of power.
The evidence suggests this isn't just theoretical. The megachurch world has been rocked by scandal after scandal in recent years. Brian Houston, founder of Hillsong, resigned amid allegations of misconduct. Carl Lentz, Hillsong's celebrity pastor in New York, was fired after admitting to an affair. Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle was forced out after accusations of bullying and abusive leadership. The list goes on.
The Prosperity Problem
Perhaps the most damaging criticism involves money.
Some megachurches preach what's called prosperity theology—the idea that God rewards faithful believers with material wealth. Give generously to the church, this teaching holds, and God will bless you financially. Your tithe is an investment that will pay supernatural dividends.
Critics argue this exploits the poor. If you're struggling financially and a charismatic preacher tells you that giving away money is the path to abundance, you might donate money you can't afford to lose. The church gets richer. The pastor gets richer. You stay poor, or become poorer—but the explanation is always that you didn't have enough faith, not that the theology was wrong.
The optics don't help. Some megachurch pastors live visibly luxurious lives. They wear designer clothes in the pulpit. They own multiple homes. They fly private jets. Kenneth Copeland, a televangelist and megachurch pastor, has defended his private jets by saying he needs them to avoid flying on commercial airlines with regular people—whom he described as being in "a long tube with a bunch of demons."
Whether this represents a few bad actors or something systemic is debated. Defenders point to megachurches that are financially transparent, pay their pastors modestly, and invest heavily in community services. Critics counter that the model itself—one charismatic leader controlling a huge organization with minimal external oversight—inevitably attracts people who want power and wealth, and gives them the means to acquire both.
The Cultural Footprint
Whatever you think of megachurches, they've become a fixture of American cultural imagination. You can see this in how often they appear in entertainment.
HBO's comedy-drama "The Righteous Gemstones" centers on a fictional megachurch dynasty in South Carolina, complete with a prosperity gospel message, family scandals, and a patriarch played by John Goodman. The show is satirical, but it's clearly drawing on real-world examples.
The 2022 film "Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul." stars Sterling K. Brown and Regina Hall as the pastor and first lady of a Southern Baptist megachurch trying to recover from scandal. It's a mockumentary—a fictional documentary—that plays the megachurch world for both comedy and pathos.
Even "The Simpsons" has gotten in on it. A two-part episode from the show's thirty-first season features a megachurch called "Blessed Buy" (a play on the electronics retailer Best Buy), complete with stadium seating and a charismatic leader.
Documentaries have been less gentle. "The Secrets of Hillsong" and "Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed" examined that organization's controversies. "God Loves Uganda" looked at the Miracle Centre Cathedral in Kampala and its role in promoting anti-gay legislation. "The Billionaire Bishop and the Global Megachurch" investigated the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and its founder, Edir Macedo.
These aren't obscure arthouse films. They're available on major streaming platforms, produced by major media companies. The megachurch has become a recognized American institution—significant enough to scrutinize, wealthy enough to satirize, and controversial enough that there's an audience for both.
The Pentecostal Engine
There's a theological dimension to the megachurch phenomenon that's easy to overlook.
Australian scholar Sam Hey, writing in 2011, noted that "almost all megachurch developments are Pentecostal, or charismatic and neo-Pentecostal offshoots." This isn't a coincidence. Pentecostalism is the fastest-growing branch of Christianity globally, and its worship style—emotional, participatory, emphasizing personal experience of the divine—is well-suited to large-scale gatherings.
A Pentecostal service typically features extended periods of contemporary worship music, with congregants raising their hands, swaying, sometimes speaking in tongues. The atmosphere is more rock concert than cathedral. This creates a kind of energy that scales well. Two thousand people singing and clapping together generates more excitement than two hundred people doing the same thing. The emotional power increases with the crowd size.
Traditional liturgical worship—the kind found in Catholic, Orthodox, and mainline Protestant churches—doesn't scale the same way. Reading prayers from a book, processing solemnly down an aisle, receiving communion in an orderly line: these rituals feel intimate and ancient, but they don't necessarily feel more powerful when more people participate. A Pentecostal worship session, by contrast, becomes more intense as the room gets more crowded.
This may explain why the megachurch model hasn't caught on in Catholic or Orthodox Christianity, despite those traditions having plenty of large congregations. The worship style that makes megachurches work—contemporary music, charismatic preaching, emotional catharsis—is a Protestant evangelical invention.
Where Does This Go?
The megachurch is now about a hundred sixty years old, dating from Spurgeon's Metropolitan Tabernacle in 1861. For most of that time, it was a curiosity—a few unusually large congregations scattered around the world. The explosive growth is recent, concentrated in the last four decades.
Whether that growth continues is an open question. Some of the largest megachurches have faced significant declines in the 2020s, following scandals and the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. Mars Hill Church, once one of the largest in the country, collapsed entirely. Hillsong has closed or rebranded multiple locations. Younger Americans are less likely to identify as Christian than their parents, and those who do identify as Christian are increasingly skeptical of institutional religion.
But the model has proven adaptable. Online services, which were once supplementary, became primary for many congregations during pandemic lockdowns. Some megachurches found they could reach more people through streaming than they ever could through physical attendance. The multi-site strategy continues to expand. And in the Global South—Africa, Latin America, parts of Asia—megachurch Christianity is still growing rapidly.
The hundred-thousand-seat Glory Dome in Nigeria isn't an endpoint. It's a data point on a trend line that nobody can confidently project. What we can say is that the megachurch has transformed Protestant Christianity in ways that would have astonished Charles Spurgeon, preaching to his six thousand Londoners in 1861. Whether that transformation is for better or worse depends, perhaps, on which seat you're sitting in.