Big churches must be a researcher’s playground. That’s what we have come to believe after working with Lyle Schaller, a veteran American church watcher, on this issue’s cover story (p. 20). Did you know that 1 in every 400 Nazarene churches is a megachurch? And that there is one megachurch for every eight McDonald’s?
We also learned about megachurches from the churches themselves. Most of the ten largest churches were initially suspicious about our request for photographs. But once they learned we simply wanted to show our readers what a megachurch looked like, we got everything from architectural drawings of their next really big auditorium to the pastor’s family portrait.
The CTi research department surveyed our readers and learned many of them thought that “in a huge church people become spectators instead of participants.” Perhaps that attitude is not surprising when we learn that one-fourth of CT’s readers attend a church of fewer than 100 people, while less than 10 percent attend a church of more than 1,000 people. (The average size of the church attended by CT readers has about 400 members.) When asked to identify the most desirable church size, one-third said 101–200, and another third said 201–500.
Big churches could be easy to criticize, but the consensus among those we talked with is that size need not inhibit the proclamation of the gospel. If thousands were added to the kingdom daily in Acts, perhaps we should not be surprised to see that congregations today think in those numbers.
LYN CRYDERMAN, Senior Associate Editor
