While we travel this year, we hope to experience communities that have not been a part of our life in San Francisco. We hope you have a chance to travel with us as we try to find ways to share our experience with you from afar.
Back in January, as Joanna and I looked at where to go, we both wanted to spend time in the American South — it’s part of the fabric and history of America, yet it felt foreign in many ways. It’s also warm and has no snow, which we figured would be a good break for the non-Canadian boo, after our time in snowy Colorado. One of the places we wanted to along the way was a megachurch.
Joanna has fond memories of a road trip through Savannah & Charleston and on up to New York City. However, she felt that maybe Savannah & Charleston might not be too representative of other parts of the South, and that cute old buildings and touring an old plantation gives only a small part of the picture of what it’s like in the South today. Joanna also grew up going to a fairly large synagogue (when she went to synagogue, which was really just a couple of times a year), so she was curious how a megachurch would compare.
Bryan went in with only the vaguest idea — brief glimpses of Billy Graham-era televangelism, and a sense of how and why the evangelical vote sways elections.
Finding a Megachurch
In Birmingham, Alabama, we started looking for megachurches to visit and had more than a dozen choices (from the Hartford Institute database). We picked the two marked in yellow: the Church of the Highlands and the Worship Center.
Highlands is the largest megachurch in the state of Alabama, with a weekly attendance over 20,000 people spread across 15 campuses. Each campus has its own local pastor and local volunteers, who create a blended service that merges on-site elements with a telecast main service from the central campus. Highlands was founded by Chris Hodges, who also co-founded the Association of Related Churches (ARC). Through that organization, since 2001 he’s helped launch and connect hundreds of other churches around the US, including several other megachurches.
The Worship Center looked interesting as one of the biggest African American megachurches. Alabama is 26% African American, and African American Alabamians have made huge contributions to America (e.g., Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr!), so we wanted to spend some time learning more about specifically African American experiences in Alabama.
Joining Sunday Services
At the Worship Center
The Worship Center has services in-person at three campuses in Birmingham and streams online here. We encourage you to check it out for yourself, but we’ll tell you about our experience here.
We got up bright and early for the 8AM morning service at the Huffman-Derby satellite site. From the moment we wandered in, we both felt warmly welcomed. Enthusiastic greeters with “You’re awesome!” signs wished us good morning at the door, and when we mentioned it was our first time, our greeter walked us over to the coffee station and pointed us to the entry to the worship room. While there were hardly any other non-African-Americans there, we never felt out of place, unwelcome, or judged.
The service began with a joyful and energizing worship. Since we were at a satellite campus, the main campus came in on video feed, but the room still felt very much alive, if not completely full (it was the early morning service, after all). A band at our campus played with the lead singer on screen, and members of the Worship Center Dream Team sang and danced along on stage and beside us in the aisles. The members of the church sang and danced too, interjecting thanks and praises to Jesus.
In second half of the service, we heard messages from speakers as part of the Dare to Commit series. The pastor talked about daring to make a commitment, like getting married, making a purity pledge, getting baptized, growing a relationship with God, becoming a leader in the church, or joining affiliated “small group” activity clubs.
Small group activity clubs might be things like a running club, or a charity group, or a parents group. There are many many small groups to choose from, and one could have a very full social life just attending group events.
Two visitors from Los Angeles also gave sermons on the theme of taking action. The first was a study of John 5-13, the story of a sick man who had lain by a pool for 38 years, waiting for someone to help him dip in the pool and be healed. When Jesus came by, he exhorted the sick man to walk and go to the pool, and the man was healed. The speaker talked about the story and how it paralleled moments in life where we worry or suffer, yet stop one step short of acting.
The second speaker talked more about experiences from his life as a pastor and real estate agent, along with stories about Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier. He talked about missed opportunities and how taking a step forward is so hard — especially in leaps of faith in growing a fuller relationship with God. He noted that at these times, even with God and a whole community behind you, it’s so easy for the Devil to push back and stop you in your tracks. He encouraged us all to channel our inner LA driver. When we see a stop sign followed by a row of green lights ahead, to just roll through it and “get a little illegal.”
For these speakers, we felt like we understood the message, even if we didn’t personally believe in the parts asking for a deeper fulfillment to God. Most of the message had secular relevance to life in general.
There was also a speaker visiting for the church’s weekend relationship conference. Referring to notes on her cell phone, she delivered a frenetic stream of loosely associated biblical references, numerological commentary, and phrases spoken in tongues. While she had an enthusiastic response from the audience, we didn’t quite grasp the experience ourselves. It sounds like in some megachurch communities, it’s very important to become moved to speak in tongues, once you get to a certain level of involvement & leadership.
Services ended with a spoken donation pledge, where everyone read out words on the main screen, making a commitment to spend money with the idea that all of it is God’s money and to tithe at least 10% to the church each year. It seemed that this is the standard ending to all their services.
At the Church of the Highlands
We went next to the Grants Mill site of the Church of the Highlands, the original main campus that broadcasts to satellite campuses. It felt like an even larger, and also welcoming community.
As we neared the Grants Mill campus, we saw hundreds of cars in line with police directing traffic. Inside, we went first into a wide open entrance with hundreds of folks milling around, like a shiny, modern concert hall. Up above, four large posters shared key aspirations of the church such as “Make a Difference” and “Discover Purpose.” We arrived relatively close to the start time, so we got seats near the back. However, with stadium seating in back and large screens up front, every seat has a good view.
Services here started with a musical worship, with exceptionally polished production values — it had a multiracial group of singers on stage backed by an uplifting musical flow and a glowing, bubbly karaoke video backdrop. In the audience, thousands sang and swayed along to refrains like “Victory belongs to Jesus.” To see what we saw, find the online worship and message from February 17th here.
Next up, the pastor invited Les Parrott on stage. Les and his wife Leslie are well-known researchers, teachers and authors on relationships. Over the weekend, Les had lead an annual marriage conference at the church with thousands of couples.
Les spoke about the most important requirement in a relationship:
If you try to find intimacy with another person before achieving a sense of wholeness on your own, all your relationships become an attempt to complete yourself.
Drs. Les & Leslie Parrott
What does it mean to be whole? He detailed these ways:
- Profound Significance – Knowing deeply that you matter, because God’s love is fully in you
- Unswerving Authenticity – Being true to yourself
- Self-giving Love – Going the extra mile for others, in ways big and small
We both thought these sounded entirely sensible, and things that aligned with our beliefs and secular beliefs at-large, after filtering elements related to God; for example, we believe we matter because we see our own value.
As the service wound down, there was a closing encouragement to connect with the church and give; however, not to the strong degree we saw earlier at the Worship Center. We also received flyers with a survey and an opportunity to receive a welcome card in the mail from the church, which would help the church to start an ongoing relationship with us if we chose.
Our Impressions
After Highlands, we chatted over lunch about what we’d been a part of.
Both megachurches felt welcoming, inclusive, and uplifting. It was easy to join in and immediately feel like part of a vibrant community. The messages focused on generally thoughtful and useful life advice, with connection to Christianity. Everything was delivered by effective speakers, with a gentle, yet pervasive encouragement to let God fully in, and one way to do this was to make progress on clear tracks at the church like joining the Dream Team or participating in leadership opportunities. Each church also had a strong online presence for reconnecting after services and to view services online.
We also felt like we’d only seen a glimpse. We went to two non-denominational Birmingham megachurches, separated by a 10 minute drive. Across the United States, there are thousands of megachurches everywhere, in numerous denominations. The Hartford Institute for Religion Research tracks a growing database. At the churches we went to, we also wondered if the message might give us the same or different impression in a different week. Joanna also noticed that there was no political content, and no controversial content. We wondered if the tracks to progress at the Church would remain as widely engaging, or if they might lead to a more insular bubble within a single church.
In short, we thought both churches were heartfelt yet also well-oiled machines, optimized to reach a wide audience and move them to become increasingly involved in the community – and give their time and money in support of it.
Joanna was impressed by the efficiency of the marketing and messaging. There was no modest shying away from discussing money, or accepting excuses. No matter how poor you are, if all money belongs to God, then you should tithe; and you will benefit more from that experience than you would from using the money for your own family. There was also a complete embrace of new technology and marketing techniques to serve church needs, very much unlike most synagogues (perhaps in part because using technology on Shabbat is a bit of a no-no, perhaps because Judaism is so focused on tradition and ritual, in comparison). The big screens and uplifting music that fill and enliven the room, the welcome signs and the survey that also gets your email & home address, the spiffy church news video segment, the channeling of members into internal clubs and leadership paths, the focus on non-controversial and uplifting content only, the group pledge to donate, the direction to pull out your phone and donate via text message *right now* – everything is geared towards getting members involved and donating, as much and as often as possible. Joanna also wonders what other communities and movements can learn from megachurch approaches. What if climate groups started doing all of these things? Would they be more successful? Would it be a good thing?
At the same time, Joanna also felt that the services were a bit fluffy, or like eating candy. The sermons were generally thoughtful. But would it continue to be engaging if we attended week after week? All uplifting and nothing controversial doesn’t sound too enticing, long term. Maybe more nuanced activities happen in the small group clubs, however. And Joanna doesn’t go to temple on a regular basis either, so maybe it’s just that she’s not cut out for weekly worship!
