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“There Are No Megachurches”

Orginally published on Wednesday, January 17, 2007 at 10:18 AM
by Todd Rhoades

Bobby Gruenewald from LifeChurch.tv has a great post on 'Megachurches' over at the new Swerve blog. Bobby writes... "I realized recently that the term “megachurch” is a gross mislabeling of our church and any other church that exists today. When we consider the magnitude of the opportunity that exists right now to share the Gospel with this world, I don’t know how we can sincerely use the prefix “mega” to refer to any ministry that exists today. That prefix can only come from a comparison to the past or to other churches."

“Though attendance isn’t really the best measure, it will illustrate my point well because it is the measure people use to evaluate church size. At LifeChurch.tv we currently average over 18,000 people in attendance each weekend…BUT we have the ability to reach approximately 350,000,000 people currently based on the locations of our campuses and the reach to existing Internet users that are able to understand English (the only language that we are currently using to communicate). How can 18,000 people in light of 350,000,000 opportunity be called a megachurch…instead...”

Continue here to read the rest of Bobby’s thoughts at Swerve...

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There are 3 Comments:

Posted by Leonard

Wednesday, January 17, 2007 at 10:35 AM

Awesome thoughts. Micro churches with a mega vision. I will say that again and again. Thanks.
Posted by

Wednesday, January 17, 2007 at 5:17 PM

“When we consider the magnitude of the opportunity that exists right now to share the Gospel with this world, I don’t know how we can sincerely use the prefix “mega” to refer to any ministry that exists today.”

Amen, Bobby.
Posted by Randy Ehle

Wednesday, January 17, 2007 at 10:57 PM

While I appreciate the distinction in attitude that Bobby suggests, I think in some ways he’s barking up the wrong fruit tree. While I don’t know for sure, my hunch is that the term “mega-church” was not first used by a church describing itself, but rather by someone else searching for a term that would continue a scalar comparison based (solely?) on size. McDonald’s has “SuperSize”; churches have “mega-”. While the term megachurch has, in some circles (primarily church circles) taken on some negative connotations, applying the label on the basis of size alone should not be problematic, regardless of the size of one’s church.

It should be noted, though, that the term has become inadequate even as a comparative. If the typical definition of megachurch is one with more than 2,000 in attendance, than certainly we could benefit from some new terms to describe those that are over 10,000 or multiple-10,000s. And perhaps, too, we need to better define what constitute small, medium, and large churches - again, for size comparisons only, recognizing that size is a very limited factor to consider in any assessment of a church’s mission and function.

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