When a Church is not a Church
Two years ago, an independent review was conducted about Arise Church detailing the ways in which certain church structures burn through volunteers, create unaccountable leaders, and foster cultures of abuse. In our next in-person event, we'll be asking: Can Christianity be saved from megachurches (see more info below)? In this reflection, however, Jaimee van Gemerden seeks to address another question reflected to this: are megachurches… churches?
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What if I told you that my biggest problem with megachurches is that they just aren’t churches? This is a confronting and uncomfortable statement, especially to those who have good experiences and have found belonging in these contexts. However, when I reflect on what I believe the church is and what I see Jesus calling his followers to, I struggle to see how megachurches can reflect the type of community and connectedness inherent in this call to being a church. And, even more controversially, I’m not sure that megachurches are the only culprit here—to me, there’s a size which churches reach where they stop being able to live out the call of the church and become something else entirely.
What is a church?
The premise of my argument is built off a particular understanding of what a church is. In the New Testament we see gatherings of Christ followers forming around shared purposes of teaching, praying, supporting one another, and—arguably most prominently—sharing life together. In many ways these new gatherings in the first century are reflective of the type of relationships that Jesus modelled in his ministry: while Jesus certainly teaches to large crowds, the gospels all describe a group of closer followers that developed an established community. More is known about the communities which form throughout the growth of the early church. In Acts 2 the church is described in terms of groups which gather to break bread, pray, and care for one another. These are likely small communities and the New Testament letters encourage the development of values around community—eating together, loving one another, and gathering for prayer, teaching, and praise.
2000 years on, I am not convinced that our focus as churches needs to be to try and reenact the life of the early church. The context in which these churches operated is vastly different to our own and it is, I believe, appropriate for our ways of gathering to move with the times. In saying that, I think the call to community is consistent and is a focus that develops the values that Paul and the other New Testament writers encourage in the early churches.
Church universal or church local?
One of the key enduring images which define the gathered group of Christ followers is that of the “Body of Christ.” This, like other New Testament images such as the “bride of Christ” or family of God, is a metaphor that captures the reality of all Christians globally, or the universal Church. The reality of being called into the life of Christ is a calling into the relationship of the body of Christ alongside other believers worldwide. This is a big image, a diverse picture that captures people of every nation and tongue together in the community of God.
The local church is, then, but a fragment of this wider gathering of the body of Christ. The fragment is not, however, insignificant. It is in these local bodies, these small parts of the wider whole, that the values of community and love for one another are able to be manifested. While the Church universal is certainly overwhelming large, the church local is a place where one is to be known and gathered in, strengthened by community, and called into prayer and praise of God.
The move to mega
For millennia, the local church was not a large gathering. Churches across the Christian world (although varying in each cultural context) where a central part of communities and were reflective of their local surroundings. The English church system—the nearest ancestor of Christianity in Aotearoa—was parish based with a local minister gathering together a community who were geographically joined. Parishioners spent their whole lives in the same community, regardless of the challenges. There are many reasons why this way of gathering changed including increasing industrialisation and urbanisation.
In addition to these wider societal factors, megachurches today are inheritors of large evangelical movements from the last 200 or so years. Pentecostalism exploded globally during the twentieth century off the back of the tent revivals of the Second Great Awakening and, combined with increasing urban populations and the Charismatic Renewal, large evangelical churches became more commonplace. By the end of the twentieth century, instead of local parishes, the exciting, growing churches were ones with great bands, lights, and exciting preaching.
I want to stress that I don’t think these things are inherently bad. I think all of them can have their place, although care must be taken given the egregious abuses and manipulations that have all too often come with these types of gatherings. My argument is not that there can’t be value for individuals in an evangelical model based on popular music and rousing preaching. My argument is that these gatherings do not constitute church. I was struck recently watching The Secrets of Hillsong by the large “welcome home” signs that great attendees. I agree that a church should feel like home, but I do not believe that this can be the case without close community relationships and these cannot be formed in churches above a certain size. How can a group of people claim to be breaking bread together when they don’t know the name of the person sitting two seats over?
There is such a thing as too big
Within the Christian movement I am part of I often hear discussions of attendance and church size, with the more the merrier the implied value. While it is rarely explicitly stated, the churches that are help up as models are those that have high attendance numbers, multiple ministers, and growing staff teams. I don’t think these churches should be the ones we aspire to be. For me, the call to love one another and to break bread together is a call to small—a call to a type of closeness that cannot be found in large church gatherings. Instead, when I think about the future of the church, I imagine places where each person is known and valued, in a reflection of how they are known and valued by God, where we can truly pray together because we know who one another is, and where when we break bread together we do so as a family, in all of the messiness that that entails.
Jaimee van Gemerden is editor at Metanoia.
On Wednesday 18 September, 7pm, we'll be gathering to ask the next question in our in-person event series: Can Christianity be saved from megachurches? Entry is free and includes wine and snacks.
