A
megachurch is a
church having around 2,000 or more attendants for a typical weekly service.
[1][2] The Hartford Institute's database lists more than 1,300 such Protestant churches in the United States. According to these data, about 50 churches on the list have attendance ranging from 10,000 to 47,000.
[3] Additionally, while some 3,000 individual Roman Catholic parishes (churches) have 2,000 or more attendants for a typical weekly service, these churches are not seen as part of the megachurch movement.
[4]Globally, these large congregations are a significant development in Protestant Christianity. While generally associated with the United States, the phenomenon has spread worldwide; as of 2007, five of the ten largest Protestant churches are in South Korea.[5] Most megachurches tend to be evangelical or Pentecostal, and are often semi-independent from the major Christian denominations.
The megachurch movement, with a large number of local congregants who return on a weekly basis, is usually thought to have begun in the 1950s.[6] There have been large churches earlier in history, but they were considerably rarer. Examples include Charles Spurgeon's Baptist Metropolitan Tabernacle in London which attracted 5,000 weekly for years in the late 1800s, and religious broadcaster Aimee Semple McPherson's Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, which was similarly large.[7] The current largest megachurch in the world is the Yoido Full Gospel Church, with 830,000 members as of 2007.[5]
In the United States, more than half of these large church institutions are non-denominational churches. A well known example would be Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, or Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois. Minor examples would be Greater Grace World Outreach in Baltimore, Maryland, or Woodside Bible Church in Troy, Michigan. Those that have ties to a larger body are most often members of the Southern Baptist denomination, which accounts for perhaps one in five megachurches. The Assemblies of God claim approximately one in ten. Another one-tenth of the megachurches are associated with historically African American denominations, such as African Methodist Episcopal, (A.M.E.), and the Church of God in Christ (COGIC).
