Believe what they do, not what they say

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Reading fawning articles about popular evangelical megachurches, highlighting their “growth” at a time when “most churches are dying,” feels kind of like sitting in a funeral service for a family member — let’s call him Uncle Dave — who was publicly beloved and renowned, but behind the scenes, within the family, was an abusive jerk whose behavior and attitude led to generations of family pain and suffering.

You know the feeling? We’ve all been there at one time or another.

“Dave was a great guy: a prominent businessman, beloved by his wife and children, hardworking and always doing favors to anyone who asked. He was also [and here’s the kicker] a man of God.”

Meanwhile, you know that Dave was either totally absent in his children’s lives or he cheated on their mom without any sign of remorse.

Or he ruined Thanksgiving dinner by haranguing everyone at the table with his thoughts about immigrants, Black people or LGBTQ+ people.

Or he cheated his colleagues at work, lied on his taxes and gambled away the grandkids’ college funds.

But there you sit in church, listening to the minister go on and on about Dave’s honorable Christian faith, his upstanding record of business and service in his community, his reputation as a “family man.”

And what do you do in that position? Dave is a member of your family! You’re sitting there in a place of worship, or at the funeral home. No one would look kindly upon you if you stood up right there and started telling the truth about Dave. It wouldn’t be “appropriate.” And worse, it would reflect poorly on your family name.

So most of us stay silent. The truth is hidden behind a veil. Dave gets to go down as a “good man.” His victims, the survivors strewn about his family and his community, never get closure or resolution. Most of the time, they lose more than just their faith in Dave — they lose their faith in God or in the basic goodness of society.

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That’s exactly how I felt, how I always feel as a fellow Christian and ordained Lutheran pastor, when I read mainstream news publications recounting the “success” and writing feel-good stories of popular evangelical megachurches.

And let me be clear, things weren’t always this way. I was baptized, confirmed and married in one of the metro area’s largest Lutheran churches, an ELCA congregation that in many ways followed the lessons of evangelicalism’s Church Growth movement — operating congregations like companies and asking pastors to lead as CEOs do, complete with mission and vision statements, business-minded boards and hefty marketing budgets.

When I finished seminary, I learned to preach during my internship at a large Lutheran congregation in Las Vegas, where at least one of our five weekly worship services boasted more than 1,200 people on an average Sunday. We had bands led by professional musicians, large screens, lights, camera, action! I took it all in and did my best, amplifying my homilies with “sermon slides” created by an in-house graphic designer.

I loved that church. When I went to Chicago, pastoring in the shadow of Bill Hybels’ Willow Creek, one of the Midwest’s first and most prominent evangelical megachurches, I encouraged my church council to buy large screens for worship as well. I went to Christmas Eve services at Willow Creek to take notes on their “production value.” And when I left Chicago, I left for a larger congregation in the hotbed of evangelical megachurches in Orange County, Calif., pastoring just a few towns over from Rick Warren’s famed megachurch, Saddleback, and from Mariners, the church that’s home to more than a few Real Housewives and sprawls out its lush, storybook campus next to some of America’s wealthiest neighborhoods.

It was in California, however, that the facade came crashing down for me. I had journeyed to Evangelical Oz, and with conservative Christians lined up solidly behind thrice-married adulterer Donald Trump, the yellow brick road took me right up to the green screen, which collapsed to reveal cowering behind it a sad and broken pastorate, compromised by greater allegiance to money, power and covering up scandal than to the Gospel of Jesus. Remember it was this Jesus who famously said — and which was last Sunday’s lectionary Gospel reading at Catholic and mainline Protestant congregations around America — that: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25).

So much for Church Growth’s multi-campus, grow-grow-grow-at-all-costs model.

In mid-2017, my California church and staff faced deep divisions over Trump’s Muslim travel ban and his frequent dehumanization of women and LGBTQ+ people. When I began to preach and write in protest of Trump’s exclusionary language and policies, I quickly found out that there was little space for this kind of truth-telling in congregations with multimillion-dollar budgets and constant pressure to afford the kinds of huge mortgages assumed with the Church Growth suburban building booms of the early 21st century.

I learned as a pastor that big money meant reliance on big givers who were often squeamish about Bible passages and Christian traditions like the Scripture quoted above and about Gospel teachings that leaned toward inclusion rather than hatred and judgment. After all, that judgment and hatred operated most in these sorts of churches not as condemnation of people in the pews, but as an opportunity to separate the people in the pews (or auditorium theater-style seating) from the “bad people” out there. The demonization of LGBTQ+ people, or of immigrants, or liberals, was intended to make people in the church feel righteous and good. It was needed not as a stick but as a carrot so that people could ensure that their ticket to heaven was punched, regardless of their commitment to Jesus’ Social Gospel, unlike those other “bad” people.

I soon found myself in that role of the person at the funeral service, listening to the minister regale us with words about Uncle Dave’s pristine moral character, all the while knowing the carnage behind the scenes. As I traveled the country in 2018 doing research for my first book, “Red State Christians,” I found myself again and again confronted with what evangelical megachurch pastor Mark Driscoll called “the bodies behind the bus.” These were the people who were hurt by the churches’ push toward growth and esteem and power at all costs, the people who dared to question the supreme leader or senior pastor at the head of these churches, the one whose authority was never to be questioned (the one who functionally replaced God as the sole leader of the church).

After COVID-19, George Floyd’s murder and the requisite reawakening and backlash over racial justice and the lack thereof in America, and after the Jan. 6 attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that led to the arrest of more than one evangelical pastor, the bodies behind the buses at these megachurches just kept piling up. My friend, Sarah Stankorb, wrote a whole book about the burgeoning list of clergy sexual-abuse survivors within evangelical churches across America. Around the same time, the Houston Chronicle published a series on sexual abuse within the nation’s largest evangelical denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention. Fittingly, the Chronicle called its series: “Abuse of Faith.”

Still, all these years later, with Trump again on the presidential ballot thanks to the backing of prominent evangelical Christians who have provided him with a Christian nationalist playbook called Project 2025, the survivors keep piling up. Young people, especially young women, keep leaving churches, and yet I keep being subjected to stories about the basic, aw-shucks goodness, the so-called “miraculous” growth occurring in evangelical megachurches, which, in the case of Minnesota’s largest megachurch, Eagle Brook, are permitted to say (”How Minnesota’s biggest church grows as others shrink,” Oct. 6) it isn’t really a “megachurch.” Nonsense. You have more than 20,000 people attending your services weekly, you have 10 different campuses, and you took in more than $58 million in 2022-23. And you recently bought a suburban piece of property for $12 million. If the shoe fits …

At this point in American Christian history, there have been enough pastoral sex scandals and financial misconduct among clergy members that those leading megachurches know that in order to keep their “brand” unsullied, they’re going to have to gaslight us about what they really are.

They’ll claim they’re “nondenominational,” when most of the time they’re affiliated with conservative Baptist denominations.

They’ll say “all are welcome,” and that they’re “inclusive” and “apolitical,” but all you have to do is dig a little bit into their website to find a statement of faith, which most often strictly defines marriage as “only between a man and a woman.” They may say “of course women are allowed to serve roles in our church,” but you’ll find out that a woman has never preached there throughout their history, and no woman on staff holds a title of senior, executive or even campus pastor. Oh — and they’ll claim to be “multiracial,” and their website will be full of photos of nonwhite people; maybe they’ll even have nonwhite band leaders and singers on stage. But look quickly to their executive staff pages, where you’ll see rows and rows of white faces.

So why not tell the truth? Just like sitting in that funeral service, listening to someone lie about a member of your family, it’s not easy for me, either. I know and have good relationships with some evangelical megachurch pastors. I’ve seen these churches do good work in ministry toward people with addiction or alcoholism, or to provide assistance to those experiencing homelessness or recovering from natural disasters. As a Christian leader, I see these folks as part of my family. I’m not looking to give my family a bad name.

But too many people have been hurt and too many of us have been silent for too long. It’s time for honest conversations about the rot at the heart of many megachurches — yes, even those close to home.