Word of Faith International Christian Center, Jackson MS

An item showed up on my megachurch Google Alert this morning regarding the court-appointed reorganization of Word of Faith International Christian Center in Jackson Mississippi:

A Jackson lawyer will oversee pretrial proceedings in a case pitting a Jackson megachurch against its former general manager over ownership of the beleaguered Mississippi Basketball and Athletics complex.Hinds County Chancery Judge Denise Sweet Owens on Friday named James Henley as special master in the legal imbroglio involving Word of Faith Christian Center church and Jeffery Lewis, who is currently operating the church’s former foundation, court records show.

Special masters are officers of the court who serve in a quasi-judicial capacity. [link]

The foundation here is not strictly speaking part of the church. It’s complicated.

Founding bishop Kevin Wright stepped down in September of last year amid allegations of sexual misconduct and mismanagement of funds. It was subsequently discovered that

the MBA Center, which was paid for by the WOF Foundation but placed in Wright’s name. According to sources, Butler ordered it closed. The price tag for the MBA Center was estimated at $2 million. [link]

A later article clarifies and corrects some of the accusations and figures [link] but doesn’t correct the earlier statement that the MBA was paid for by the church but technically owned by Wright. How it came to be owned by the church foundation and into the control of Lewis isn’t clear.

That’s not the only thing that isn’t clear; the church is listed in more than one article as being a 4000+-member megachurch, but somehow missed the Hartford Institute list [link].

This basic pattern, however, is familiar: a church grows from being small to being large in a single generation; there’s financial stress and sexual misconduct; and business practices that weren’t worth mentioning when the church had nothing of value became important when the church was big, handling lots of money, and suddenly having shall we say organizational issues.

What’s the takeaway here? Well, I’d be tempted to put it this way: if a church or a parachurch organization is a single generation old (that is, if the founder is still on staff in any capacity) I’d suggest finding out who legally owns and controls the church, its property, and its finances. This is especially true if there is a second entity (an integrated auxiliary, if you will) such as a school, radio station, television station, publishing or production company, or sports complex that appears to be under the ministry’s organizational umbrella.

This is one more reason to suggest that if a church has a second entity like this the whole ministry should file the IRS Form 990 and disclose its assets.

The Grassley staff report: 50/25/25

I realize there are readers who might reasonably think I’m beating this Grassley thing to death, but I think it’s the gift that keeps on giving. One section of the report tries to get a fix on the scale of the money handled by megachurches and/or “media ministries” with no real balance sheet transparency (due to the fact that there are no Form 990 requirements) and no external oversight:

This lack of governmental, independent or denominational oversight is troubling when considering that churches can reach the size of large taxable corporations, control numerous taxable and non-taxable subsidiaries, and bestow Wall Street-size benefits on their ministers. The 2005 megachurch survey found that there were 1,210 megachurches (i.e., Protestant congregations that draw 2,000 or more attendees in a typical weekend) in the United States, nearly double the number that existed five years earlier. The survey also found that average annual expenditure of a megachurch in 2005 was $5.6 million. A follow-up study conducted in 2008 found that average megachurch income in 2008 was $6.5 million. Generally, fifty percent of income went to salaries, a quarter to buildings, and a quarter to missions and programs.  (pages 30-31)

Let’s just note that the “2000 Protestants” is a restriction of convenience; in many ways churches of 1900 or 2100 people are virtually the same, and the term “Protestant” here is a grab-bag term meaning “not Roman Catholic,” mostly because there just aren’t any non-Christian church-like groups drawing 2000 people on a weekly basis with megachurch-like buying power.

I probably should mention here that it is in this part of the document that the Grassley report comes closest to Establishment Clause trouble, because it is suggesting that it is the independence (read: lack of denominational affiliation) that makes these church organizations troublesome. I’d hate to see the final recommendations from this process suggest that of the 1400+ churches on the Hartford Institute list, only those with particular affiliations need to find some ECFA-like body to approve their balance sheets or face losing their 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status.

Anyway, if we roll the megachurch count forward to today’s list and leave the dollar figure at its 2008 level we end up with an aggregate of more than $9 billion tax-free dollars being handled annually by Hartford Institute churches. That’s a substantial amount of money for there to be no external accountability.

Finally, the last figure is of particular interest. Of that $9 billion total half, or $4.5 billion, is spent on salaries, $2.25 billion on facilities, and $2.25 billion on everything else. I might gently suggest that as Christians we’re getting a poor return on our investment if only a quarter of every dollar is actually spent on ministry. No wonder the modern megachurch doesn’t feature foreign ministries as prominently as the small independent churches I attended in the Seventies.

I’m tempted to take this 50/25/25 as sort of a pass-fail line, meaning that churches that spend 50% of their money on salaries are overspending, etc. But it seems kind of outrageous in and of itself. I’m not sure I’d be comfortable (for example) writing two checks to my local church: half to the church and half directly to the pastoral staff.

It also suggests to me that there may be no economy of scale for churches, if small churches and large churches alike are following roughly a 50/25/25 breakdown.

Of course, and this is the point of the Grassley staff report, it’s hard to know if you don’t know how your local church is spending the money it receives.

 

Phoenix First Assembly of God

I had to be in Scottsdale this past weekend on family business, with a flight early Sunday afternoon. A 10AM service would have been too late for us, so our options were limited to churches with early (8AM or 9AM) services. We had been wanting to visit a real megachurch for a while, so I picked Phoenix First Assembly (PFA) [link] out of the Hartford Institute list for Arizona [link]. According to self-reported numbers they run 16,000 a week, placing them in the largest 1% of megachurches in the United States. If I had done a little more research (well, clicked a clearly presented banner on the main page of their website) I would have noticed that their senior pastor Tommy Barnett would not be preaching, due to heart valve surgery [link].

We arrived early at the church’s multi-building campus and had a look around, visiting the youth facility (something like a cross between a big lecture hall and a concert venue) and the children’s facility (a big open room in what appeared to be a converted garage with a big sound board in the back and a drama stage in the front), noted their relationships with Crown Financial Ministries, the National Association for Marriage Enhancement [link], and Starbucks and headed into the main sanctuary. The entire campus is very pretty and well-placed back against a hillside with an expansive view of at least part of Phoenix. The sanctuary is round and done up in a sort of a maybe Mission Revival style; the rest of the campus is concrete, metal, and glass.

By the time we got into the sanctuary the music had already started; our greeter handed us flyer and a small white flag. The flyer wasn’t a liturgy or an order of service; it was just a list of announcements and a schedule of other events taking place at PFA, some of which were highlighted. The white flag was about 6″ x 8″, glued to a small dowel rod, and our greeter made it clear that she wouldn’t explain it to us but that all would become clear during the service.

The sanctuary is big, round, and flat; there are balcony sections, but most of the seats are on the floor. The stage is huge and backed by five video screens. There was a live band with guitar, bass, and drums, along with a horn section including a tin whistle, a piano, and several singers placed evenly across the stage. There was one woman who was clearly the lead singer as she got most of the camera time. There was no backing choir, and no choir loft. Lyrics were projected onto the various screens. The music was not your standard praise choruses (nor was it traditional hymns); the lyrics were less repetitive than your standard Hosanna! Music stuff but was pretty much in that ballpark. Off to the far right “live worship artist” William Butler [link] was painting on a canvas.

The service was “produced” like a television show, with multiple cameras (including a crane jib camera), but I’m not sure why; the church video archive is currently empty [link], and PFA does not appear to have a television presence.

After the music there was a “news brief” segment, a fast-paced, tightly-edited video complete with an anchorwoman standing and talking directly into the camera, telling us about the many services offered at PFA, upcoming sermon series. This included a segment on Joyce Meyer, who is holding a conference at PFA February 24-26; there was a drop-in from one of Meyer’s appearances where she said something flattering about Tommy Barnett and his strong faith.

Most of the sanctuary was roped off; I am guessing this was to pack the small early-service crowd into the front rows and make the sanctuary look full on video. The sanctuary was maybe one-quarter full, and with all the video, lights, and sound coming from the stage the effect was almost overwhelming. My traveling companion likened it to a rock concert, saying

I’m a little surprised they let us in here for free.

After the news segment the ushers passed the offering buckets. These were shaped like KFC buckets, or large round movie popcorn containers, but were made of gray plastic. There was another song from the band featuring the tin whistle. After that there was an update on Tommy Barnett’s health from Angel Barnett (see e.g. this video); she told us an amusing story featuring Tommy and his hotel room. This transitioned neatly to the introduction of Tommy’s son Luke who preached the sermon.

The text for the sermon was 2 Chronicles 16:9a [NIV]; just the part about God looking for someone whose heart is totally committed to Him; not the part about being at war. The bulk of the sermon was a recap of the life of Mother Teresa [link] with life lessons for us drawn from her biography. The white flags we had been given figured into the “surrender” aspect of her life story somewhere. To his credit Luke Barnett didn’t try to make the points rhyme, but the word choices were sometimes obscure; he seemed to have a compelling story to tell but lacked the sermoncraft chops to bring it off. Also, his delivery is of the loud, almost strained type popular in many churches today where the pastor attempts to convey the importance of what he’s saying by shouting even though he’s adequately mic’d and amplified.

If there was a Gospel message I missed it; if there was a mention of Jesus I missed it. Because the nominal text was from the Old Testament I would have expected at least a hand-wave at connecting it to us as Christians rather than its original audience (Asa, king of Judah).

Our baby became restless and we had to leave well before the sermon finished; we visited the bookstore and beverage area and noted the various items for sale. They were a mix of homegrown stuff (books, CDs and DVDs by Tommy Barnett) and evangelical names big and small. The book area was surprisingly small given the size of the church; compared to the churches of comparable size I’ve seen I’d call it a token bookstore.

On balance I’d say this was a tightly-marketed, slickly-produced experience; I definitely got the impression that a fair number of development and marketing people are involved in making PFA what it is. Everything has a brand name at PFA, and the campaigns and their brand names appear to change very frequently, I guess so it doesn’t get dull. I got the impression that most of the message originates in an executive creative meeting or some such. There was a mention of small groups “starting up again;” I took this to mean that they are seasonal. I sort of expected a Pentecostal church, but apart from a handful of people raising their hands I didn’t see any evidence that this is an Assemblies of God church [link] rather than a non-denominational church.

Finally, I didn’t see evidence of there being 16,000 people at this church. It’s huge, but it seemed smaller than Thomas Road Baptist Church (~13,000) and Calvary Albuquerque (also ~13,000). Perhaps the PFA reported number includes campus churches; I didn’t see any evidence of these, either, so I can’t be sure.

Shepherd of the Lake (ELCA) loses pastor

Shepherd of the Lake Church (ELCA) is losing its lead pastor, Peter Strommen, due to health issues, at least partly stress-related, according to a recent article by Lori Carlson in the Prior Lake American, Prior Lake, MN [link].

The church grew rapidly over the period 2003-2006 and moved into a big (60-acre) facility, but the former pastor, Stephen Haschig, resigned in 2006:

The church took many hits, including the 2006 resignation of longtime pastor Stephen Haschig, who disclosed what he called “an improper relationship” with a woman while serving at the church, and the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression, which kicked into high gear shortly after the church moved to its new campus. In 2009, the church made major staff cutbacks to keep itself afloat.

This article is chock-full of detail, including the fact that while younger members have continued to attend the church, older members left after Haschig’s resignation:

“The whole point is that our building was built and designed for a very large congregation, one that continued to grow at significant rates after the move in 2004,” Strommen said. “This has largely been true regarding young people, but not so much in terms of adults, because many stepped back after the 2006 resignation.”

Unfortunately this article tries to put the church’s financial problems into the context of the broader recession, when it seems more likely that local problems (see above) are more to blame. The recession is tough all over, but church bankruptcies continue to be the exception, not the rule, and all the cases I’ve seen can be blamed on leadership problems (malfeasance or poor transition plans) rather than on the recession.

Finally, I have to note that while the article refers to Shepherd on the Lake as a megachurch, it doesn’t appear in the Hartford Institute database [link], nor does the article give attendance figures to justify calling it a megachurch.

a megachurch model

Ian at the Irreducible Complexity blog offers 7 steps to starting a megachurch [link]; unlike most steps, they’re paragraph-length, so I’m going to list them by opening sentence:

1. First think about yourself.
2. Get up to date demographic information for your city.
3. Plan to run a commissioning service for three months down the track.
4. Hire a great graphic design company (or better yet a talented religious designer willing to work on the cheap).
5. Recognize that most of your churchgoers will be currently attending other churches (you’ll typically have less than 1/5 new converts).
6. Make sure your first year of church is super-professional.
7. From the very first service you need to be thinking about revenue.

The first bullet might be better stated “You (as pastor) are the church; project a persona that is professional and powerful;” the third as “build your initial inner circle from disaffected ex-members of other churches’ inner circles.”  The others read pretty well as summaries of their paragraphs.

This is his summary of what he’s learned from various sources regarding megachurches (he provides a bibliography) including works by Scott Thumma (editor of the Hartford Institute megachurch database) and Dave Travis, the megachurch and leadership expert we met a couple of days ago over at Intelligence Squared. The author is a self-professed atheist, and his ear for the jargon isn’t quite right (church people don’t talk about “how God is going to change the world” in so many words, do they?), but otherwise he’s totally believable; e.g. either he or his primary sources understand that asking people to pray for you and your ministry is an effective way of getting buy-in; church growth runs the risk of being “basic marketing, really;” etc.

So for the rest of this post let’s take it as read that his is a fair model of a megachurch: churches are in a sense multilevel marketing schemes; churches need pastors who are powerful leaders; every existing church represents a ready pool of dissatisfied church-goers; marketing is important; “God at work in this church” is the product; etc. What good does this model do us?

Most of the time when I hear complaints and criticisms sound wrong somehow. I’d offer Mollie Hemingway’s points in the I2 debate as a case in point (on further reflection she’s not just accusing megachurches of failing to be Lutheran; she’s accusing them of being (gasp) evangelical). Michael Horton’s (and others’) repeated flogging of “moralistic therapeutic deism” being another. These approaches seem to me to share a common flaw: they’re affirmations of values that contrast somewhat with what one might find at a given megachurch, but they’re not necessarily right. They may be just another high-sounding bunch of buzzwords and slogans.

So  I think rather than going for the easy answer (“only go to this type of church”) I’ll suggest questions to ask. Each of them doesn’t necessarily point to a fatal flaw in a church, but taken together they constitute a sort of megachurchy inventory.

1. Every church tells a story about itself; what story is your church telling? Is the story true?
2. How does your church communicate? Is your church engaging in a marketing exercise?
3. Is your pastor basically honest? Is he a man of integrity? Is he the same person out of the pulpit as he is in the pulpit?
4. Does the pastor spend time in the pulpit telling you what a great church this is? Be careful; learn to tell the difference between reflexive pride and crafted message. They’re both problematic, but they’re indicative of different things.
5. What sort of people attend your church? Does your church have a power clique? What distinguishes the insiders from the outsiders? Every church has a group that’s there looking for a spectacle; at your church what is this group looking for? How many of the people at your church became Christians there? How do they describe the process of becoming Christians?
6. What sort of a story does the church tell you about money? How does it describe the money it takes in? How does it describe  the money it spends? Is the church accountable for its money?
7. Is your church slick and packaged? Is it always on message? Can you put that message in plain language?

Neither of these lists should be taken to be definitive, but I hope they’re helpful. I wish I’d had lists like these a couple of years ago. Or ten years ago. I’ve watched churches before and gotten a nameless uneasy feeling (“why is that man standing there saying what he’s saying?”) and it would have been helpful to have a megachurch marketing model in hand if just for comparison’s sake.

“It’s hard to find God in a megachurch” and other stories

Intelligence Squared sponsored a dial-in debate between journalist Mollie Ziegler Hemingway and “megachurch and leadership expert” Dave Travis [blog] on the premise “It’s hard to find God in a megachurch” [link, free registration required]. The introduction for the debate doesn’t look promising; apart from some soundbites (Robert Schuller, Eddie Long, George W. Bush, Ted Haggard) there’s this definition:

The evangelical movement has a globally influential role, and the megachurches are an important element of it. They have huge congregations with inspirational, charismatic pastors. They are run like businesses and, it might seem, often with rather business-like objectives of raising funds and satisfying customers.

Hemingway gets off on the wrong foot from the start:

Most notably, the size and charisma aspects affect the relationship of the pastor to his congregation. These features require for lowest common denominator preaching; it becomes based on ‘You’, rather than Christ.. Equally, sacramental worship is not feasible with a congregation of 2,000 people. In small congregation churches, members are active. In megachurches, the audience is passive, consuming rather than engaging with gospel entertainment.

Yes, there are problems when the relationship between the preacher and church is out of whack, but she trots out the “big/passive, small/active” red herring: neither of these is necessarily true. And while her point about “gospel entertainment,” whatever that is, is probably apt, she’s made the mistake of making the conservative Lutheran method of worship standard so everything else is deviant.

The problem of America’s churches is that they’re market driven, but megachurches are market driven on steroids.

I have no idea what “market driven on steroids” means; this sounds like a fancy way of saying “very market driven” or “very very market driven.” And of course it begs the question “market driven as opposed to what?”

Hemingway is offering the usual talking points here, as if the alternatives in the megachurch debate were the LCMS standard on one side and Joel Osteen on the other. Briefly: not everyone outside a megachurch is looking to “receive sacraments for the forgiveness of sins” and not everyone in a megachurch is looking for “your best life now.” I’m disappointed in her presentation and don’t think it was effective, especially once she conceded that church size isn’t the problem.

Dave Travis on the other hand offers a fairly standard set of church growth arguments: “we took a survey, here are some results, lo and behold they support our model of church.”

Here’s part of his opening argument:

People are moving from small to big institutions in every sector of America’s society. In the church, this is not necessarily an obstacle to a healthy relationship with Christ; it just creates a different one. Yes, in megachurches, preaching is simpler in approach than smaller churches, but accessibility to doctrine does not make it un-challenging. In fact, megachurches preach what is relevant to the congregation.

I’m not sure how the first two sentences are related to one another; if there’s a causal connection between other institutions getting bigger and churches getting bigger I don’t see it. He concedes that megachurch preaching is simple and includes mention of the relevance of the text to the believer, but doesn’t point out any differences between sermons that are relevant to the believer and sermons that are consumer-centered. It’s a weak presentation, but Travis is mostly stuck responding to the moderators’ opening comments and Hemingway’s opening comments.

Travis doesn’t handle a question about pastoral accountability well; he answers a poorly-presented question about congregants in a small church engaging in question and answers with the pastor by saying megachurch pastors take feedback via websites and response cards. He also interacts poorly with a question about authoritarian preachers.

Hemingway responds to the same question by presenting the same lousy argument “churches should be defined by creeds and sacraments, not market research” and equivocates between creeds and sacraments on the one hand and Scripture on the other. I don’t know what if anything Hemingway can say about churches that are neither focused on creeds and sacraments nor driven by market research.

I think Travis misses an obvious knock-out punch that goes like this: The Hartford Institute, which provides definitions and lists for American megachurches, lists 1408 churches that meet its criteria. Of these seven are part of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod [link]; does Hemingway’s analysis apply to these? If so then all her bluster about creeds and sacraments is nonsense; if not then her distinction she’s making above is invalid.

I hate to say it, but I don’t see a winner here; neither party actually interacts with the premise. Hemingway’s argument is just special pleading, and she grows increasingly shrill as the discussion progresses. Travis comes closer to interacting with the premise by relating survey results about church attenders’ impressions of their relationship with God, but never suggests that there’s any way to close the gap between those results and an actual God. Hemingway can’t seem to see past her tradition. It’s a mess.

On the whole I’m left wondering if there is any common ground between the two sides, and whether this is an issue a debate can resolve. I would recommend listening to this debate anyway; 25 minutes isn’t very long to sort out issues like this, but it’s helpful to hear where the discussion is now (nowhere, mostly). As I said several months ago, this still sounds like a dialog between a dead church and a dying church to me.

In other news, Dee at The Wartburg Watch offered a take on Cruise With A Cause 2011 a couple of weeks ago [link]; her comments cover some of the same ground I covered [link], from a different angle and somewhat more pointedly. She also points out that the online biography for Ergun Caner appears to mix in elements of his brother Emir’s biography.

And finally: I found myself awake between 1:30AM and 2:30AM and ended up taking a peek at the KAZQ [link] overnight offerings. They offer GOD TV [link] as a second OTA digital signal (Digital channel 32.2) and on their primary signal in the wee hours. I got to sample the late Barry Smith’s program Mystery Babylon [link, link]; it caught my interest when I saw the word “Weishaupt” on the whiteboard behind Smith and heard his Kiwi accent. His presentation was a fairly typical fast-and-loose “Freemasons are apostate; Freemasons run the English-speaking world” presentation. Highlights included

• Smith’s claim that floor tiles in contrasting colors, especially in black and white, in public buildings, are a secret Freemason symbol
• Smith’s claim that certain hand gestures require Masonic judges to free Masonic criminals
• A dissection of the symbols on the back of a one-dollar bill that sounded even stranger with a Kiwi accent

GOD TV currently offers two or three episodes of Barry Smith programming a night and another in the afternoon; Joe Bob says check it out.