Imagine moving to a new city and visiting a local church. What would you expect to find?
Dr. Brad East writes about a curious answer he received after asking his class this question. Lights, said one student, by which he meant a staged performance: dimmers, reflectors, big screens, large production values. East goes on to argue that this expectation has been growing in evangelical circles for decades, and was only reinforced during COVID lockdowns.
Although I grew up in a Catholic church where stage lights and big screens were absent, I can relate to the expectation. During my college years I began attending an evangelical megachurch in Maryland, and where I live now there are several popular megachurches within easy driving distance, including the magisterial McLean Bible. The McLean Bible website insists, rightly, that church is not about a building or event, but it’s impossible to feel a certain dissonance about that when you walk through the vast hallways of its main campus and enter the stadium seating.
Of course, not all technology is bad, and discerning when and how to use it well in a church building is much more difficult than it sounds. As East demonstrates, technology seems so innocent and promises so much, and yet in subtle ways can divert attention away from committed involvement in “the drama of the Eucharist or the reenactment of the liturgical script”. Put another way, technology has an insidious, barely perceptible way of engendering a consumeristic attitude towards church, inclining the heart away from who Christ is and what he has done to what he can do for you. Given the trends he sees in this direction, East asks: What should young people expect at church? What should anyone expect? What he writes is so important:
The historic answer of the church down through the centuries is that they should expect the liturgy of Word and sacrament. They should know in advance that, with real but limited variations, they will pray, sing, confess their faith, confess their sins, hear the word of the Lord in Scripture, hear the gospel of the Lord in proclamation, and receive the visible word of the Lord’s body and blood, the bread of heaven broken for their salvation. Whatever country they are in, whatever language is spoken, whether visiting a city or a town, a congregation of 5,000 or a parish of 50—this is what should await them. (emphasis mine)
The most instructive thing to learn from this statement is this: the core Christian liturgy is simple and flexible enough to work in virtually any setting. The “fancy lighting, concert-style” approach to church works for the privileged; it does not work for the poor and the persecuted. East asks whether we really want small churches in ordinary or hostile corners of the world to dwindle simply because they can’t meet modern technological expectations, and we all know the answer to that (or should). Maybe you want ordinary churches to liven things up a bit, and that’s fine. Maybe they would if you gave them more of your time and money. Ultimately, you have to explain to what end. East reminds us: “Beyond the tools required to produce texts (which long predate the printing press) and food and drink (which are necessary to live), no technology is necessary for the church to worship the Lord in Spirit and in truth. Perhaps, as the case may be, new technologies have the potential to help. But they always have the potential to harm, to distort and misshape.”
I am now part of a small church (roughly 150 members), and it’s no question that my past experience at the megachurch in Maryland shaped me in good and bad ways. I heard the gospel and received life-giving discipleship. I became a member, volunteered in various ministries, and attended small groups. I learned how to lead Bible studies and took part in special readings in systematic theology. But there was also an undeniable bent in the structure of the service and the culture of the meeting space towards entertainment. Worship was not held in a sanctuary but in an auditorium. The center of the space was not a cross but a stage. On some semi-conscious level, you could attend without committing; receive without giving; consume Sunday morning “lectures” about God without stepping too deeply into the messiness of community; sing along with good music without giving weight to the sacrament of the Lord’s supper (which for many years was taken monthly rather than weekly); enjoy a moving religious experience without getting too vulnerable with the people standing around you. On these points Dr. East’s article closing lines are worth chewing on:
Much can be said for a joyful service that communicates both uninhibited and Spirit-filled adoration. But faithful worship is, and therefore should be, something any church can do, regardless of production level.
We must imagine an alternative catechesis—one that, for students like mine, brings to mind first of all the risen Christ: his living Word, his body and blood, his gathered people. The question is: What kind of worship would produce such a thought?
Now, for all its love of lights and ultra sound systems, my Maryland megachurch still cultivated an active community life. Small groups and membership programs were vigorously promoted. In fact, if you attended Sunday worship and chose not to join a small group, you inevitably ran up against persistent reminders and gentle encouragements to change your mind. (There were problems here too, though. A sort of super-spiritual, one-size-fits-all Christian sub culture emerged among some small groups which I found frustratingly insular and ill-equipped at times to engage with the complexities of the human experience.)
Additionally, I would push back a bit on East, who exaggerates when he says, “At best, the gospel retains the power to cut through the noise. At worst, believers receive neither the Lord’s Word nor his body and blood. Instead, they get a cut-rate TED Talk, spiritual but not religious, sandwiched between long sessions of a soft rock concert.” This makes it sound as though gospel preaching at megachurches is lucky if it manages to bubble above the surface of high-tech music performances. That is not my experience. The pastors at my Maryland church and at McLean Bible (I have only attended the latter five or six times) were faithful to preach the gospel with conviction and a firm grounding in biblical hermeneutics. I had my disagreements on certain theological points but I seldom thought they were shallow or unclear to the point of barely “cutting through the noise”. In fact, one reason I kept going is because they were more clear and thoughtful than most of the preachers I had heard at almost every Catholic mass and/or non-denominational church service up to that point in time. The gospel was, and is, the central connecting theme in most if not all of their talks. And they had something else, too: a certain charisma and imaginative manner of storytelling designed to contextualize the gospel and meet visitors where they are. Charisma and storytelling aren’t everything, of course; 1 Corinthians 2:1-5 is more than enough to disabuse us of that idea. But the concept of adapting your speech to your audience has plenty of biblical warrant when we consider the myriad texts showing Jesus and the Apostles using creative means of communicating the good news. All this to say, I believe East has constructed a rather sweeping caricature of megachurch preaching, which deserves a more nuanced treatment than the one he gives.
And yet his caricature doesn’t necessarily undermine his central contention, and in some respects bolsters it. Just as you can go too far in prioritizing technology, you can place a weight on the sermon and preacher they were never meant to carry. This results in several serious problems, one being the obvious fact that not every church can attract top-notch preaching talent. Another is the celebrity pastor phenomenon, which by now ought to be highly questionable to your average American Christian but sadly is not. East’s thesis could probably be extended to say “faithful worship is something any church can do regardless of production level or quality of preaching”. By this I don’t mean to downplay the importance of preaching to a degree which the Bible does not, nor to suggest that preachers stop trying to deliver the very best sermon they can, nor even to let preachers off the hook for being lazy or lackluster. Paul exhorts Timothy to “preach the word” (2 Timothy 4:1-5), and it is clear from other New Testament passages (such as 1 Thessalonians 2:4) that preaching is a vital task of ministry deserving careful reflection, preparation, and reliance on the power of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 2:4). But notice that entertainment is nowhere in the equation. An entertaining speaker should never be the ultimate reason you travel 20-50 miles to attend a megachurch rather than giving prayerful consideration to whether God may be calling you to join that small, ordinary, local church two blocks from your home so you can better invest in your congregation and neighborhood. As long as you are hearing “the word of the Lord in Scripture” and “the gospel of the Lord in proclamation”, then you are getting exactly what you should expect in a sermon, even if it is delivered by a pastor who never rises to the rhetorical heights of St. Augustine or Charles Spurgeon.
Richard Rabil, Jr. 