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The Chick-fil-A ChurchHow "video venues" are helping megachurches franchise.

By Andrew ParkPosted Friday, Aug. 15, 2008, at 12:37 PM ET

LifeChurch.TV logo Most Sunday mornings at Buckhead Church in downtown Atlanta, one person is conspicuously absent: the senior pastor, Andy Stanley. A nationally known evangelist, Stanley is usually 20 minutes away at North Point Community Church, the suburban megachurch he has led for 13 years. To the 6,000 or so faithful at Buckhead, he appears only on video, his digital image projected in front of the congregation in life-sized 3-D. The preacher is a hologram.

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As the Wall Street Journal noted earlier this summer, American megachurch pastors are starting up video-based branches overseas to spread their faith, and their faces, to places where evangelical Christianity is just taking hold, using Starbucks as their model for rapid expansion. But here at home, where houses of worship are already as plentiful as suburban strip centers, the same strategy of high-tech franchising is emerging, despite objections from many Christians that it's the wrong way to reach new converts.

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Chris Lehmann reviewed Rick Warren's book The Purpose-Driven Life and examined the "rigid—and plainly dangerous—nominalist faith" of Joel Osteen. Witold Rybczynski examined the architecture of the megachurch. Jesse Noyes noted that the old church-naming conventions are starting to fade. Doree Shafrir reported on the history of church signs.

An estimated 2,000 to 2,500 U.S. congregations now operate multiple campuses, and many of them, like Buckhead Church, are so-called video venues. The Leadership Network, a Christian nonprofit that follows these multisite churches, says there will be 30,000 of them within a few years. Already, the most ambitious pastors are predicting that, thanks to video, they'll have branded outlets nationwide and more than 100,000 followers—twice as large as the country's biggest megachurch today. Gigachurches are the way that next-generation celebrity evangelists are building their empires.

While anyone can watch Joel Osteen or T.D. Jakes on TV, few would call that "going to church." Can a digitally projected pastor lead a congregation, shepherd believers, create and expand a community? Or is this just business-minded religion run amok? In a blog post, one of Stanley's lieutenants compared the job of running a video venue to operating a franchise of another Christian-led business: Chick-fil-A. "Just like that Chick-fil-A owner/operator, I'm here in Nashville to open up our franchise and run it right," wrote Eddie Johnson. "I believe in my company and what they are trying to 'sell.' "

Johnson told me that he never anticipated the vitriolic response his blog post would produce. ("This is where 'Church, Inc.' takes us," wrote one commenter; another called Johnson the anti-Christ.) But he stands by his analogy. Most residents of Nashville, Tenn.—he estimates around 71 percent—don't attend church regularly. If it takes a name-brand preacher to put butts in seats, so be it.

But first, there has to be a place for people to put their butts. The most successful megachurches, like Willow Creek Community Church outside Chicago and Mars Hill Church in Seattle, are standing-room-only. They've expanded as much as zoning laws and the cost of bricks and mortar will allow. In the past, they would send up-and-coming leaders out to set up autonomous congregations in other locations (and many still do). But church-planting, as it's known, can be arduous and time-consuming, and there's no guarantee it will reproduce the home church's success, especially without the same charismatic leader at the top. With video, you just need seats and a screen to replicate the original. While only a handful of churches can afford Buckhead's $250,000 high-def system, it costs relatively little to project a DVD of the home church's sermon from last week. Or churchgoers can head to the movie theater: National CineMedia rents multiplex screens that otherwise would be dark on Sunday mornings to churches.

With video venues, ambitious pastors can think beyond their current geographic boundaries, whether it's across town, across the country, or even across international borders. Oklahoma City's LifeChurch.tv, which also holds services online, has churches in six states. Fellowship Church in Dallas bought out a struggling Baptist church in Miami for its first off-site location. Andy Stanley's North Point has 16 video venues, including a church whose members voted to defect from the Presbyterian Church of Canada last fall. He's gunning for a total of 60 by 2010.

Typically, a video venue will have a local staff to produce live elements to its service—greetings, music, offerings—and a "campus pastor" who will occasionally preach. Defenders of video venues note that the unorthodox arrangement relieves young pastors of the burden of writing and delivering a weekly sermon, leaving them more time to spend with their members, staffs, and families.

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Andrew Park is a writer based in Chapel Hill, N.C.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

I used to attend an offshoot of Willow Creek's model, and it's sad to say that churches can't care for people when leadership isn't present. I think these video venues are great for the occasional change of pace or a weekend pick me up, but Christ calls His children to do more than just present the Gospel. They also need to model it, live it, and walk with people through this crazy thing called life.

--reesefire

(To reply, click here.)

I become more and more amazed at how circular the history of church culture in America seems. The protestant ethos that many claim is an important element of what it means to be 'American' grew from a desire to escape an all-encompassing church from a centralized authority and get back to "the real way God wanted it." Fast forward 500 years and the cycle continues to repeat itself with suburban America standing in for Rome and disillusioned evangelicals starting home churches, missions, and non-denominational organizations like The Simple Way.

Meanwhile the dwindling number of members of mainline protestant denominations that have for generations been teaching the importance of social justice, redemption, and community-building are left scratching their heads wondering why another new church has to get started when they've been around for hundreds of years.

--OhNoNotAgain

(To reply, click here.)

LifeChurch.tv came to my town a couple of years ago. They built a big building on the outskirts of town. It stands alone in what was a cow pasture. The landscape around the building hasn't been much altered, not yet anyway. No artfully arrayed trees or bushes soften the building's outlines or disguise its mass. There're only multiple entrances and a large parking lot to let you know that it's a place where people congregate. The building is incongruous; it erupts out of the ground like a monument. It's not part of a neighborhood. If not for the LifeChurh.tv logos, you might be forgiven for thinking the place was some kind of sports and fitness complex.

The place draws a pretty good crowd on Sunday mornings. I had occasion to drive past one Sunday just as services were ending. The two-lane country road the church borders clearly wasn't designed to handle that amount of traffic. People put up with it I guess. So the place must offer something people want. It's not as if there weren't already plenty of churches to choose from in my town.

I've never attended a LifeChurch.tv service, but one of my friends has. She and her husband were looking for a church to which they could take their kids. Neither parent is a firm believer; both are what I would describe as casual agnostics. But both felt that some form of instruction in public and private virtue would benefit their young kids. And, not least of all, neither wanted the children to be the odd ones out when all the other kids at school were talking about going to church. So they began looking for some congregation that didn't demand too much in terms of belief or participation. They didn't want to commit to a dogma or a community. They wanted to be able to take what they needed or wanted with few strings attached. I guess LifeChurch.tv gave them that. From what I understand there's a lot of music and celebration, a few prayers and other items of church business conducted by a local pastor, and big screen sermon beamed in from the leader's Oklahoma City church. I'm told it's all typically fun, spiritually uplifting, and life affirming. No contentious political issues are discussed, there's not much talk of narrow paths, the emphasis is on redemption rather than sin and damnation, and appeals for support are low key.

Of course my friends have only been attending the LifeChurch.tv services for a few months, so maybe they haven't yet seen all there is to see. But to me it sounds as if the fast food analogy is fairly apt. You won't find a lot of unique, local flavor in these churches but you pretty much know what you're going to get. And what you'll get has been designed to be broadly appealing. It's convenient and you don't have to worry that the place will go under without your patronage. I can see the appeal, I guess. I wouldn't want to live exclusively on that fare, mind you, and I wouldn't recommend that diet to anyone else. But plenty of people seem to like it.

--Havelock

(To reply, click here.)

(8/17)

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