A megachurch is a church with an unusually large membership that also offers a variety of educational and social activities, usually Protestant, including Evangelical. The Hartford Institute for Religion Research defines a megachurch as any Protestant Christian church having 2,000 or more people in average weekend attendance. The megachurch is an organization type rather than a denomination.
Lakewood Church is a non-denominational evangelical Christian megachurch located in Houston, Texas. It is among the largest congregations in the United States, averaging about 45,000 attendees per week. The 16,800-seat Lakewood Church building, home to four English-language services and two Spanish-language services per week, is located at the former Compaq Center. Joel Osteen is the senior pastor of Lakewood Church with his wife, Victoria, who serves as co-pastor.
Joel Scott Osteen is an American pastor, televangelist, businessman and author based in Houston, Texas. Known for his weekly televised services and several best-selling books, Osteen is one of the more prominent figures associated with prosperity theology and a focus of its critics.
Rodney Morgan Howard-Browne is a South African-born American evangelist and conspiracy theorist. He has resided in Tampa, Florida, since the mid-1990s and is pastor of The River Church in Tampa Bay. The River is considered both Pentecostal and Charismatic with revival meetings, led by Howard-Browne, known for those in the audience breaking into "holy laughter" and experiencing other phenomena similar to the Great Awakenings and Azusa Street Revival. Howard-Browne is the head of Revival Ministries International, a ministry he and his wife founded in 1997.
David Matthew Stoll is an American cultural anthropologist. His research has focused on the indigenous peoples of modern Latin America, and especially on the Mayas in Guatemala. He has been a professor of anthropology at Middlebury College since 1997.
McChurch is a McWord used to suggest that a particular church has a strong element of entertainment, consumerism or commercialism which obscures its religious aspects. The term is sometimes used as a derogatory synonym for megachurch.
Mark A. Driscoll is an American evangelical pastor and author. He is the founder and primary contributor of RealFaith ministries. He is also the senior and founding pastor of Trinity Church in Scottsdale, Arizona, which was founded in 2016.
Timothy James Keller was an American Calvinist pastor, preacher, theologian, and Christian apologist. He was the chairman and co-founder of Redeemer City to City, which trains pastors for service around the world. He was also the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City and the author of The New York Times bestselling books The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith (2008), Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God (2014), and The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (2008). The prequel for the latter is Making Sense of GOD: An Invitation to the Skeptical (2016).
Alfonso R. Bernard, Sr. is the founder, CEO and pastor of the Christian Cultural Center Megachurch in Brooklyn, New York. In the 2020s, the CCC is a 37,000+ member church that sits on an 11+1⁄2-acre campus in Brooklyn, New York.
Mars Hill Church was a Christian megachurch, founded in 1996 by Mark Driscoll, Lief Moi, and Mike Gunn. It was a multi-site church based in Seattle, Washington and grew from a home Bible study to 15 locations in 4 U.S. states. in addition to services offered at its 15 locations; the church also podcast content of weekend services, and of conferences, on the Internet with more than 260,000 sermon views online every week. In 2013, Mars Hill had a membership of 6,489 and average weekly attendance of 12,329. Following controversy in 2014 involving founding pastor Mark Driscoll, attendance dropped to 8,000–9,000 people per week.
Elevation Church is an Evangelical Baptist multi-site megachurch, based in Charlotte, North Carolina. Weekly church attendance was 27,408 people in 2021. Elevation has 20 locations. Its senior pastors are Steven Furtick and Holly Furtick.
Skyline Church is an evangelical Christian megachurch located in La Mesa, California, a suburb of San Diego, affiliated with the Wesleyan Church denomination. The church currently averages 2,500 in attendance per week.
Real Marriage: The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together is a 2012 marriage book written by Christian author Mark Driscoll and his wife, Grace, and published by Thomas Nelson. The book spent one week on the New York Times Best Seller list for advice books, however, controversy arose when it was later reported that a former pastor of Mars Hill Church had contracted with the marketing firm Result Source to affect metrics on the best-seller list shortly before resigning. The church also created a Real Marriage sermon series based on the book.
Matt Chandler is an American Baptist evangelical Christian pastor. He is the senior pastor of Village Church, based in Flower Mound, Texas and the executive director of the board of the Acts 29 Network.
Mark Galli is an American Roman Catholic author and editor, and former Protestant minister. For seven years he was editor in chief of Christianity Today.
New religious movements in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States have a history going back to the 19th century.
James S. Bielo is an American socio-cultural anthropologist, specializing in the Anthropology of Religion, the Anthropology of Christianity, American Religion, Urban Anthropology, Linguistic Anthropology, and the study of Material Religion. He is an associate professor of Religious Studies at Northwestern University. He was awarded his Ph.D. in anthropology in 2007 from Michigan State University. With Carrie M. Lane, he is the series founder and co-editor of the “Anthropology of Contemporary North America" book series at the University of Nebraska Press. He is one of the founders of the AnthroCyBib, an online bibliographic resource for the anthropology of Christianity that is hosted by the University of Edinburgh. He is also a founder and co-curator of Materializing the Bible, an interactive, curated a catalogue of biblical themed environments that covers "Protestant, Catholic and, to a lesser extent Jewish and Latter-Day Saints sites, that in different ways transforms the Bible into physical, interactive and choreographed environments, for purposes of immersion, personal piety, religious education and conversion."
Chad Veach is an American evangelical pastor and the founder of Zoe Church, a youth-oriented Christian congregation that is based in Los Angeles, California. Veach has been the subject of significant mainstream press coverage, which often focuses on Veach’s taste in streetwear and sneakers and his links to celebrities like actor Chris Pratt, the Kardashians and singer Justin Bieber, which have been chronicled on Veach’s Instagram.
The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill is a podcast that discusses the popularity, and later scandal associated with Mars Hill Church and Mark Driscoll. The show is hosted by Mike Cosper and produced by Christianity Today.
