David Yonggi Cho was a South Korean Christian minister. He was the founder of the Yoido Full Gospel Church, which he started in a tent with 5 people, which eventually became the world's largest congregation, with a membership of 830,000.
Joshua Eugene Harris is an American former Evangelical Christian pastor. Harris' 1997 book I Kissed Dating Goodbye, in which he laid out his ideas concerning a Biblically based Christian approach to dating and relationships, helped shape purity culture for many Christian millennials. Harris was lead pastor of Covenant Life Church, the founding church of Sovereign Grace Ministries, in Gaithersburg, Maryland from 2004 until 2015. In 2018, Harris disavowed I Kissed Dating Goodbye and discontinued its publication. The following year, Harris announced that he was separating from his wife, had "undergone a massive shift in regard to my faith in Jesus" and had given up on his Christian faith.
Willow Creek Community Church is an Evangelical non-denominational, multi-site megachurch. Its largest campus is located in the northwestern Chicago suburb of South Barrington, Illinois. It was founded on October 12, 1975 by Dave Holmbo and Bill Hybels, who was its longtime senior pastor. As of February 2020, the church averaged 18,000 attendees each weekend at seven locations, down from a high of 25,000 in 2015. Willow Creek has seven locations in the Chicago area, and their Spanish-speaking congregations, Willow Español, at the South Barrington and South Lake in Lincolnshire, campus.
Sovereign Grace Churches is a group of Reformed, neocharismatic, Evangelical, restorationist, Christian churches primarily located in North America. Besides the North American congregations, there are also congregations in Australia, Bolivia, Ethiopia, Great Britain, Germany and Mexico.
John Fullerton MacArthur Jr. is an American Particular Baptist pastor and author who hosts the national Christian radio and television program Grace to You. He has been the pastor of Grace Community Church, a non-denominational church in Sun Valley, California since February 9, 1969. He is currently the chancellor emeritus of The Master's University in Santa Clarita and The Master's Seminary.
The First Baptist Church of Hammond is a fundamental Independent Baptist church in Hammond, Indiana. It is the largest church in the state of Indiana, and in 2007 was the 20th largest in the United States. Though founded in 1887 by Allen Hill, it was under Jack Hyles' leadership from 1959–2001 when it became one of the megachurches in the United States and during the 1970s had the highest Sunday school attendance of any church in the world. In 1990, the church had a weekly attendance of 20,000. It also operates Hyles-Anderson College, a non-accredited institution established for the training of pastors and missionaries, and two K-12 schools, called City Baptist Schools and Hammond Baptist Schools. John Wilkerson is the senior pastor at First Baptist Church.
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.
Prestonwood Baptist Church is a Baptist multi-site megachurch, based in Plano, Texas. It is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. It is one of the largest churches in America, with a membership of over 45,000 and a weekly attendance of around 17,000.
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.
Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa is a Christian megachurch located near the boundary between the cities of Costa Mesa and Santa Ana in Orange County. Although the church takes its name from its original facilities on the Costa Mesa side of the boundary, it is now in Santa Ana. It is the original Calvary Chapel, having grown since 1965 from a handful of people led by the original senior pastor Chuck Smith to become the "mother church" of over one thousand congregations worldwide. Outreach Magazine's list of the 100 Largest Churches in America lists attendance as 9,500, making it the thirty-ninth largest in America.
Charles Joseph Mahaney, commonly known as C.J., is an American Christian minister. He is the senior pastor at Sovereign Grace Church of Louisville, and was formerly president of Sovereign Grace Ministries, now known as Sovereign Grace Churches, a network formed to establish and support local churches. He was one of the founding pastors and leaders of Covenant Life Church, in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Under Mahaney's leadership, Sovereign Grace Church of Louisville is a member of Sovereign Grace Churches and works with the Southern Baptist Convention for training and Christian mission work.
The Meeting House is an Anabaptist church located in the Greater Toronto Area suburb of Oakville, Ontario. It consists of nineteen regional sites meeting mostly in cinemas, each of which has a lead pastor with a team of elders and part-time staff, with and interim senior pastor, Karmyn Bokma, and a board of overseers. With a consistent average weekly attendance of around 5,000, it is ranked by the Hartford Institute of Religion as the third largest church in Canada. The Meeting House is part of a denomination called Be in Christ.
Eddie Lee Long was an American pastor who served as the senior pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, a megachurch in unincorporated DeKalb County, Georgia, from 1987 until his death in 2017.
Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale (CCFL) is an evangelical megachurch in Florida, with over 20,000 worshipers attending on average. Founded in 1985 by Bob Coy and his wife Diane, it is affiliated with the Calvary Chapel movement. CCFL is currently led by Pastor Doug Sauder.
Community Chapel and Bible Training Center was a controversial independent church created in 1967 and pastored by Donald Lee Barnett in which he taught his version of Oneness Pentecostalism. The church eventually grew to an attendance of over 3,000 before splitting and losing significant numbers in 1988 because of numerous lawsuits brought against Barnett and others in the church leadership for sexual improprieties. Community Chapel became infamous for a practice its leaders advocated known as "spiritual connections." This practice involved seeking intense emotional experiences of love with another person, usually not one's spouse, while dancing together in worship. It was taught at the Chapel that through this experience, Jesus, specially known to the participants as "the glorified Son of Man" because of the teaching of Barnett, was connecting the members of his church together in love as he had always meant them to be.
The Inspiring Body of Christ Church (IBOC) is a non-denominational megachurch in Dallas, Texas in the United States. A survey by Outreach Magazine in 2008 ranked the church 87th in the US based on weekly attendance of 7,500 and has since grown to 15,000 members. The church describes itself as a "high praising, high worship, Bible believing church."
David Joseph Platt is an American evangelical Baptist pastor. He was senior pastor at the Church at Brook Hills in Birmingham, Alabama, from 2006 to 2014. At the time he was the youngest megachurch pastor in the United States. From 2014 to 2017, Platt was president of the International Mission Board. He became pastor-teacher at McLean Bible Church in 2017. He is the author of the New York Times Best Seller Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream. Other publications include Follow Me: A Call to Die. A Call to Live, Radical Together, and A Compassionate Call to Counter Culture in a World of Poverty, Same-Sex Marriage, Racism, Sex Slavery, Immigration, Abortion, Persecution, Orphans and Pornography.
Gilbert Bilezikian is an American Christian writer, professor, and lecturer. Along with Bill Hybels, Bilezikian is a co-founder of Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, "one of America's most important churches". In 2000, Christianity Today referred to Bilezikian as "the man behind the megachurch". In 2020, Willow Creek announced that allegations of sexual abuse had been made against Bilezikian.
Seattle Bible College (SBC) is a four-year Bible college in Everett, Washington that offers theological and church ministry degrees. It was founded in 1955 and is associated with Philadelphia Church in Seattle, Washington which is associated with the Fellowship of Christian Assemblies.
