Megachurches and Theologies of Consumption :: Religion Christian

Last weekend, while attending Lexington, KY’s Southland Christian Church, I received an invitation to attend a â€Å"Poor Man’s After-Tax Dinner.† Located on a 115-acre plot that occupies a stretch of the rapidly disappearing farmland between Lexington and Jessamine County, Southland will host the gala, which includes a catered meal and a performance by the Dale Adams Band. On the church’s website, an announcement for the event asks, â€Å"Did you have to pay when you filed taxes? This month’s Gathering is designed to help you to forget your IRS woes.†[1] The After-Tax Dinner will minister to those still reeling from the April 15th deadline, and, with any luck, it will foster solidarity among Southland’s flock, the majority of whom are members of the tax bracket whose wallets ache most severely after just having rendered unto Caesar the money that belongs to him. Southland Christian Church, one of several worship centers in the United States that has earned the moniker â€Å"Six Flags over Jesus,† is Lexington’s largest megachurch. With a weekly attendance of 8,000 people and an operating budget that supports a staff of over eighty members, Southland far exceeds most U.S. congregations in terms of financial resources and social clout. In recent years, popular and scholarly studies have attempted to situate the megachurch movement within a broad cultural context. Although the majority of these analyses dispute the precise definition of a megachurch, most distinguish these multiplex sanctuaries from smaller worship communities by using the same criteria—i.e. weekly attendance, campus acreage, annual budget, etc.—that megachurches themselves draw on to represent their own success. [2] However, the essence of a megachurch is not its large buildings, but rather the theology of consumption that informs it s programming.[3] In this way, a megachurch ethos has infiltrated even the smallest congregations in the United States and has helped to solidify Christianity’s inextricable connection to consumer capitalism. To those who see megachurches as symptomatic of a flawed Christianity, market-minded church growth confounds one of the faith’s oldest dualities, the contradiction of living in the world without conforming to its ways, as Paul puts it in Romans 12. Megachurches at once reject â€Å"the world† and participate in it by seeking to win the lost and wow the consumer at the same time.