Believe what they do, not what they say

On Evangelical megachurches who gaslight and obscure the truth, my latest for the Minnesota Star Tribune ...

Hi Readers,

Quick Sunday afternoon post for you here. Hope you’re all getting a chance to enjoy an autumn day of some sort wherever you are (or a spring day for our friends in the Southern Hemisphere!)

Sharing here again my latest column for the Minnesota Star Tribune.

There will be a gift link to the full column at the bottom (please let me know if you have trouble accessing it).

Reading fawning articles about popular evangelical megachurches, highlighting their “growth” at a time when “most churches are dying,” feels kind of like sitting in a funeral service for a family member — let’s call him Uncle Dave — who was publicly beloved and renowned, but behind the scenes, within the family, was an abusive jerk whose behavior and attitude led to generations of family pain and suffering.

You know the feeling? We’ve all been there at one time or another.

“Dave was a great guy: a prominent businessman, beloved by his wife and children, hardworking and always doing favors to anyone who asked. He was also [and here’s the kicker] a man of God.”

Meanwhile, you know that Dave was either totally absent in his children’s lives or he cheated on their mom without any sign of remorse.

Or he ruined Thanksgiving dinner by haranguing everyone at the table with his thoughts about immigrants, Black people or LGBTQ+ people.

Or he cheated his colleagues at work, lied on his taxes and gambled away the grandkids’ college funds.

But there you sit in church, listening to the minister go on and on about Dave’s honorable Christian faith, his upstanding record of business and service in his community, his reputation as a “family man.”

And what do you do in that position? Dave is a member of your family! You’re sitting there in a place of worship, or at the funeral home. No one would look kindly upon you if you stood up right there and started telling the truth about Dave. It wouldn’t be “appropriate.” And worse, it would reflect poorly on your family name.

So most of us stay silent. The truth is hidden behind a veil. Dave gets to go down as a “good man.” His victims, the survivors strewn about his family and his community, never get closure or resolution. Most of the time, they lose more than just their faith in Dave — they lose their faith in God or in the basic goodness of society.

•••

That’s exactly how I felt, how I always feel as a fellow Christian and ordained Lutheran pastor, when I read mainstream news publications recounting the “success” and writing feel-good stories of popular evangelical megachurches.

And let me be clear, things weren’t always this way. I was baptized, confirmed and married in one of the metro area’s largest Lutheran churches, an ELCA congregation that in many ways followed the lessons of evangelicalism’s Church Growth movement — operating congregations like companies and asking pastors to lead as CEOs do, complete with mission and vision statements, business-minded boards and hefty marketing budgets.

When I finished seminary, I learned to preach during my internship at a large Lutheran congregation in Las Vegas, where at least one of our five weekly worship services boasted more than 1,200 people on an average Sunday. We had bands led by professional musicians, large screens, lights, camera, action! I took it all in and did my best, amplifying my homilies with “sermon slides” created by an in-house graphic designer.

I loved that church. When I went to Chicago, pastoring in the shadow of Bill Hybels’ Willow Creek, one of the Midwest’s first and most prominent evangelical megachurches, I encouraged my church council to buy large screens for worship as well. I went to Christmas Eve services at Willow Creek to take notes on their “production value.” And when I left Chicago, I left for a larger congregation in the hotbed of evangelical megachurches in Orange County, Calif., pastoring just a few towns over from Rick Warren’s famed megachurch, Saddleback, and from Mariners, the church that’s home to more than a few Real Housewives and sprawls out its lush, storybook campus next to some of America’s wealthiest neighborhoods.

It was in California, however, that the facade came crashing down for me. I had journeyed to Evangelical Oz, and with conservative Christians lined up solidly behind thrice-married adulterer Donald Trump, the yellow brick road took me right up to the green screen, which collapsed to reveal cowering behind it a sad and broken pastorate, compromised by greater allegiance to money, power and covering up scandal than to the Gospel of Jesus. Remember it was this Jesus who famously said — and which was last Sunday’s lectionary Gospel reading at Catholic and mainline Protestant congregations around America — that: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25).

So much for Church Growth’s multi-campus, grow-grow-grow-at-all-costs model.

Read the rest of the column here

P.S. …

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