Jesus Christ's Superflock

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IN A SOCIETY where the average family moves every five years, where people have long commutes from exurb to office park and spend precious little time with family, much less neighbors, megachurches solve the problem of dehydrated community. Just appear, the megachurch says, and you are one of us. The size of congregations, far from being a deterrent, is a draw, providing the anonymity that allows the curious ("seekers," in the parlance) to feel comfortable browsing for a church that suits their needs. From a doctrinal point of view, size is a natural byproduct of righteousness. Anyway, if it weren't a good product, would so many people be buying it?

Megachurches don't just physically resemble malls, they mimic the very essence of what a mall offers, consolidating convenience, entertainment, neighborhood, even employment. But in a larger sense, the megachurch resembles the Norman Rockwell town square—the commons. All churches promise forgiveness and salvation, but the key to the megachurch is that it provides all kinds of social services and functions that struggling old-line parishes have been forced to off-load. By taking on roles as various as those of the neighborhood welcome committee, the Rotary, the corner diner, the country club mixer, the support group—and, of course, family and school—megachurches have become the tightly knit villages that many Americans think they grew up in and can now find only on television. It's no coincidence that so many megachurches have the word "community" in their names. In a sense they operate much like medieval city-states, and it is telling that a megachurch in Longmont, Colorado, plans to develop 313 surrounding acres into residences, a community college, and a senior center.

Suffixes of "community" and "church" aside, Willow Creek's name came, appropriately enough, from the fact that the congregation once met in the husk of the Willow Creek movie theater. Rather like malls that take their names from what they destroy, this church takes its name from a competing form of entertainment.

Megachurches are designed to be familiar, nonthreatening, fun. The main entrance to Willow Creek is no portal done up like a passage into another world with a huge arch and gargoyles. Inside there's not an ounce of old-time religiosity. No icons, no crucified Christs, no stained glass, no polished silver or gold. And no "Sunday best." There's an almost aggressive insistence on informality, as if to show the genuine nature of voluntary spirituality. The 7,200-seat gunmetal gray auditorium has stadium seating and automatic curtains that lower to create a calm half-light. As one Willow Creek official has said, "You can't convince the unchurched that they have to sit on a hard seat in a draft for an hour every Sunday morning because that's what people did 500 years ago."

Down front is a floodlit stage with two 16-by-28-foot LED screens. When the pastor (although that term is rarely used—first names suffice) delivers the sermon (although "message" is the term of choice), these screens allow him to show a cartoon or filmstrip to illustrate his points. As with many megachurches, Willow Creek's music is generated by a large live band, including electric guitars and saxophones. Churchgoers once had to squint at hymnals, but here projectors show the words (as well as the perpetual copyright notices) of the poppy songs.

These electronic altars may seem luxurious, but they are more practical than buying thousands of hymnals and prayer books. No mass page-flipping by parishioners, who are never lost during the service. The singing is uniformly booming and enthusiastic, partly because of the music's catchy simplicity—no minor 18th-century composers here— but also because people have their chins up and their hands free.

In a reiteration of the medieval morality play, the Willow Creek service often kicks off with a playlet illustrating a workaday problem before the pastor, Bill Hybels, takes the stage. Well-scrubbed and casually dressed, he speaks about "virtue development" or "life at the boiling point" or some other general theme. Over the weekend there are three interchangeable, 30-minute "seeker services," which the church has called, with deflective candor, Christianity 101. Midweek features a "believer service." This is grad school, the place for real transcendence... and tithing.

The weekend seeker services, however, are aimed at the skeptical. Hence Hybels' focus on a nurturing, forgiving God eager to help with the stresses facing most families. It goes without saying that religious explosions like this one depend on a charismatic character who spots the needs of a population, and Hybels is no exception. Looking over his sermons of the last decade, you can see a chicken-soup-for-the-soul inventory. Adjustment is key: adjusting to your children, to a spouse having an affair, to apathy, to abortion, to debt, to divorce, to drugs, to competition, to being lonely, to not measuring up, to repetition, to sloppiness, to lust, to anger, to being passed by, to racism, to growing older, and, well, to just about everything that men, especially, would prefer not to speak about in public. State-of-the-art duplicating machines guarantee that on the way out you can pick up a tape or CD of exactly the sermon you just witnessed so that you can revisit the coping lessons on your ride home.

In just 30 years, Willow Creek has become one of the nation's largest congregations; 18,000 people attend services on any given weekend. And while independent of any top-down denomination, it has expanded sideways into its own Willow Creek Association—a national network of more than 10,000 institutions listed in an atlas of churches sympathetic to Willowesque branding. If this sounds suspiciously like a denomination, so be it. What it really represents is the franchising of a formatted service, the Home Depot of epiphany.

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Photo: Alex Webb

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