The 'Megachurch'

Megachurch and Mega Bucks: Creating Wealthy Pastors

A *megachurch, as defined, is a Protestant Christian church having 2,000 or more in the congregation in average weekend attendance. The concept originated in the mid 19th century, continued into the mid 20th century as a low-key phenomenon, and expanded rapidly throughout 1980s and 1990s; it is widely seen across the world as of the early 21st century.

The origins of the megachurch movement, with a large number of local congregants who return on a weekly basis can be traced to the 1800s. There were large churches earlier in history, but they were considerably rarer. Examples include Charles Spurgeon's Baptist Metropolitan Tabernacle in London which attracted 5,000 weekly for years in the late 19th century, and religious broadcaster Aimee Semple McPherson's Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, which was similarly large.

In 2010, the Hartford Institute's database listed more than 1,300 such Protestant churches in the United States; according to that data, approximately 50 churches on the list had average attendance exceeding 10,000, with the highest recorded at 47,000 in average attendance.

On one weekend in November 2015, around one in ten Protestant churchgoers in the US, or about 5 million people, attended service in a megachurch. While 3,000 individual Catholic parishes have 2,000 or more attendants for an average Sunday Mass, these Catholic churches are not seen as part of the megachurch movement, because–by definition–megachurches are a part of Protestantism.

Globally, these large congregations are a significant development in Protestant Christianity. In the United States, the phenomenon has more than quadrupled in the past two decades. It has since spread worldwide. In 2007, five of the ten largest Protestant churches were in South Korea. The largest megachurch in the United States is Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas with more than 40,000 members every weekend and the current largest megachurch in the world is South Korea's Yoido Full Gospel Church, an Assemblies of God church, with more than 830,000 members as of 2007.

*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.