At the turnoff to the New Milford town green, Route 7, the two-lane road that winds through the narrow, forested valley of the Housatonic River, linking rural northwestern Connecticut with Danbury and the suburbanized south, abruptly opens out into four lanes. A few miles farther south, the road is still under construction, but already auto dealerships and mini-malls have sprung up on both sides, leaving only an empty farm stand and a quilting shop to remind passersby that New Milford was once a farming community. Faith Church, completed two years ago, is hard to see for the roadwork, and hard to identify, because, apart from the three stucco crosses on its façade, the building looks much like a big-box store. The church parking lot is enormous, and at 10:45 A.M. on a Sunday hundreds of people stream from their cars to the wide glass doors of the church for the second service of the morning.
In New Milford, a town of thirty thousand, Faith Church is a matter of curiosity. It looks nothing like the Congregational and Episcopal churches on the historic green, or even the modern Catholic and Baptist churches in town. People call it “the faith place,” and they wonder who goes there and where they come from.
Faith Church, however, would look familiar to people in other parts of the country. The doors open onto a spacious and well-lit reception area with wall-to-wall carpeting, plasma TV screens, and sofas, where people can watch the service going on in the sanctuary. The first time I attended services there, an ebullient woman in bluejeans introduced herself as Susan and invited me over to the booth to pick up some information about the church. While I leafed through four-color brochures advertising Bible-study classes, a day-care center, a pre-K-12 school, and a variety of ministries, she asked if I wanted to fill out a card with my contact information and gave me a gift for newcomers—a beribboned package containing a coupon for the church’s coffee shop, more brochures, and a CD of a sermon by the senior pastor, Frank Santora, on how to build self-esteem by “seeing yourself as God sees you.” Did I want information about small groups? There were groups for single women, basketball players, scrapbook-makers, museumgoers, and a group led by Susan herself for people learning to trade on eBay.
I passed a bookstore and found myself in a hallway decorated with comic-book-style murals of a street scene in an old-fashioned town. At a registration desk, parents were lining up at a computerized check-in system to get name tags for their kids before sending them in to the schoolrooms for children’s church, which offers Bible lessons, worship, playtime, and snacks. At the “Sonbucks” coffee shop down the hall, volunteers were working an espresso machine. When a band began to play, people drifted into the sanctuary, some carrying their Styrofoam cups with them.
The sanctuary at Faith Church, as in many megachurches, looks like a modern concert hall, with more than a thousand comfortable seats arrayed in front of a deep stage. The services often begin with soft rock music, played by an eight-piece band, then singers appear, to lead the congregation in praise songs: “I worship you” and “Wonderful God, you are worthy.” The worship pastor, Charles Reid, an African-American, directs this part of the service from a keyboard, interpolating the music with prayers. All the other full-time pastors on the staff are white, but the congregation is about forty per cent white and thirty per cent African-American, with the rest predominantly Latino and Asian. The doctrinal statement on the church Web site makes it clear that the church is Pentecostal, but Faith Church is nondenominational, and, while in most Pentecostal churches the worship is spontaneous and ecstatic, with people raising their arms in rapture and sometimes speaking in tongues, here the worship is decorous. The services, which usually include live skits or videos that introduce the text of the sermon, are well produced—almost professionally so—by a woman on the church staff. The lyrics of the songs and the Biblical verses the pastors cite appear simultaneously on a large video screen above the stage, and television cameras record the services for broadcast on a dozen local public-access stations.
On the stage, Frank Santora was preaching the second sermon of a series called “God’s Apprentice,” before a backdrop of the Manhattan skyline. With an untucked, open-necked shirt, he looked like any man from the audience. He sat at a small table at the front of the stage, wearing a head mike, and spoke in a conversational manner. His sermon was on how to influence people, and in explaining how not to do it he gave a funny imitation, in his high tenor voice, of a guy on a soapbox telling everyone they were going to Hell. When he told Bible stories, he used everyday language and created lively, sometimes comic dramas. In Santora’s version of the story of Mary and Martha, Jesus shows up at their house for lunch unannounced with twelve hungry fishermen. The floors aren’t washed, the living room isn’t vacuumed, and the dishes are still in the sink. Martha, “in panic mode,” busies herself cleaning, cooking, and setting the table. She’s so busy she doesn’t have time for Jesus. Mary, meanwhile, “has got this thing figured out.” Their house, she thinks, is what it is, and Jesus didn’t come to be impressed. So she just clears a space on the floor and sits at his feet to listen. Toward the end of the sermon, Santora, now raising his voice, walked about the stage, joked with the musicians, and used comic props. The audience applauded, then grew quiet as he concluded with a lesson about how to grow in faith and to influence others as Christians.
When Santora took over the church, in 1997, its congregation numbered less than three hundred. At the time, it was called Bright Clouds Christian Church, and met in a church it had built in Danbury. Within a few years of his arrival, it was holding three services on weekends, and at the eleven-o’clock Sunday service the congregation overflowed its six-hundred-seat sanctuary. Unable to find land for a bigger building in Danbury, the church bought forty acres ten miles north of town, in New Milford. Since the completion of the new building, in June, 2005, the congregation has been growing at an average of twenty-five per cent a year, with some people coming from as far away as the Bronx. Faith currently draws fifteen hundred people to its weekend services, and at its current rate of growth it will draw two thousand, and attain the status of a megachurch, within the next two years.
Megachurches are rare in New England—there are fewer than a dozen in the region—but there are more than twelve hundred and fifty of them across the country. Since 1980, their numbers have been growing almost exponentially. According to surveys conducted by Scott Thumma, a sociologist at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, in conjunction with other researchers, the number of megachurches doubled between 2000 and 2005, and their average size increased by fifty-seven per cent. The majority are in the Sun Belt, and around sprawling cities such as Atlanta, Dallas, and Los Angeles. They are almost without exception theologically conservative: evangelical in the broad sense of the term. Most of their congregations are in the two-to-three-thousand range, but the largest of them, Lakewood, headed by Joel Osteen, who broadcasts his services live on TV, numbers more than forty thousand. Lakewood is in Houston—it occupies a stadium that once belonged to the Houston Rockets—but the majority are in suburbs or exurbs. Typically, their pastors built in high-growth areas, near highways, when the land was relatively cheap. The second- and fourth-largest churches—Willow Creek, in South Barrington, Illinois, and Saddleback, in Orange County, California—were planted in this fashion more than a quarter of a century ago. Their pastors, Bill Hybels, at Willow Creek, and Rick Warren, at Saddleback, both now in their fifties, have created a pattern for many of the newer churches in everything from worship styles to programming. They do not preach politics, but then, contrary to the impression many non-evangelicals have, only a few megachurch pastors are active in the religious-right movement.
Robert Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, who has written extensively on the breakdown of social networks, and Andy Stern, the president of the Service Employees International Union, have both described the megachurch as one of the most successful community-building institutions of modern times. Almost all megachurches have cafés or food courts, bookstores, sports facilities, child care, youth programs, and small groups, which can include anything from Bible-study classes to affinity groups for motorcyclists. Most of the larger churches have an array of counselling programs and support groups for those suffering from divorce, depression, addiction, or the death of a loved one. Many, including Faith Church, offer classes in how to manage family finances, and many have funds to help church members through financial crises. All have opportunities for community service, and many have drama groups, arts classes, and high-tech recording equipment. In other words, megachurches offer just about everything the newly arrived suburbanite can’t find at Wal-Mart or Home Depot.
But they are also a new species of church. Their pastors, instead of expecting people to accept their practices, have tailored their churches to meet the needs and desires of those they hope to serve. As a result, many have come to define the role of the church in a far more expansive way than traditional churches do.
Megachurches have developed as they have in part because most of their pastors aim to attract people from a variety of religious backgrounds. In the evangelical strongholds of the South, many megachurches belong to the Southern Baptist Convention, the Assemblies of God, and other large evangelical denominations, but nationally a third of all megachurches are, like Faith Church, nondenominational, and many others play down their denominational ties. Saddleback, for example, is a Southern Baptist church, but Rick Warren doesn’t advertise this to newcomers, and he has brought in not only congregants from different evangelical denominations but also former Catholics and former mainline Protestants. Hybels’s congregation at Willow Creek was at one time forty per cent former Catholics.
New England, however, has posed a particular challenge to megachurch builders, not only because it has a relatively small population but because it has relatively few evangelicals. It is the most intensely Catholic part of the country. Catholics of Irish, Italian, and French-Canadian descent have been the religious majority for more than a century, and today, with the addition of Latino Catholics, they make up seventy per cent of those who claim a religious identity. In New Milford and the other small towns of Litchfield County, to the north, Protestant churches dominate the town greens, but Catholics outnumber mainline Protestants by two or three to one. In Fairfield County, to the south, from which Faith Church draws many of its attendees, practicing Catholics make up half the population. They outnumber mainline Protestants by more than five to one, and evangelicals by twelve to one, though this figure does not include African-American congregations, many of which are evangelical. The number of evangelicals in the area appears to be growing, owing partly to the pharmaceutical and financial-services industries, among others, which have attracted people from around the country to cities like Danbury. There has also been a rise in the number of Latino immigrants, some of whom are Pentecostals. But the potential congregation for Faith Church largely consists of the thirty to forty per cent of the people in the area who are not affiliated with any church, most of whom consider themselves to be Christians.
Frank Santora’s office at the back of Faith Church looks like the quarters of a sports coach. A small, L-shaped room in a corridor of offices guarded by a receptionist, it has a framed basketball jersey and pair of boxing shorts, and autographed photographs of Dallas Cowboys on one wall, a basketball signed by Knicks players on the top of a bookshelf, and another on a small round table where Santora sits with guests. When I went to see him, Santora, a tall man with short-cropped hair, wore an old leather jacket that was much too big for him. He had lost a considerable amount of weight since I had seen him preach some months earlier, and he looked much younger than he had on the stage. He was thirty-five years old and a sports fan, but not a player.
Santora said that when a visitor to his church remarked on his youth, he told him that Jesus did all of his preaching before the age of thirty-three. He spoke with a certain formality, as though to assert the dignity of his office, showing only glimpses of the antic humor he had displayed onstage. Pastor Frank, as Santora is known, leads a church with a staff of nine pastors, seven laypeople, and eight hundred volunteers each month, plus the school, which has two hundred students. The church cost seventeen million dollars to build, and its annual budget is four and a half million dollars.
Santora was born in Brooklyn and raised on Staten Island. His family was Catholic, and he was an altar boy. When he was thirteen, the family moved to New Jersey, and his mother, in a desire for a more personal and direct experience of God, started to attend a Pentecostal church. Santora, because he liked the pastor, joined the church, too, and, as he put it, gave his life to Christ formally. His plan, he said, was to “become something successful in the world’s eyes. . . . After that, I would serve God in the ministry.” He went to Rutgers University, graduated with a degree in accounting, and joined an accounting firm with the intention of getting a law degree and becoming a C.P.A./attorney. But his career plans changed.
While still in college, he went to a seminar at the Rhema Bible Training Center, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The center had been founded in 1974 by Kenneth E. Hagin, a popular Pentecostal televangelist whom Santora’s mother admired. Rhema means “spoken word” in ancient Greek, and Hagin preached that believers could be healed physically and financially if they invoked God’s promise of an abundant life and had enough faith. At the center, Santora met the Reverend Anthony Storino, a New Jersey pastor and the regional director of the Rhema association for the Northeast. Another ex-Catholic, Storino had worked in his family’s jukebox-and-pinball-machine business. When he was twenty-nine, he got saved and, a few years later, quit his job and went to Hagin’s Bible school. He began a fellowship in his living room in 1984, and by the time he met Santora it had grown into a church of two hundred people. “I’m a street kid from New Jersey,” Storino told me. “No formal education except for a year in community college, but I read a lot. At our church, we’re Pentecostal from the top of our heads to the soles of our feet—and I’m a pretty animated preacher.”
After Santora returned from Tulsa, he volunteered part time as a young-adults’ pastor at Storino’s church, and the two became close friends. A year later, Santora became engaged, and his fiancée, Lisa Du Bois, moved with her parents to Danbury, where she found a job teaching second grade at Bright Clouds Christian Church. The church had begun as a Bible-study group in a Danbury living room in 1983, and had moved, as it grew, to a doctor’s office, then to a Ramada Inn conference room, and then to what had been an X-rated-movie theatre, before building its own church. Santora met the pastor, another Rhema graduate and a friend of Storino’s, who offered him the job of assistant pastor. Santora accepted.
About four years later, Bright Clouds found itself in the midst of a crisis of the sort that small nondenominational churches rarely survive. The pastor was discovered to be having multiple affairs with women in the congregation. He resigned, and Santora took on his duties while the board decided what to do. Some people left the congregation, but Santora preached forgiveness for his former boss, and gradually began to pull the church together again. At some point, Storino—who is now a member of the executive board of Faith Church—told him that he couldn’t go on running the church as a hireling. “You remember Nikita Khrushchev?” Storino asked me. “Well, I told Frank he should go into the board meeting and bang his shoe on the table, like Khrushchev at the U.N., and say that either they make you senior pastor or you’ll start another church down the street. And, believe me, the congregation would have followed him.” Santora demurred, and the tactic proved unnecessary. Not long afterward, the board found that the church had a million-dollar mortgage on it; Santora agreed to sign it, and was made senior pastor and head of the church corporation. “It worked out good,” Storino said. “Frank turned that baby around.” Santora was twenty-six years old, and, apart from an extension course he had started at Rhema, he had no formal religious education.
A year or two later, Santora began to make the changes that would vastly increase the size of the church. Like Storino’s church, Bright Clouds was a true Pentecostal church that taught spiritual warfare with the Devil and the approach of Armageddon; during worship, people spontaneously raised their arms in rapture, and sometimes spoke in tongues. Its particular theology came from Kenneth Hagin, whose doctrine of “Word of Faith” was controversial among evangelicals, some of whom ridiculed it as “name it and claim it.” Then, too, Bright Clouds, after years of growth, had, like many small churches, become inwardly focussed: a family that took care of its own. Santora had completed his Rhema course under Storino’s tutelage and been ordained as a minister by him. However, according to Storino, Santora always believed that it was his calling to reach out to people of all religious backgrounds.
By 2005, Santora had altered the whole identity of the church. Even before the move to New Milford, the name Bright Clouds Christian Church was dropped. “It sounded like an Indian reservation,” one of the pastors told me. Also, to evangelicals, “Christian” has a denominational ring to it. The Faith Church motto became “Real people, real life, real faith,” and its mission “to help people discover the winner within them through a growing relationship with Jesus Christ.” Its worship style became less spontaneous and enthusiastic, and Santora preached on the problems of daily life. Faith Church today teaches Pentecostal theology in advanced Bible-study courses and holds special healing services once a month, but Santora rarely preaches on Pentecostal doctrine or speaks of Armageddon at the Sunday-morning services. “Sundays are about real life, inspiration, and hope,” he told me. “What good is it to have somebody know the ins and outs of eschatology if their marriage is falling apart, their kids are in all sorts of trouble, and they can’t keep a job?” Instead of Hagin’s doctrine, Santora preaches thinking positively about God’s purposes for one’s life. He said, “I believe that God wants the best for us. I believe that Jesus paid the price on the Cross for not just our sins to be done away with but for our bodies to be healthy and for us to be successful and blessed.”
Ray Martin, the pastor of the children’s church, and a former Assemblies of God minister with a great deal of experience in other large churches, explained that Faith Church, although Pentecostal to its core, had to be “culturally sensitive.” “Here’s the deal,” he said. “Demographically, most of the people in our area come from a Catholic background. For our main worship services to be centrally Pentecostal and charismatic is just too big of a step for a lot of those people.” It’s not, he said, that the church discourages such practices as speaking in tongues, “but we’re targeting our culture, and only one per cent of people around here are Pentecostal.” Santora estimates that fifty per cent of the congregation comes from Catholic, mainline Protestant, and Baptist backgrounds—the majority of them Catholics—and that only twenty to twenty-five per cent are Pentecostals.
Santora also plays down his politics. He holds conventional Christian-right views, but in the several sermons I heard him give he did not mention politics, and the angry militancy of the Christian right seemed foreign to his messages of hope and positive thinking. Santora explained that he did speak out about issues such as abortion and gay marriage around election time, but that otherwise he didn’t preach on politics, and that he believed in treating everyone with love and respect. “I tell people that God isn’t a Republican or a Democrat,” he said. Faith Church is, after all, in a blue state, where the evangelicals tend to be politically centrist, and in his racially mixed congregation there are some Democrats.
In creating Faith Church, Santora has closely followed the model of the “seeker church,” which was developed three decades ago. Its origins lie in two very different phenomena. One was the Jesus movement of the nineteen-sixties, in which crowds of young Californians in torn bluejeans who had rejected the church of their parents flocked to tents where musicians strummed guitars and preachers such as John Wimber led emotionally charged, ritual-free services. The other was the ministry of Robert H. Schuller, the televangelist and builder of the Crystal Cathedral, in Garden Grove, California. As a young minister in the Reformed Church in America, Schuller had been sent in 1955 to plant a church in Orange County, only to find that there were very few families of his denomination in the area, and that about half the population didn’t go to church at all. He rang hundreds of doorbells asking people why, and what kind of church would attract them. On the basis of their answers, he built a church with a huge parking lot, greeters to welcome new “customers,” and Sunday services with inspirational talks by Norman Vincent Peale and sermons of his own on positive thinking. “I advocated and launched what has become known as the marketing approach to Christianity,” Schuller later claimed.
But the basic model of the seeker church was developed by younger and more orthodox pastors, who shared the view that the way to reach the irreligious was to lower the threshold between the church and the secular world, without compromising the essential evangelical message. Warren and Hybels, as young preachers in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, surveyed the burgeoning white suburbs where they had chosen to start their churches. People commonly complained that churches were boring, unfriendly, lacking in child care, and irrelevant to their concerns. “Religion” signified hard pews, arcane doctrines, and spiritual inauthenticity. The answer was to create an informal, relaxed atmosphere, and to deal with the problems of everyday life. Warren points out, in his primer “The Purpose-Driven Church,” that the adults who are most receptive to joining a new church are those in transition (a move, a new job) and those in pain, from, say, a broken marriage, financial trouble, or substance abuse. The church was therefore to provide assistance and to establish small affinity groups to foster a sense of belonging; and pastors were to preach to people’s “felt needs” and to their culture. In general, the boomers and their successors wanted relief, as opposed to guilt; they wanted good news, not more bad news. More than previous generations, they believed in tolerance and in the freedom of the individual; on the other hand, they wanted a set of rules for the conduct of a successful life—“moral guard rails,” as Hybels puts it.
Hybels and Warren had to invent, but today’s aspiring pastors can find a great deal of help and expert advice on how to build a very large church. Books, magazines, and Web sites offer information on everything from parking management to the sociology of congregations. Successful pastors lecture on leadership, and church-growth consulting has become a small industry. The Willow Creek Association and Warren’s Purpose-Driven Church Network hold conferences and, at a small price, offer pastors a wealth of resources from sermons to seminars on the recruitment and training of volunteers.
Santora frankly acknowledges his debt to Warren and many others for the church-growth strategies he practices. Faith Church is a member of the Willow Creek Association, and Santora has sent members of his staff to a Willow Creek conference to learn how to put on theatrical productions. Willow Creek is not a Pentecostal church, but Santora reads its pastors’ sermons for inspiration. He pays attention to the megachurches he considers the most innovative, such as Craig Groeschel’s Life Church, in Edmond, Oklahoma, which incorporates Internet technologies into its services. Three of Santora’s board members head large evangelistic organizations, and Maurilio Amorim, a church-growth consultant, brings him ideas on media and marketing.
Formerly the executive pastor of a megachurch in Nashville, Amorim heads a small Tennessee company that includes Web-site designers, graphic artists, and production directors. “We’re a boutique firm that creates a brand for churches,” he told me. Amorim’s Web site shows his hand in the branding of Faith Church. (“Real hope for real people in the real world” was the motto of his Nashville church.) “We’re trying to create a culture, not just products,” he said. Amorim meets with Santora every other month in part to plan “a marketing blitz” around a six-to-eight-week-long sermon series. “In fall, when the kids go back to school, Frank usually does a series such as ‘My Messy Family,’ ” Amorim said, “and in January, just after New Year’s Day, he does a series on fresh starts. Those are the best times for advertising.” For these series, Amorim puts together a package that includes a direct-mail piece, a thirty-second TV spot, graphic banners on the Faith Church Web site, a microsite, and mini-invitations that church members can give out to friends. Amorim also helps the pastors design church bulletins and elements of the services, such as songs, videos, and stage props, which will engage church attendees in the message before Santora speaks.
Santora’s strategic plan for the next few years includes hiring more pastors and adding more weekend worship services, more small groups, and more community-service programs, and there will be an emphasis on developing new programs for youth and young adults. Last spring, Santora launched a five-year, five-million-dollar capital campaign, to pay off part of the ten-million-dollar mortgage on the new building, to increase the church’s support for foreign missions, and to construct a one-and-a-half-million-dollar youth center in a building next to the church. The center, as Santora envisions it, will have a sanctuary, an iPod lounge, a café, a bowling alley, a basketball court, pool tables, video games, a dance floor, and a skateboard park. Its purpose is to serve Faith Church kids, but also to harbor a program for troubled teens and to provide students from the local high schools with a safe place to hang out. It’s part of the mission, Santora said, “to reach kids who have no interest in spiritual things or in Christ.”
Scott Thumma, at the Hartford Institute, says that megachurch pastors need to have a very different set of skills than those required of small-church pastors. According to his data, a third of all megachurch pastors do not have seminary degrees; and in younger churches the less formal religious training a pastor has, the higher the growth rate of his church is likely to be. Thumma thinks there are two reasons for this. First, pastors without seminary training are less removed from secular life, and less liable to speak “churchese.” Second, and just as important, religious training has nothing to do with the entrepreneurial and managerial talents required to build and run a very large church.
Megachurches are, after all, to small churches as corporations are to mom-and-pop stores. More than a quarter of them have satellites in other locations. (McLean Bible Church, in Washington, D.C., for example, is planning to build ten satellites in a “spiritual beltway” around the city, to bring everyone in “secular Washington” to Christ.) Many megachurches have missions in inner cities or abroad, and many have planted other churches. Saddleback and Willow Creek have formed associations of thousands of smaller evangelical churches to help them grow: associations that have some of the attributes of a denomination. Yet even the smaller, single-site megachurches are complex organizations with specialized pastoral staffs and lay staffs that handle administration and programming.
Megachurch leaders are C.E.O.s, and many of them, particularly the seeker-church pastors, have borrowed techniques from big business. Hybels and Warren learned not just from Schuller but from the management expert Peter Drucker, and have themselves become experts on the management and marketing of churches. Of all the megachurches, Willow Creek, the subject of a Harvard Business School study, must be the most professionally run: Hybels’s executive pastor, Gregg Hawkins, graduated from Stanford Business School and worked for McKinsey & Company; his communications director is a former executive of Allstate Insurance; and the author of the Harvard Business School study is now the head of the Willow Creek Association.
Santora, in turn, has been making Faith Church’s operations more professional. The youth pastor and the new pastor of ministries—like Ray Martin, the children’s pastor—have had experience in other megachurches, and all three were hired after national searches for specialists in their fields. To deal with administration and finances, Santora has drawn from his congregation two men without religious training but with careers in business. His own training in accounting has also proved useful. The church finances, he explained, have to be audited each year, because of the mortgage. “I don’t mean to sound arrogant,” he said, “but I know if the accountants made a mistake.”
Some evangelical pastors and scholars—typically from fundamentalist or Calvinist denominations—have attacked Saddleback and Willow Creek as market-driven churches that cater to the society’s insatiable demand for entertainment. They have also charged Warren and Hybels with preaching a Christianity lite, in which theology is marginal and the Gospel is mixed up with pop psychology. Their teaching, these critics say, is “me-centered,” rather than God-centered, and it proposes that people are basically good, rather than essentially sinful and in need of salvation. Seeker-church pastors, they say, argue that the Scriptures help to heal pain and bring self-fulfillment, but in doing so they are suggesting that the Bible is true just because it works. Furthermore, their God seems to be a domesticated, useful deity—a God without wrath who demands no sacrifices from his children. (John MacArthur, the pastor of Grace Community Church, in Sun Valley, California, whose “Grace to You” radio shows are broadcast nationally, has written, “Salesmanship requires that negative subjects like divine wrath be avoided. Consumer satisfaction means that the standard of righteousness cannot be raised too high. The seeds of a watered-down Gospel are thus sown in the very philosophy that drives many ministries today.”) In sum, seeker churches, in their attempt to be “relevant” and “culturally sensitive,” are giving in to the secular culture.
Hybels and Warren reject these criticisms. God cares for the lost, they argue, and turning the irreligious into mature Christians is necessarily a process. The first step is to capture their attention and to deal with their “felt needs,” as Jesus did when he healed the sick. But that is only the first step. Saddleback sermons, Warren wrote, have catchy titles, but beneath them is a hard-core Biblical message. Then those who come to Sunday services can continue their spiritual journey in Bible-study classes, mentoring groups, and participation in church activities, until they become fully devoted followers of Christ. Recently, however, Hybels has changed his mind somewhat on the efficacy of this process. In 2004, as part of an exercise in strategic planning, Gregg Hawkins brought on a consumer-research expert to measure spiritual growth at Willow Creek and six other churches. The study, published this year, revealed that one out of four churchgoers—and the most committed of them—felt stalled in their growth or dissatisfied with their church. They felt that participation in church activities and small groups had helped them, but only up to a point. Hybels called the data “earth-shaking” and concluded that the church had to rethink its coaching strategies so that the faithful learned to depend less on the church and more on themselves. He proposed creating “customized personal spiritual-growth plans” for everyone in the church.
Santora maintains that his teaching, though seeker-oriented, is wholly orthodox. He does teach the Bible, even though, as he says, he emphasizes the positive. “Different ministries are called to emphasize different aspects of God,” he explained. “The unique calling, if you will, that God has given me is to teach people how to be successful through practical teachings that apply to everyday life.” Further, he believes that his use of psychology is fully Biblical. He has just written a book titled “Identity Crisis,” which, like the sermon on the CD that Faith Church gives out to newcomers, explains how to shed a negative self-image. There is, he said, a connection between self-esteem and Jesus’ commandment to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself.
In Maurilio Amorim’s opinion, New England is still the hardest place in the country to work as a church-growth consultant. Local television, he says, doesn’t bring very many people to church there, and direct mail isn’t as effective as it is elsewhere. Amorim believes that the main problem lies in the “bigger disconnect between the culture and the church.” What he means is that church is not a pervasive way of life, as it is in the South. But there are other reasons. In Thumma’s view, the strength and independence of the New England towns has militated against the development of regional churches. People just don’t like to leave town in order to go to church. Also, in these towns, the civic culture has been shaped by the Protestant churches on the town greens, and the Catholics have fully participated in it. In New Milford, the clergy—mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jews—long ago reached an unwritten agreement to respect one another’s boundaries and to coöperate in community-service programs. (As a part of this agreement, they don’t send mailings to members of other churches; Faith Church, of course, does.) In the urban and suburbanized parts of southern Connecticut, the towns may be losing their coherence, for regional churches have begun to spring up. All the same, New England remains a hard place to build a megachurch. “I tell Frank that Faith Church would be twice as big if it were anywhere else,” Amorim said. “I tell him that he is working extremely hard for incremental growth. If you plopped the church down in Houston, it would be huge! He gets all worked up when I say that.”
Santora, however, is undeterred. He and his pastors are already looking forward to the day when they can launch a satellite church in another quarter of the Danbury area—though the congregation will have to grow by a thousand before they can do that. “I think that we can be ten thousand,” Santora said. “And I think that as we approach that my number will change again! There are four hundred thousand people in the greater Danbury area. My joke at pastors’ get-togethers is ‘I just want fifty thousand—split up the rest.’ ” ♦
