I have a confession to make. I miss the evangelical megachurch I grew up attending. I don’t miss the beliefs or the sermons, of course. I’m not talking about missing doctrine or anything like that. I’m talking about missing the community a megachurch provides, and the community it offered me and my family growing up. All that was necessary to gain access to the community the megachurch had to offer was sharing its evangelical beliefs. Once you were in the “community of faith,” you entered a very real physical community too, a community that could be felt, seen, and enjoyed. It was in this community that I grew up, and that church was my home.
Monique El-Faizy has written that the evangelical megachurch has thrived in recent decades because it provides a ready-built community to Americans ever more on the move. While young families in times gone by remained in the communities they grew up in, families today are often launched into new areas of the country. El-Faizy argues that the megachurch offers these newcomers a ready place to plug in, a ready-built community right there and waiting for them. I have to say I completely agree. I’m going to take a moment here to outline some aspects of that community.
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