More than one in ten Protestant churchgoers attend megachurches, according to Scott Thumma, a sociologist at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research who's been researching the trend since the 90s. "If this group of churches were a Protestant denomination," writes Thumma, "it would be the nation's second largest such group."
For his work, Thumma defines as "mega" any Protestant church that has a sustained weekly attendance of more than 2,000. As he points out, there has been a "rapid proliferation" of these kinds of congregations since the 1970s. In fact, writes Ed Stetzer at Christianity Today, "There are as many megachurches today in the greater Nashville area as there were in the entire country in 1960."
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