» WaPo: Big Churches Not Always Impersonal, Study Finds

Weird title, interesting report ...

Researchers at the Institute for Studies of Religion, who defined megachurches as those with more than 1,000 worshipers, found that their members were twice as likely to have friends in the congregation than members of small churches. They also displayed a higher level of personal commitment to the church -- attending services and tithing more often than small-church members.

Megachurches are often criticized for having "all sorts of flaws," said Rodney Stark, co-director of the institute, based at Baylor University. "They're big . . . they're kind of cold, they have kind of like theater audiences -- all wrong."

I tend to be nitpicky about studies such as these, namely because the methodologies can always be criticized on how well or inaccurately they measure what reports like these say they do. And yet, I'm a fairly unlikely megachurch member in several regards. I love the music, even if I've gotten to the point where I refuse to listen to Hillsong due to overexposure. I love the people despite the fact that I'm a bona fide introvert.

At the end of the day, I guess I just see one's preference coming down to their own tastes. For all the knocks megachurches get for being "consumerist", there's nothing inherent about smaller churches being less so. I don't normally watch Ed Young (the younger one up in DFW), but he recently had a sermon about the time he did a show with a porn actress and they talked about sex (go ahead ... guess how that could *possibly* get my attention!). The sermon itself was more about the meaningfulness of staying with a church and making a personal commitment to growing within a church's environment. Joel does something similar every week (minus the attention-getting lede) when he urges new believers to give Lakewood - or whatever church in their area they can attend - a year of their life. That can be done at a church regardless of size. It just depends on making the commitment first, though.