The main cautions I would raise about mega-churches are two: First, a focus on megachurches reinforces the tendency to be awed by the spectacu-lar and to think that when it comes to churches, big-ger is better. This tendency is not cured simply by entering a disclaimer that "these larger churches are not necessarily better churches" [quoting Elmer Towns; cf. John Benton’s The Big Picture for Small Churches, Evangelical Press, xxxx).

Second, the megachurch focus obscures the fact that most church growth historically does not come from huge churches but from small to medium-sized congregations. That is, overall, the church grows more from dynamic smaller churches that multiply themselves than from the numerical growth of mega-churches. Thus, the focus on megachurches tends to put the emphasis in the wrong place (Synder, in Evaluating the Church Growth Movement, 62-63).

However, the most critical evaluation of megachurches is that provided by Os Guinness in his book, Dining with the Devil: The Megachurch Movement Flirts with Modernity (Baker, 1993), a book which bluntly talks about the mega-church movement as being "secularized evangelicalism" that is more concerned with success and worldly acclaim over theology and biblical fidelity. In his more recent Prophetic Untime-liness: A Challenge to the Idol of Relevance (Baker, 2003), Guinness makes much the same point again, exposing how many "evangelical" churches have bowed to the "idol of relevance" and trendiness. He says many megachurches today, and those smaller churches whose leaders make every effort to follow in the footsteps of them, are so busy trying to keep up with postmodernism, that they are constantly conforming to what the world says it needs in order to be relevant. In both books, Guinness warns against the over-emphasis being placed on being seeker-sensitive and audience-friendly.

In these works, and in his 1994 Fit Bodies, Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals Don’t Think and What to Do About It (Baker, 1994), Guinness bemoans the fact that many evangelical leaders today show an almost complete ignorance of where many popular evangelical ideals have originated. The idea seems to be, "As long as what we do gets more and more people in the church, it must be okay."

What Guinness says has been echoed in different ways by other evangelical writers. For example, in Willow Creek Seeker Services: Evaluating a New Way of Doing Church (Baker, 1996), sociologist, theologian, and historian G. A. Pritchard expanded on his 1994 Ph.D. dissertation (North Western University), warning about the long-term dangers of Willow Creek’s unconventional perspective and strategy of conversion and commitment, both of which are present, but not viewed nearly as important as making people feel comfortable and getting them to actively participate in "church."

What Pritchard, Guinness and others have observed about seeker-sensitive megachurches is seen in a slightly different light by David F. Wells. What Wells observed when he reflected on these same developments is found in his 1993 book, No Place for Truth, or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? (Eerdmans). Like Guinness, Wells warns that churches can grow for all the wrong reasons. He says Christians need to be more serious about the issues of truth and theology, and how these things affect not only our worship services, but our local churches, and the larger Church. Un-fortunately, again, as Guinness notes, truth and theology are the two things that are the first to be discarded when a church begins to embrace anything that will work (pragmatism).

We need to be aware that the extravagances of the church growth movement and its stepchild, the meagachurch movement, are not new in themselves. The temptation to attract people to the gospel of Christ by something other than the power of the Spirit is mentioned by Paul in 1 Corinthians 2:1-5. He said he intentionally did not use "lofty words" or human wisdom, he did nothing that would humanly draw them to Christ, rather he depended solely on the Spirit’s power. Why? So that their faith "might not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God" (1 Cor. 2:5).