Meeting in my house church Mosaik

We’ve all heard about megachurches – enormous congregations with thousands of people that sometimes looks like big stadiums. Their pastors become famous and their services become giant shows. I won’t dig into the criticism against mega churches – many has done so before me – but I want to question what we usually believe is a “normal church”. You know, the one that has around 100-200 members, a pretty little church building and a youth group, children’s group and gathers families on sundays. I’m very critical to those as much as to the mega churches.

See, “normal” churches are mega churches in miniature. The services are shows where people are expected to sit down and listen most of the time. Except for some singing in the start and some prayer in the end, one should be passive in church. And quiet. Furthermore, the building costs a LOT of money – and most church members are fine with that. In fact, most of them don’t even know what it costs but they trust their clergy to handle it for them. Now, the funny thing with buildings is that they’re mostly very unflexible. If the church attendance shrinks, the church building becomes increasingly expensive until it’s not useful to have it the same size anymore. If church attendance grows – we have to build a bigger church! Which would make most pastors and priests very excited. But again, that costs TONS of money!

In fact, the goal of many church leaders is for their church to grow, and grow, and grow until they basically looks like a mega church. I’ve heard several talk dreamingly about how they heard about this awesome pastor who started his church with a tiny bit of followers but now leads a mega church. Of course, every respected pastor or priest would say that the main goal of the church is to lead people to Christ and give them eternal life, but then it would be pretty neat if the church also grew bigger, and bigger, and bigger. So we have to rebuild the church building again, and again, and again.

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