Catholics need to stop envying Protestant megachurches

Some Evangelical megachurches are impressive, boasting 10,000 members, professional bands and production crews, etc.

But Catholics need to stop envying them.

I’ve heard this from a lot of Catholics:

“Protestants really know what they’re doing with evangelization.”

I used to say it myself.

But then I actually experienced more of these churches and it stopped making sense.

Survivorship Bias

The megachurch in my hometown is the largest indoor venue in the county. It sits almost 3,000 people.

But it’s right down the road from maybe a dozen other evangelical churches that are small and failing. For every megachurch, there’s a graveyard of evangelical congregations barely keeping the lights on.

We only notice the winners.

I hesitate to call this a universal thing. It’s not always the case that evangelical churches are good at welcoming people. We just don’t see the ones that aren’t.

Megachurches are Magnet Churches

Most Catholics don’t realize Protestant megachurches work differently than Catholic parishes.

The evangelical megachurch purposefully draws from a large metropolitan area.

When I was a youth minister, one of the kids in my group was a Catholic coming back to the Church. She would come to our parish for Mass, but she would also still go to her megachurch—45 minutes away in Pittsburgh.

Think about what that means. The parish down the road pulls from the people in that neighborhood of Pittsburgh or nearby. The megachurch down the street pulls from the entire diocese.

It would be like if the entire diocese went to the Cathedral for Mass. You’d have all the resources you need because everybody’s there—good and bad. You just get the best people to do the best things.

But in most Catholic parishes? You get what you get. We have fewer resources than evangelical megachurches by design.

And that’s okay.

The Purpous-Driven Problem

Even if we could match their resources, we can’t copy evangelical churches because they don’t have the fullness of the Christian faith. Evangelical church strategies by definition divorced from the lifeblood of the Church: the Sacraments.

That’s the danger with Catholics reading books like Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Church and trying to adapt those things for the Catholic world.

The Catholic strategy is different than the evangelical strategy.

The megachurch model is to set up an attractive thing and draw people to that thing. When Rick Warren founded the 30,000-member Saddleback Church, he went house to house asking people what they want in a church. Then he built that.

We don’t do that.

The Catholic strategy for evangelization is to go into an existing community and build on what’s already there—the families, the customs, the traditions. Then we initiate that community into the Catholic way of life.

Catholics have a standard for what the Church is.

It’s the kind of thing that baptizes and receives the Eucharist and confirms and hears confession. That’s what the Church is. We don’t ask people what they want and build around their preferences.

A lot of Catholic adaptations of Protestant books skip over the liturgy. The liturgical traditions of the Church become an afterthought.

Ignoring the liturgy and the sacraments sets us up to fail.

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But all of this is good news.

If you’re a layperson looking at the megachurch down the road thinking, “Father, can’t we do what they do?” He’s not going to. He can’t.

but since Catholic parishes are built on existing things, all you have to do is build a community. Once that is built, you can participate in the life of parish.

You can’t build a mega church, but you can build a Catholic church.

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I breakdown how to build a solid community in my new book Save Your Parish releasing February 2.

Download the first chapter or preorder bulk copies for your parish team here.