The economics of megachurches

from each one hebdomad 45,000 people amount to pray in a converted hoops stadium in Houston. On Christmas Eve the unconventional Lakewood Church sanctuary filled with a crowd that looked like a cross-section of America in matching red outfits. When the pastor began telling the story of a baby born in Bethlehem on a starry evening like this one, the massive screens behind him twinkled and smoke machines coated the stage in a cozy fog. A man sang a gospel rendition of “Silent Night” in Spanish and when the beat dropped every person in the bleachers felt the thump of the bass in their body.

Researchers have found that services like this one, at America’s biggest church, can leave people feeling like they are high on drugs. It is perhaps no surprise then that while most American churches are struggling to fill pews, megachurches—the 1,800 or so with Hollywood-style production and mesmerising crowds—are only getting bigger. In the past five years Americans have flocked to the sprawling suburbs of the sunbelt where these churches thrive. When small churches shut during the pandemic, the big ones were ready to absorb their congregants. Today, although most churches have fewer than 100 members, 70% of people attend the largest 10%. The product that they sell is changing Christianity in America.

The megachurch business model is all about growth. At any given service roughly a sixth of the crowd is made up of newcomers, says Scott Thumma of the Hartford Institute for Religious Research. At North Point Community Church outside Atlanta, where fake snow fell during the opening act on a recent Sunday, a battalion of volunteers at the “connections” booth give first-timers gifts and usher them towards “small groups” they can join. To meet prospective congregants closer to home, churches are now franchising. Some rent high-school gyms and theatres that are empty on weekend mornings, others are buying new buildings. Oklahoma’s Life Church has 46 campuses and Alabama’s Church of the Highlands has 27. The expansion has turned church into much more than a Sunday service: it’s where members play pickup sports, attend marriage counseling, take anger-management lessons and send their children to school. Many megachurches now run colleges.

That reach shows up in the money they are bringing in. Surveys run by the Hartford Institute found that between 2020 and 2025, the average megachurch’s annual revenue rose by 25%, from $5.3m to $6.6m. Nearly all of it came from congregant donations. Megachurches report spending half of their cash on staff salaries, just over a third on building maintenance and programming and a tenth on charity. But beyond what they choose to disclose, their finances are a mystery.

Federal tax law exempts churches from filing annual returns and shields them from audits. “The only people keeping an eye on these big churches are insiders,” says Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer of the University of Notre Dame. In 2021 a pastor at another megachurch in Houston was convicted of defrauding investors out of nearly $3.6m. A more recent lawsuit accused church leaders of misusing tithes. The glitz invites more suspicion. Some pastors live in large houses, accept expensive gifts like cars from members and make millions from book deals. About a quarter preach the prosperity gospel, a theology that asserts that God rewards faith with material wealth. “I can’t be a big blessing to people if I’m poor and broke and depressed,” Joel Osteen, the best-known among them and Lakewood’s senior pastor, said on the Oprah show.

For decades megachurches have been trend-setters in the evangelical world. Their worship music and TED Talk–style sermons go viral and they have made jeans and Nike shoes acceptable churchwear. But courting today’s jaded masses incentivises them to avoid anything too substantive, for fear of alienating people. Most megachurches, like a rising share of American protestants, are now non-denominational. Rather than tie themselves to traditional sects with rigid doctrines they are building brands that are designed to be popular and flexible. The result is a Christianity that looks more like a crash course in self-help than an age-old faith anchored in scripture. The central message on Christmas at Lakewood was “don’t stop believing”. Congregants were told that God’s grace is coming and they should keep fighting the devil of depression, or give rehab one more try.

It is for the same reason that the majority of megachurch pastors do not preach politics. Rarely do they even address hot-button issues like abortion or homosexuality from the pulpit. This summer the Trump administration scrapped rules that stripped pastors of some tax exemptions if they publicly endorsed political candidates. Nonetheless most of the churches that responded to the Hartford survey said they had no plans to start doing it. “They’re not prophets screaming into the wilderness, these guys are running multi-million-dollar empires,” says Ryan Burge, who studies religion at Washington University in St Louis. “Why would they imperil that?”

Albert Mohler, the head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, reckons that young people want a Christianity that is more serious and that megachurches will wane if being associated with them doesn’t give their members social capital. He calls the prosperity gospel a “direct threat to biblical Christianity” and a “pseudo-religion”. Inside Lakewood Church there is no cross on display. Instead, at the back of the stadium a giant American flag glows above the bleachers. Here the biggest draw is something easier to follow than any of Jesus’s teachings: the gospel of American capitalism.

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