Megachurch

I attended megachurch and loved it. This is an AI-generated image of a pretend one.

Recently, I told my wife that I wanted to attend spiritual ceremonies with strangers at least once a month. I didn’t grow up with religion, and I wanted to experience multigenerational fellowship without it being tied to tripping off plants and toads. This isn’t a separation of church and state situation, so to speak, as I enjoy the ceremonial multigenerational fellowship I share with the plant medicine community. But I do feel called to mix it up. 

The very next day, my wife’s mom invited us to Christmas service at her local megachurch. 

We humans usually get what we ask for, in one way or another. When I talked about attending spiritual ceremonies, I envisioned multifaith, humanist ones with crystals, sage, and drum circles. God has a great sense of humor, and what he delivered was an invitation to an evangelical megachurch.

My wife’s mom is a lovely woman who recently took us to see a classic live performance of Scrooge at the fanciest theater in town, so I couldn’t turn her down.

This was my first megachurch experience, and I was skeptical about going. Based on the limited data I had on megachurches, I thought it would be way too big, way too much, and way too over-the-top to love. Megachurch turned out to be all that and more, but the twist is that I loved it. 

The megachurch we hit is located deep in the suburbs where my wife grew up, and its mega huge parking lot was full, forcing us to park in the HyVee supermarket lot not mega far down the street.

The outside of the megachurch resembled a medium-sized big box store not as big as the HyVee but bigger than an Aldi, even one of the fancier ones like the one in Grand Forks, Nebraska. The megachurch’s logo font is also way more fun than HyVee’s and Aldi’s font fun factors combined. 

The inside resembled a combination of a fun big box store like an old-skool Best Buy, a fun fancy theater like the one where we saw Scrooge, and a fun NBA stadium like the one in Phoenix where we took our boys to see the Suns smoke Cleveland. 

Like my dad’s stories, the service was an immersive, multidimensional experience. Unlike Dad Story Time, megachurch came with lights, lasers, stadium seats, several jumbo screens, and a bangin’, state-of-the-art sound system with speakers everywhere you looked. It wasn’t quite an IMAX experience, but it was way closer to that than any church I’ve ever attended. 

The service was lively and fast-paced. It went from singing to dancing to scripture to sitcoms and back for several rotations without lingering on one thing for long or missing a beat. Yes, you heard me correctly. They even spliced in a pre-recorded scripted sitcom. The story was good, the special effects were silly but not cheesy, and the jokes were funny and not super sappy. For comparison, Hallmark rom-coms are way sappier, and I enjoy some of those. Especially ones where the lead is a woman, her romantic options are brothers, and one’s straightlaced, and the other’s a straight dirt dawg.  

The megachurch sitcom looked and felt as professional as any Hallmark movie, except for the part where the mom wore megachurch drip. It reminded me of one of the better shows my boys used to watch on the Disney Channel.

The entire megachurch spectacle had a production value not unlike that of the Vegas variety shows I enjoy. It felt like one big party, and everything made more sense when the pastor explained that he got good at throwing parties as a rave dj before he got into the ministry.

My parents didn’t do church when I was growing up, but I went with my friends’ families all the time, mostly just to be social. As a kid, I dug the music part about church, especially when a gospel-style choir was involved, but I didn’t love the other stuff. My megachurch experience was the exact opposite. 

Many of the hundreds of folk at megachurch were mega into the music, and more than several seemed touched by the holy spirit. Every one of those human beings performing on that stage had musical talent I can only dream about, and a few of them had some bonafide pipes. It just wasn’t my jam. The secular equivalent to megachurch music is adult contemporary, and I don’t love that genre. Unless Jon Secada is involved because I do love Jon Secada. 

I’m glad I didn’t love the music. Otherwise, I might have done something irrational like sworn off smoking plants and toad venom and joined the megachurch ministry on the spot. My wife, who used to rock mega Christian hard at a different megachurch in a different life, suspects that they might’ve hooked me in a different year. As she explained, they frequently switch up the music at this megachurch, and one year, they had rappers who spit hot Jesus fire.

Even though the music wasn’t my favorite, I loved everything else. Putting aside the mega style, the message had mega substance. I’ve heard dozens of sermons, and the one from the megachurch pastor is my personal GOAT. This isn’t a recency bias situation, either. The pastor’s core message was that it’s mega obvious that everything in life is a miracle, and it tracked a J’essay I wrote that same morning. His sermon even included a side quest about how science and spirituality should be buds, which also harmonizes with my J’essay. 

The pastor is about my age and reminded me of me, only if I was white and into Jesus enough to start a megachurch. He delivered the word with charisma, hilarity, and humility and was as entertaining as anyone I’ve seen in Vegas, except for Lionel Richie. He didn’t even appear live, but the part where he only appeared on the jumbo screens might’ve made him hit even harder, like the Wizard of Oz. And his astral apparition inside the almost-IMAX auditorium definitely hit way harder than the Wizard of Oz’s did on that comparatively tiny green screen no larger than the 50-piece I had in my basement.

The vibe I get from the pastor is that he’s a super cool human who’s doing exactly what God intended him to do. He seems like the kind of person I’d want to be my pastor if I were the kind of person who wanted someone to be my pastor.

The part where the family from the sitcom was multiracial seemed like an omen that megachurch and me were meant to be. The part where a young mixed brother, who reminded me of a lowercase j, had the meatiest role out of all the sitcom family members had me feeling like it was written. And it slayed me that they didn’t let the poor brother who played the dad talk after I just wrote a story about how much my dad likes to talk.

If they had just one soul sister singing the hook on one of the adult contemporary Christian songs from the show, they might could’ve hooked me on Jesus and the megachurch.

But that’s not how it went. With some space around it, I’m so glad I didn’t go for it.

These days, spirituality is my main hobby. Almost diving headfirst into Jesus made me realize that my favorite part about spirituality is cherry-picking the stuff I like from all kinds of places, including different religions. I also get a grim satisfaction from discarding the stuff I don’t like that feels like spiritual pimple popping.

Lately, I’ve been leaning hard Jesus, but going with one doctrine to the exclusion of others isn’t a vibrational match for me. Nor does it seem like something Jesus would do. 

I want to ask that preacher-wizard who almost hooked me with a pre-taped sermon if he thought Jesus would choose Christianity. My guess is that Jesus would be on the fence about going with himself, at least in this three-dimensional experience we’re sharing. But I have little doubt he’d have fun at megachurch. 

Even if I don’t pal around with the pastor, I still plan on going back to his megachurch for more pomp and prayer. I’m hoping that next time, the music will be a closer vibrational match to how I rock. Perhaps they’ll go full-Vegas and book my man Jon Secada, who did put out a Christmas album.