The Global Church Era · c. 1975-present · N. America, then global
The Megachurch & Seeker Movement
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About This Movement
From the mid-1970s a particular way of building a church spread out of American suburbs and then around the world. Willow Creek Community Church was founded in 1975 on the premise that the Sunday service should be designed for the person who does not go to church, with the actual formation happening in small groups during the week. Saddleback followed in 1980, and Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Church (1995) put the method into a book other pastors could work from. Behind both lay the church-growth school, and Donald McGavran's Understanding Church Growth (1970). The Willow Creek Association, from 1992, exported the model by conference and manual. The other great carrier was music: Hillsong, founded in Australia in 1983, became a global publisher of congregational songs, and licensing data shows how widely they were sung. The movement studies itself unusually hard — Willow Creek's own REVEAL research from 2007 questioned whether its programmes were forming anyone.
Sources
- The church-growth school's own literature: McGavran, Understanding Church Growth (1970); Wagner's corpus; Warren, The Purpose Driven Church (1995); Hybels/Willow Creek Association records (1975/1992) (primary) — The movement theorizing itself, in its own words.
- The self-study record: Willow Creek's REVEAL study (Hawkins & Parkinson, 2007-); church-growth metrics culture (primary) — This is a self-critical self-report — the church studying its own effectiveness rather than an outside evaluation.
- The worship-music industry layer: the Hillsong catalog (early 1990s-; 'Shout to the Lord' 1993); CCLI licensing data (primary) — CCLI licensing data is an unusual quantitative record of what congregations actually sing, drawn from industry licensing rather than church self-report.
- The memoir and collapse records: the Ravi Zacharias investigation report (2021, commissioned and published); Mars Hill's dissolution (2014) and CT's The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast (2021); Hillsong's 2021-22 crises (primary) — The movement's self-documentation now includes its published failures. Some of this material is investigative journalism rather than the churches' own record.
- Scott Thumma & Dave Travis, Beyond Megachurch Myths (2007) and the Hartford Institute megachurch research; Kate Bowler, Blessed (OUP, 2013) (secondary) — The Hartford Institute provides independent counts of megachurches, as a check against churches' own self-reported numbers. Bowler covers the related prosperity-gospel movement.
- CHC vol. 9 (reference) — This phenomenon postdates the period this volume mainly covers; the sociological literature listed above is the more relevant reference material.