Megachurches Aren't Bad. Why Your Preference Isn't Holier | Episode 23

Everybody has a megachurch take. Too big, too flashy, too shallow, too much fog machine and not enough gospel. But when you actually look at the data and the Bible, the case falls apart fast. Bad churches are bad and good churches are good, and size is almost never the thing that decides which one you're looking at.In this episode, Pastor Jason Parrish, Pastor Howie Smith, and John Rowa sit down with special guest Pastor Joshua Bingle from Genesis Church in Spokane, WA and make the case that megachurches aren't the enemy, and that a lot of what passes for discernment online is really just personal preference wearing a holiness costume. We get into why the failures make national news while thousands of faithful large churches quietly serve every weekend, what the research actually says about who's in these churches and what they're doing, and why the first church in Acts looked a lot more like a megachurch than the critics want to admit. 3,000 added in a single day, meeting in the temple courts and house to house.This is not a defense of everything big churches do. It's a refusal to treat bigness itself as sin.We talk through: the "planes that land safely" problem and media bias, the data on megachurch health and growth, what healthy growth actually costs a leader, the celebrity-pastor trap and real accountability, whether the early church was ever really that small, and how to answer the "that's just a megachurch" comment without losing your mind. Judge fruit, not square footage.Text THE WELL to 55498 for the full episode link and the Weekly Growth Guide. -- Recorded at The Well Church in Sandy, Utah. New podcast episodes of The Analog Gospel drop every Sunday. https://www.thewellslc.com/