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The Voice of the CIO Community Search
1,800Estimated number of megachurches (weekly attendance 2,000+) 7.2 mill ion
Estimated total weekend attendance
40,000Weekly attendance, Lakewood Church, Houston
9Number of campuses of Seacoast Church, headquartered in suburban Charleston, S.C.
11,500Member churches, Willow Creek Association
$3 millionCost of high-end audio/video system
"Reach hither thy finger," says Jesus to Thomas in the Gospel according to John, and on a recent Sunday morning atWillow Creek Community Church, in South Barrington, Ill., a group of middle-school students appears to be taking thatparticular bit of scripture to heart.
What they're reaching for as they enter the massive building amid a throng of fellow churchgoers is a fingerprint scanner,which quickly checks them into Willow Creek for Sunday school. Nearby, parents swipe ID cards through digital card-
readers to check in the younger kids. "We need a way to get them in securely and without hassle," says Mike Gold, WillowCreek's director of information technology. "When you're dealing with 3,000 kids, you need to be quick."
Beyond the high-tech check-in lies a church that is as wired as any business in the country. Inside the 7,095-seatauditorium, the image of Pastor Bill Hybels is projected on large video screens, making him visible to everyone in thecrowd. Miss a sermon, and you can catch it later via streaming video on the Web, and then surf over to a church blog tolearn more about Gulf Coast relief efforts. They still pass the collection plate at Willow Creek, but they also acceptautomatic bank drafts. "We can tithe out of a bank account as soon as a check is deposited, so God gets the first fruit,"says Brian McAuliffe, CFO and director of operations.
About 20,000 people attend Willow Creek every week, making it one of the largest churches in the nation. And like otherso-called "megachurches"defined by average weekly attendance of more than 2,000 peopletechnology is essentialto almost every phase of its mission. There are perhaps 1,800 megachurches in the U.S., including a subset of trulygargantuan institutions whose attendance can approach 20,000, or more. And the bigger they are, the more they tend torely on technology.
"Technology is essential for a church of our scale," says DuncanDodds, executive director of Lakewood Church, in Houston, whichhas weekly attendance of over 40,000 people, maintains a
60,000-name e-mail list, and meets in a renovated basketballarena once used by the NBA's Houston Rockets. "You could notdo church the way we do without it." Pastor A.R. Bernard of the24,000-member Christian Cultural Center, in Brooklyn, N.Y.,agrees. At his church, worshippers use the in-house WiFi networkto call up Bible verses on their laptops as they follow along withBernard's big-screen, PowerPoint presentations. "Technology is a vital and integral part of our setup," he says. "It is acore enabling element to what we do."
These tech-savvy institutions are the fastest growing element in religious life in the U.S. "We're finding about one a week,"says Dave Travis, who tracks megachurches in his role as executive vice president of church innovations at theLeadership Network, a Dallas-based research and consulting group that works with large churches. There have alwaysbeen large congregations, says Mark Chaves, head of the sociology department at the University of Arizona, where hestudies religion, organizations and social movements. But, he adds, the biggest got bigger throughout the 20th century,and the rate of growth has accelerated over the last generation. Historically, Chaves says, the biggest churches haven'tstayed the biggest for very long: "They get overtaken by the next cultural wave of innovation." Increasingly, innovation isdriven by technology, which is a large part of what has allowed megachurches to thrive. Says Travis: "One reason you'veseen an explosion in megachurches is because of the technological progress that's been made."
Religious groups have longembraced the technology oftheir day, going back to theEpistles of Paul and theGutenberg Bible and onthrough to the radio andtelevision preachers of morerecent times. In that sense,the megachurches arefollowing tradition, but inmany particulars they arechanging the way millions of
Americans worship, donateand interact with theirchurches and with each other.Megachurches reflect a
culture that is comfortable with enormous institutions, from suburban high schools and universities to retail outlets andbanking companies. They tend to be less political than some of their smaller brethren, but still represent a potentiallypowerful political force. Their pastors wield great financial muscle and public clout.
While they make up only a tiny percentage of the total number of churches, the new breed of megachurches, typicallyfound in suburbia, accounts for perhaps 7 percent of weekly church attendance, according to Scott Thumma, asociologist of religion at the Hartford [Conn.] Institute for Religion Research. The churches are often unaffiliated withparticular denominations, and they span a broad range of beliefs and practices. Taken as a whole, however, theirmemberships add up to perhaps 7 million people or morethe equivalent of the third-largest religious group in the
Home IT News & Trends Megachurch Megatech
Megachurch MegatechByEdward Cone | Posted 11-05-2005
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Nowadays, spreading the Word involves a lot of sophisticated information technology. Here's how IT works in a very
high-growth enterprise.
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country, says Thumma, trailing only Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists (with whom their membership overlapssomewhat).
What's more, the megachurches are growing at the expense of other churches. "Overall church attendance is not goingup. People are going to megachurches from other churches," Chaves says. One factor driving growth, he adds, is cost."You may have to go to a larger church to get quality, such as a youth minister and more programs, or better facilities."
Another cost center is the technology that touches nearly every phaseof megachurch life. There are management systems that allow hugecongregations to track finances and organize members with relativelyfew staffers, audio-video tools that help pastors compete formindshare with the clamor of popular culture, and telecom and Webapplications that allow churches to reach outside their walls and startsatellite campuses as well as manage national associations that can
include thousands of other churches.Doing all this stuff requires a substantial investment. At Willow Creek,the technology budget tops $1 million a year, out of a total budget ofabout $27 million. A15-person IT staff helps support about 50 serversand 600 PCs, two more full-timers work on the Web team, and anarmy of volunteers helps out with everything from maintenance to
design. In order to deal with its growing scale of operations, Fellowship Church, in Grapevine, Texas, developed its ownmanagement software, which it subsequently spun out as an independent company called Fellowship Technologies; thecompany, an application service provider, has more than 240 customers, says CEO and President Jeff Hook, includingseveral of the largest churches in the country, and brings in revenue of more than $3 million per year.
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