The Exponential Church

Learning From America’s Largest and Fastest-Growing Congregations

In each issue of Outreach, we share the inspiring ideas, insights and stories of churches of all types and sizes. However, once each year Outreach unapologetically reports on the largest and fastest-growing churches in America. We don’t look to these churches as “the best,” the “most spiritual” or any other qualifier; they are simply the largest and—because of their size—command our interest and attention.

We have again asked veteran church consultant and author Bill Easum, a man with both vision and perspective about the American church, to lend his voice to this year’s church profiles, introducing us to some ministries we think will challenge you.

by Bill Easum

Twenty years ago American megachurches (more than 2,000 attendance) numbered just over two dozen. Today, they exceed more than 830, with more than 30 now exceeding 10,000 worshippers—launching a whole new category we call the “gigachurch.” This growing number of large churches is also indicative of a shift in church attendance. Today, fully 3 million church attendees go to a megachurch vs. 897,000 only 10 years ago. Thirty-five of these churches are less than a decade old. The landscape of the Christian church is changing faster than at any other point in American history.

In this report we will introduce you to five churches taken from within the ranks of the top 100 largest and fastest-growing churches. Like all the churches on the list, they are growing rapidly. However they are also exceptional examples of what I call “faithful” churches. Each has a high rate of conversion growth, adding people to the Kingdom of God rather than just relying on transfer growth from other churches or reconnecting “de-churched” people. These five are by no means the only “faithful” churches on the list, or the only ones with significant conversion growth. They are simply solid, representative ministries, each one offering a unique ministry focus that will challenge our own churches as we learn from them.

A biblically faithful church exists to transform both individuals and the society around it. A faithful church grows because of its faithful, transformational approach to people and society. A faithful church is a disciple-making church, including both conversion of non-believers and maturity of its fold. Specifically at issue: How much life-changing impact a church has on the surrounding community.

The churches we’ve profiled, Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas; Christ of the Valley in Peoria, Ariz.; The L.A. Dream Center in Los Angeles, Calif.; Calvary Chapel in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn, N.Y.; and our “One to Watch,” Christ the King Community Church in Skagit Valley, Wash., were all chosen as examples to represent the ever-increasing number of faithful churches growing up across our country.

Enjoy reading their stories. We hope they will be a catalyst for dialog and reflection at your own church.

 

Adult Transformation

Calvary Chapel, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

In talking with 48-year-old “Pastor Bob” Coy and hearing him tell the story of his conversion, it’s clear why the church he founded almost 20 years ago is seeing 100 people come to Christ each week.

Coy recalls the early years: “I was 24 when I received Christ while working on the Las Vegas strip in a casino. Two weeks later, I left the casino scene, took a job as a record company sales representative and started volunteering in a local church. I loved working in the church so much that I couldn’t keep my mind on my work.”

Not long after that, Coy began teaching regularly at the church, leading to the day when he realized he had to plant his own church. So he packed up his family and headed east to Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

“We went to Florida without anything or any support, found a funeral home for worship and began handing out fliers on the beach,” Coy recalls, as tears swell in his eyes from reliving the journey.

Coy knows firsthand what can happen when believers begin to mature in their love for Christ. That’s one reason why his church exudes a raw passion for adult transformation.

“The way the Lord combines worship and the Word—teaching, interpretation and application—that’s what we’re about,” Coy says, describing Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale’s central focus. “We want to see people’s faith work. We focus on helping people live a more fruitful Christian life. There is an adult transformation focus here that’s contagious.”

Pastor of Outreach Jym Kay adds: “We don’t have a lot of fan-fare, no offerings, no hard push. We just teach God’s Word so that people can understand it and live it.”

As a result, several thousand people gather in the church’s 4,000-seat auditorium on Monday and Tuesday nights for adult Bible classses. To accommodate the overflow crowds, the church added two Wednesday night teaching services. Moreover, Coy encourages the hundreds who give their lives to Christ each week to participate in a 23-week class, “Deeper Faith,” which explores Christianity from the non-believer level to a “deeper” walk.

“Get out of the building!” he says. “There just has to be practical application of our lives. I’ve learned more about God on the streets of South Florida than anywhere. And I see that in the life of Christ, the way He connected with people. The next generation has to have a solid reason before they do what you ask them to do.”

With that philosophy, the church teaches its worshippers not only how to share their faith but also provides them actual opportunities to talk to people. Calvary Chapel teaches confrontational evangelism, then offers organized weekly and monthly opportunities for worshippers to get out into the world and share their faith, from the streets to the beaches. The church also teaches worshippers how to use relational evangelism in their everyday networks.

Kay explains: “Our church has caught Bob’s passion. People are excited about what God is doing, and they want to know how to share their faith. We see every attendee as a potential ambassador for Christ, so evangelism happens in every department in our church.”

Coy and Calvary have faced their share of challenges over the years—some personal, some corporate. His biggest personal challenge, he says, has been learning to entrust ministry to the body of Christ. “I don’t want to be a ‘ball hog.’ There are great men who have a heart for God whom I can bring alongside of me and let them do their thing.”

The greatest challenge as a church was learning how to cross cultural barriers. “At first we were an Anglo congregation,” Coy explains. “Today, we reflect the South Florida culture. When you allow God to work through whomever, and allow people to work alongside of you, the church will reflect the culture around itself.” Now all of Calvary Chapel’s services are translated into Spanish.

“I’m not well educated by the world’s standards,” Coy says. “I’ve never been to seminary. All I have is on-the-job-training. So I have a profound sense of awe seeing how God is transforming lives and using our church to equip them to share Christ with anyone and everyone.”

 

Risking to Reach the Lost

Lakewood Church, Houston, Texas

In 1959 John Osteen, a young caucasian man with a limited education, did something unheard of at that time in American history. He began a ministry in an abandoned feed store in a predominately black neighborhood of Houston, Texas, hoping to minister to people of all ethnicities. His message was simple: “God loves you, Jesus saves you, and the Bible is the Truth.” The unconventional church took off and experienced steady growth through the years, until it reached a plateau of 6,000.

However, all that changed when Osteen’s church successfully navigated one of the most difficult challenges a church will ever face—the effective succession of the founding pastor. After his father’s death in 1999, Joel Osteen took the reigns. Although he had no formal seminary training and had only preached once, attendance escalated exponentially from 6,000 to more than 25,000 over the next three years—a rare feat in mega-church history. But what makes this growth really impressive is the 25,000-plus professions of faith that have taken place since 1999. Nearly 30,000 people have rededicated their lives to the Lord.  

Today, this church that launched in a feed store is the largest, fastest growing, and one of the most ethnically diverse churches in the U.S.

While giving the glory to God, two factors can help to explain this phenomenal growth. The most obvious is Joel Osteen. He is young, articulate and attracting a wider audience to the church. The other factor is perhaps more important: Since he took over his father’s church five years ago, Osteen has taken major risks. Within a few months of assuming leadership he went from one to two worship services—a brave step since it would take 3,500 people just to make the 8,000-seat sanctuary appear anywhere near comfortably full. Three months later Osteen added a third service on Saturday night, with 7,000-plus attending the first week. With the addition of each service, worship attendance doubled in size. And today, Lakewood services are broadcast on television throughout the world.

As a result of the exponential growth, in late 2003 the church acquired the Compaq Center (past home of the NBA’s Houston Rockets) located on the second busiest intersection, in the fourth largest city in America. The new worship space alone will seat more than 16,000 people. Lakewood's arena renovation and new construction of 250,000 square feet of children, youth and adult educational space will have an initial cost of $73 million. These future plans position Lakewood to be the first church in the U.S. to minister to more than 50,000 people each week. Beyond “mega,” Lakewood has come to define what could be called a “giga”-church.

Yet unlike most of these giga-churches, Lakewood is one of the most racially diverse congregations in the U.S. According to Lakewood Executive Director Duncan Dodds, the church is one-third Hispanic, one-third black and one-third Caucasian. Moreover, people from every strata of society attend Lakewood. John Osteen’s dream of a multiracial, multicultural congregation is now a reality.

The diversity is seen in Lakewood’s Beyond the Walls ministry to the city of Houston, which includes agencies such as Bridge Over Troubled Water that provides shelter for up to 185 women and children; Open Doors, a crisis-intervention service offering addiction-recovery services and job and skill training to 200 men; SEARCH, a provider of homeless services offering job training, education, healthcare and transitional housing; and Living Word Outreach, supplying food to the needy all across Houston.

Osteen has continued his father’s emphasis on offering a Gospel of hope rather than condemnation.  He focuses on helping people to see themselves as God sees them. To make this point, he, like his father before him, opens every service with this confession:

 

Everyone’s a Minister

The Dream Center, Los Angeles, Calif.

Some 10 years ago, Matthew Barnett came to inner-city Los Angeles with his well-known father, Pastor Tommy Barnett from Phoenix First Assembly, to plant a church. But the dream of a faith community that would serve the area’s disenfranchised began four years prior and unbeknownst to the senior Barnett.

“The Lord gave me a dream to start a church in inner-city L.A.” Matthew recalls. “I was 16, lying on the hood of my red Nissan in Phoenix seeking to know what God had for my life, and He put inner-city L.A. in my heart.”

When the father-son team came to L.A., Matthew was only 20, and his father wanted a more experienced pastor to lead the Assembly of God church plant. But the search failed to yield anyone willing to serve the crime-ridden area, and young Matthew was appointed.

At first, the church faltered under his charge, declining from 18 to just two people in the first month.

“I was so concerned about being successful that I couldn’t focus on doing what God wanted done,” Barnett says. “Then God told me to die to my dream of success. When I died to that dream and lost myself in the needs of others I saw in the neighborhood around me, The Dream Center took off.”

Indeed it did. The church ran out of worship space in 2000. Unlikely assistance came when the nearby aging Angeles Temple—the birthplace of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel—heard about the need. Seeing that The L.A. Dream Center shared the same community-focused mission as they did, the Foursquare denominational leaders refurbished the 3,100-seat church for $8 million, ordained Barnett in the denomination and turned over the Angeles Temple to The L.A. Dream Center. Today, The L.A. Dream Center’s English-speaking worship services are held in the Angelus Temple, and the nine other bilingual services are held in the original building, now the church’s outreach facility.

“We have the most diverse group of people sitting in our services—Hollywood actors, prostitutes, business leaders, bus kids, addicts, skilled workers, rich and poor—the whole sea of humanity,” Barnett says. This multicultural congregation has shown Christ to inner-city L.A. for more than a decade, and today, The L.A. Dream Center runs 214 ministries led by literally hundreds of volunteers, 360 of whom come from around the world and donate a year of their time to serve the community.

The L.A. Dream Center is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “I believe that if the bars can be open throughout the night, the church should be, too,” Barnett says.

Each week, “outreach trucks” take children’s church to 27 neighborhoods where some 6,000 children attend. And every day the church deploys trucks into the inner city feeding 30,000 people each week. 

“We consider everyone a minister who should go out and make a difference,” Barnett explains.

The outreach doesn’t stop even within church walls. More than 650 people, including drug addicts, runaway youth, the homeless and the 350 volunteers, live in The L.A. Dream Center. An incredible gathering of people—some hurting, some in rehabilitation, some healthy—are all working together.

Barnett’s voice quickens as he relates the church’s atypical approaches: “We rescue prostitutes off the street by fooling their pimps and slipping them into our cars when their pimps aren’t looking. Most of these girls are only 16 or 17 years old.”

The church’s goal is straightforward—to drive out the element of crime in the community. Gradually, that’s happening. According to Barnett, over the last three years crime in the church’s community has dropped 73%.

“When you have 750 people going out to serve a needy community every Saturday and more than 100 volunteers going out daily to do things like pick up trash and paint over graffiti, you’re bound to make a difference,” he says.

How does The L.A. Dream Center afford the $600,000 monthly price tag it takes to run its 24/7 ministries? Three-fourths of the money comes from churches nationwide, Barnett says.

“Churches across the country have been the engines that built this ministry,” he explains.

Barnett’s dream of serving and transforming the inner city has multiplied: Over the last 10 years, 150 Dream Centers have developed across the U.S.

 

Fishers of Men

Christ’s Church of the Valley, Peoria, Ariz.

“If we can get the man, we can usually get the family.”

For Don Wilson, pastor of Christ’s Church of the Valley (CCV) in Peoria, Ariz., that statement and explanation for CCV’s meteoric growth has rung true for the last 22 years.

“Our passion is to reach men. So, all of our events are designed to attract men,” Wilson explains, adding that CCV even evaluates elements like music and color schemes around men’s tastes.

Larrie Fraley, pastor of communications at CCV, adds: “We go to great lengths to understand how men think. We’re presently using focus groups and surveys designed to get into the head of the 25- to 45-year-old churched and unchurched male. We want to know what makes him tick and what brought him to the church and Christ in the first place.”

Consequently, many of CCV’s projects and events appeal to men, such as building and repair work in the community, men’s mission trips, golf tournaments and trips to professional sports events. Wilson, a former basketball player and coach, stresses the importance of sports activities as an outreach ministry—one of the best ways he’s seen for reaching men.

And Wilson knows that by reaching men, he’s also reaching the families of those men. Over one-third of CCV’s attendees are age 18 or younger. “We have a very strong children’s and youth ministry. If we’re going to reach young couples, we need these,” comments Wilson.

Since its launch in 1982, CCV has met in rented theaters, schools and leased facilities, running as many as six services a week. However in early 2004, CCV moved into a new 3,000-seat, multipurpose worship center to better facilitate its family-focused ministries.

The new center will soon include a food court, a bookstore and outdoor sports facilities—overall, a place where “people can experience real change in their lives,” Wilson says.

“I’ve said for years that I’m not interested in building new buildings but in building people,” he explains. “By giving families a casual, enjoyable setting where they can foster meaningful relationships with each other and with God, I believe we will do that.”

Steven Haman, CCV’s finance and business administrator, emphasizes the outreach potential the new facilities provide. “Our aim is to create a non-threatening entry point for visitors, and to provide a tangible way to help build our community,” he says. 

Unlike other megachurches, CCV has no future plans for expanding its building to accommodate more growth. Wilson is determined to address the growing phenomena of people moving from church to church—in other words, “church shopping”—as their spiritual life develops. He shares his insight: “We’re not going to build more than 3,000 seats, but we will remain open to developing three different venues and facilities for three different styles of worship and teaching. As you go through different phases in your life, you won’t have to change churches. We’ll have a different venue to meet your needs.”

Also essential in the fight to retain members, as well as reach its community, is CCV’s emphasis on small group ministry. More than 300 groups of eight to 10 adult couples and individuals (not counting men’s and women’s ministries) meet in homes across the North Valley, all using the same curriculum. Fraley identifies relationships and outreach as two keys CCV uses to start and grow healthy small groups.

“Our small group ministry is geographically based,” he says, “which gives our people opportunities to invite their neighbors. So our groups are more outreach-oriented than just assimilation.”

CCV, he says, is currently shifting its small group emphasis from teaching to reaching the city. As a pilot ministry, the church plans to identify a square mile and assign a pastor who will invite people living in that area to a small group.

“Over time, we’ll pop up new square-mile emphases all over the city,” Fraley explains. “We already have the city divided into regions and have assigned a pastor to those regions to do everything a pastor would do except preach. We’ll use that strategy to move into a multi-site ministry in the future.”

Wilson adds, “Our purpose is clear: “Win people to Christ, train believers to become disciples and send disciples to impact the world.”

 

Commited to Character

Christian Cultural Center, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Christian Cultural Center (CCC) is a place of color—many colors. Since launching as a storefront church in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn in 1978, and building a 6.5-acre sanctuary/conference center in 1995, immigrants from around the world have found a spiritual home at CCC.

“Our church has many nationalities,” says church founder, Rev. A.R. Bernard, Sr. “We so appreciate the varieties of cultural identities who find a home at CCC.  Even though the white presence is growing rapidly, the larger body is very multicultural.”  

Worship at CCC reflects an expressive mixture of emotion and intense intellectual stimuli. While the music is emotional, the expository preaching is geared to helping people learn to worship God through their minds. Bernard preaches a message of discipline, order, strength and responsibility and cultivates
an academic learning environment. An electronic flipchart augments his preaching, projecting the message to a giant screen. Laptops and notepads abound as congregants take notes.

“We focus on the thinking man,” Bernard says. “The devil can’t take away from you what you understand.”

Born in Panama to a mother who was black and a white Spaniard father, Bernard came to Brooklyn, N.Y., at age four and, as a teenager, began following the tenets of Elijah Mohammad. Throughout his life, he says, he has always been a seeker of truth. At age 22, he found that Truth when he received Christ and left Islam. 

Bernard recalls his conversion: “When I received the revelation of Jesus Christ, everything fell into place. I find it interesting that the year I got saved, Elijah Mohammad died. I was about to make a full commitment to the Nation of Islam, and then I received Jesus Christ.

“Now I try to follow the teaching of John 17:19, where Jesus says, ‘I consecrate myself to meet their need for growth in truth and holiness’ (Living Bible). As a leader, I work harder on
myself than my congregation. As I work hard on myself, they follow.” He advises pastors: “Whatever you want people to become, you must become first.”

To that end, Bernard sows the seeds of discipline, order and responsibility for how one lives in the marketplace. “To be spiritually unemployed is just as bad as being economically unemployed,” he notes. “Spiritual unemployment leads to a lack of spiritual productivity and maturity. That’s why evangelizing, discipling and putting people into service are foundational to our ministry.”

CCC’s congregation has numerous opportunities to serve, via the church’s various community impact programs, including a food pantry, a prison outreach, a literacy program and a ministry to substance abusers, among many others. And future expansion plans on a newly purchased site adjacent to CCC’s current building include senior housing, a 500-seat performing arts theater, a youth sports complex and other community development projects.

“Our philosophy is that people feel they are part of some-thing that is much bigger than just a church,” Bernard explains. “They see an entity that is making local and global impact. We teach that God takes His Word and puts it into the human heart. Then He sows that person out into the world. It may be the world of finance or sanitation.  It doesn’t matter. We empower each person to take the presence of God into the
marketplace. We measure our success as a ministry by the way we impact our society. We appreciate the growing number of people attending our church, but we believe being salt and light in the society is a better measure of success.”

CCC welcomes about 1,000 new Christians each year, and 98% of them become members of the church—a very high retention rate.  Bernard cites three factors as reasons for CCC’s assimilation success, as well as its rapid growth: the practicality and relevance of the Word; the warm and welcoming environment; and a sense of discipline and order.

“We make the Word immediately applicable and practical to every walk of life,” he says. “We provide a warm welcoming environment, and our worship has a great sense of discipline and order. We are strong on customer service. No matter where you’re going to serve, you are going to take the customer training program and serve two months as an usher. Says Bernard: “We don’t believe God commits to talent; He commits to character.”

 

Micro, 'Rurban' Church

Christ the King Community Church, Skagit Valley, Wash.

While not yet on the list of America’s largest churches, Christ the King Community Church (CTK) in Skagit Valley, Wash., is a developing church growth model with the potential to become an apostolic movement—birthing the expansion of other church communities using its progressive approach.

Unlike most megachurches, CTK thinks “micro,” allowing geography to define its methodology. Scattered throughout the sparsely populated Skagit Valley are the church’s 10 locations called “worship centers” instead of churches.

“We’re a “rurban” church—not urban and not rural,” says Dave Browning, pastor of CTK’s parent church in Mt. Vernon, Wash. And he’s right. The area’s largest town has 20,000 people with most of the towns’ populations hovering between 5,000 and 10,000.

CTK’s original church launched in spring 1999 and is now the hub for each of the 10 worship centers serving the area. The worship centers are an extension of the Mt. Vernon location.

“Each center is an expression of a much larger entity,” Brown-ing says, explaining that CTK has modeled its structure after Starbucks. “We’re taking the entrepreneurial spirit of our culture and applying it to the local church, and it’s working for us.”

CTK’s strategy is simple: All of the worship centers begin as a small group. When two groups emerge, Mt. Vernon sends the emerging new worship center a DVD copy of last week’s message to use in its worship. As the worship center grows, a teaching pastor emerges from the ranks. Some of the worship centers have a host; some have a pastor. But each pastor has been raised up from within the network.

The self-multiplication concept also applies to CTK’s resources. All of the worship centers send back the first dollar of every $10 received from the offering to the Mt. Vernon church to be used to develop new sites. When a new worship center is birthed, the existing worship centers leverage the new site by pitching in with prayer, money, people and other resources.

The unconventional structure affords CTK the resources of a mega church as it plants new worship centers, but also the intimacy and flexibility of a smaller congregation—something Browning believes is more in line with the emerging culture.

“We feel like we’re riding the wave of the emerging world where the power is in the networks—not the mainframe,” says Browning. “Mega is the past. Micro is the future.”

The church plans to double its size every year. “By 2010 we could have 1,000 locations,” Browning says. “You can’t grow at that rate if you have to turn around and build another building. We focus on people rather than programs. So we don’t have a lot going on like you would see in many churches. Basically, all we have are small groups and worship centers. If we can get this model down right, we think it has great potential for people in any ‘rurban’ context.”

To assist the church in its goal of reproducing “rurban” churches anywhere, CTK has created two organizations: CTK University, an online, training center for its worship centers; and CTKUSA, a center for developing new congregations.

“So far, we’ve been able to reach thousands of people by decentralizing and penetrating these small population pockets,” Browning says. “In the same way, we want to be able to respond to opportunities beyond our valley, even around the world.”

 

-Outreach magazine, "Features," May/June 2004

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