Where Church Is Big ... Very Big

"You won't find anything in here that is ostentatious. You'll find beauty," says Pastor Young. "God's house ought to be beautiful." Young, a self-described "redneck, blue collar, south Mississippi country boy" and son of a utility-pole-lineman, started his flock in 1978 with 300 attendees -- less than half the number of teenagers baptized at the beach recently.

"It's a phenomenon of this generation," he says of the sheer size and growth of congregations like his. "It's meeting some niche there."

Megachurches, considered Protestant, with more than 2,000 people attending each week, cut a wide swath across the country. In 2005, California led the nation with 178 of them, followed by 157 in Texas and 85 in Florida, according to the book Beyond Megachurch Myths: What We Can Learn From America's Largest Churches.

"We believe it is only a matter of time until every state has a congregation of megachurch size," write authors Scott Thumma and Dave Travis. "Americans have not only grown accustomed to large organizations, but they have even had their character and tastes shaped by them."

Thumma, a professor at Hartford Seminary, has reported that the average megachurch income was $6.5 million in 2007, up from $4.7 million in 1999. About 50% of it was spent on salaries, the rest divided evenly between missions and buildings. Meanwhile, he says nine out of 10 megachurches more than doubled in size between 2002 and 2007.

Among the fears of Ed Young Jr., pastor of Fellowship Church in the Dallas area, No. 7 on the list of largest megachurches, and gaining on his father at Second Baptist, is the financial accounting of growth that comes with mergers and added campuses. And he wonders if megachurches are "just taking people from other churches because we have a cooler church."

Only 6% of megachurch attendees who participated in one of Thumma's surveys said they were at their first church. They appear to be being pulled from other congregations or brought back into practicing their faith after falling off the wagon. Two-thirds of megachurch attendees have been going for five years or less, he found.

A third of megachurch attendants are single compared with 10% at a typical church, and the average age is 40 compared with 53. Twenty-six percent of families at megachurches earn more than $100,000 a year, compared with 15% at typical churches, which tend to have slightly better regular attendance rates.