Megachurch

An insurgent Democratic newcomer toppled a Republican incumbent for the first time in nearly 100 years.

Mega Church pastor Adam Hamilton is projected to defeat first-term Senator Roger Marshall, Republican of Kansas, one of the more unexpectedly close and brutal races during this midterm election cycle.

Hamilton's win in the Sunflower State marks the first time Kansas has sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1932.

Again, this is based on socialist promises that may or may not come to pass.

Yeah, well, that's awesome.

And you mentioned First Baptist, you know, Mega Church, you've been a part of that for a while.

Was there anything in there? I mean, I know a lot of times Mega Churches, there's a lot of ideas that come out, a lot of creativity, a lot of newness.

And so how did that particular path prepare you to build something almost from scratch?

Yeah, I mean, honestly, I'm a graduate of the University of Central Florida.

It's expected, almost.

Whenever I see Mega Church, I'm like, okay, you bought it.

You bought your own car.

This is not going to be a stand-up character.

Now, that's across four campuses in three cities, but still, that's 35,000 people who consider themselves members of the same stand-alone Christian evangelical church.

With that many people and that much money coming in from the congregation, megachurches don't just hold spectacular Super Bowl-level sermons.

They also regularly hold concert-level events, many spanning several days, like the Stronger Men's Conference.

It's kind of a weirdly phrased, the Stronger Man's Conference is not, it's called the Stronger Men's Conference.

Not everyone in the church necessarily attends every single service, but in some mega churches, they do.

And given the spectacle and the punting of Bibles and, you know, indoor tanks rolling over cars, you might wonder, is this what makes these churches so popular? Is that what led to their immense growth over the last few decades? What is the psychology, the social science that has led to this phenomenon? And what can we learn from this category of human groupishness that explains other kinds of groupishness and groupishness in general? What, brings people together into the structure of the megachurch.

And given how huge they are, perhaps the more important question is what keeps them as social interaction institutions from collapsing? And the answer, it seems, is that megachurches have evolved into a format, a cellular structure of human interaction in which church leaders began asking...

What's the smallest reproducible unit in your church? And that is what you need to invest in.

President Trump was in Park City to support GOP Senate incumbent Roger Marshall.

Mega Church pastor Adam Hamilton has made it a competitive contest with many polls showing Hamilton tied with or even ahead of Marshall.

The president made the case for six more years for the incumbent.

The people of Kansas are going to re-elect a great, a truly great person, a great senator, one of the greatest senators we have.

The next show.

Mega Church has developed their own leadership training routes.

Jeff, this is picking up from yesterday's podcast.

We were talking about the pastors, who's going to train them, who's going to teach them.

If you have a building of 5,000, you need to have 5,000 there.

So to the scope of the vision would be, I'm saying that that would follow a biblical pattern.

So if you've got Willow Creek or if you've got Bethel or if you've got all these mega churches, the fact that they are mega churches is not in itself proof of right or wrong, but it could be proof of the call of God.

And I will say this, those that are engrossed in the training of pastors to send out is the biblical model that we should be following.

[laughs] Like, "You gotta step down for a while.

We gotta, we gotta have some conversations about this." And, and a lot of these mega churches are operating outside the boundaries of any denominations, and that to me bothers me from account- from an accountability standpoint, and here's the other piece of this.

I do understand that most of these men who are pastoring these massive congregations will indeed claim that they have accountability.

Yes.

He's gaining a lot of traction.

Yeah.

And, and I think one of the things that seems most legitimate about some of his critiques of these mega churches, large congregations, whatever it may be, is they operate more like a corporation-

Sure