Pittsburgh, USA - Even by the most conservative estimates, about 60 million Americans attended religious services this weekend, including more than 450,000 in the Pittsburgh region. The Morning File thinks that's reason enough to look at some of the numbers behind religion.
There might be no better place to start than Rick Warren, the California minister whose book "The Purpose Driven Life" has now spent 128 weeks on the best-seller list, which is longer than it takes most divinity students to become a pastor. Warren preached at his first church service in a high school gym in Orange County, Calif., in 1980. Today, his Saddleback Church boasts of a weekly attendance of 23,000, and his worldwide Purpose Driven Network includes 139,000 congregations, according to business magazine OC Metro. Even while running his megachurch, writing best-selling books and going on speaking tours, the quintessential Californian told OC Metro that he also finds time for guitar-playing, gardening, golf and "anything outdoors," and that Mel Gibson (natch) is his favorite entertainer.
But he's no David Yongii Cho
As impressive as Warren is, he and his church are pikers when compared with the world's largest Protestant church, the Yoido Full Gospel Church of Seoul, South Korea, run by pastor David Yongii Cho. Yoido Full Gospel claims a membership of more than 750,000. In a conversation with Warren, Cho acknowledged that a substantial proportion of his congregation "attend" via the Internet. "Korea is very small -- not like in America with a lot of space, so we can't enlarge our church buildings," Cho told Warren. "Besides, every year we have 20,000 new converts in our churches, and we can't put them all in our church building or even our branch churches." Korea is the most Christian of all Asian nations. A major reason is that when the country was under the domination of the Japanese from 1910 to 1945, Christian churches became aligned with Korean nationalists trying to keep their language and culture alive.
But does Cho have a basilica?
Yoido Full Gospel may win the world attendance award, but for sheer physical size, the No. 1 Christian church sits in the middle of the African bush in Cote d'Ivoire -- the Ivory Coast in the less culturally sensitive days when many of us went to school. The Basilica of Our Lady of Peace Yamoussoukro, built over five years in the 1980s by former Cote d'Ivoire President Felix Houphouet-Boigny, encompasses 323,000 square feet and is modeled after St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. The sanctuary can seat 7,000, with standing room for 11,000. Whether that many people have ever entered the premises is another matter.
Houphouet-Boigny built the church in his birthplace for $300 million, thereby doubling the country's national debt. He commissioned a stained glass window with his image and asked that it be placed next to windows of the 12 apostles, according to the Wikipedia Web site. The basilica is surrounded by a city where the vast majority of homes do not have running water or adequate sanitation.
Small is beautiful
This kind of wretched excess not only would be repugnant to many faithful people, but is about as far from their own experience as a Saddleback Church is. In a major survey four years ago, the Hartford Institute for Religion Research found that half of the congregations in America have fewer than 100 members, and that a full quarter of them have fewer than 50 members.
The joys of the small church
The Rev. Anthony Pappas, an American Baptist minister who specializes in small church ministry, once wrote that for meeting the bare minimum requirements, none of the congregations he oversaw could match the church that had dwindled to 10 members and whose pastor wanted to retire. It turned out that another Baptist minister had just moved to the town to care for ailing parents and wanted part-time work. Pappas was able to persuade the other pastor to retire to part-time status as well, so that they would share the duties and keep the little church alive. Baptists choose their own ministers, he said, and so at the congregational meeting, "two parishioners showed up for the vote and agreed to the plan. In effect, these two members could each claim their own pastor!"
Hold those services here
That vote could have been held -- barely -- in a church some of you may have visited. "Our Lady of the Pines" in Horse Shoe Run, W.Va., near Deep Creek, Md., is a 16-foot-by-11-foot sanctuary that advertises itself as the Smallest Church in the continental U.S. But the travel nuts at RoadsideAmerica.com say the real winner for teeniest church appears to be Cross Island Chapel near Oneida, N.Y., five hours northeast of Pittsburgh.
The chapel measures 51 inches by 81 inches and sits on a platform in the middle of a pond. It can seat two people. Years ago, RoadsideAmerica says, a couple managed to squeeze into the chapel with a minister to be married, but the rest of the wedding party had to anchor themselves in small boats nearby. The chapel, the Web site notes drily, is "non-denominational." What a relief. It should avoid any unseemly naval warfare over who gets to claim the church.