LOUISVILLE, Ky. — PATTY ANDERSON and her husband, Gary, found faith where they least expected it — he on the free-throw line and she swathed in sweats in an aerobics class.
It happened at the 50,000-square-foot activities center of the Southeast Christian Church here, where pumping iron and praising the Lord go hand and hand. Amenities at the gym include 16 basketball courts and a Cybex health club, free to churchgoers, where the music is Christian and the rules ban cursing even during the crunch.
"I really had no intention of being part of a church," recalled Gary Anderson, a physiology professor at the University of Louisville School of Medicine. But hoops at this 22,000-member megachurch led him to the sanctuary. And after three years, he said, like a slam dunk, "the sermons sunk in."
Southeast Christian is an example of a new breed of megachurch — a full-service "24/7" sprawling village, which offers many of the conveniences and trappings of secular life wrapped around a spiritual core. It is possible to eat, shop, go to school, bank, work out, scale a rock-climbing wall and pray there, all without leaving the grounds.
These churches are becoming civic in a way unimaginable since the 13th century and its cathedral towns. No longer simply places to worship, they have become part resort, part mall, part extended family and part town square.
In Glendale, Ariz., the 12,000-member Community Church of Joy, which has a school, conference center, bookstore and mortuary on its 187-acre property, has embarked on a $100 million campaign to build a housing development, a hotel, convention center, skate park and water-slide park, transforming itself into what Dr. Walt Kallestad, the senior pastor, calls a "destination center."
The churches have even become alternative employers. At the Brentwood
Baptist Church in Houston, a
By making it nearly possible to inhabit the church from morning to night, cradle to grave, these full-service churches can shelter congregants, said Dr. Randall Ballmer, a professor of American religion at Barnard College, from "a broader society that seems unsafe, unpredictable and out of control, underscored by school shootings and terrorism."
While some scholars and communities are concerned about the megascale of the churches, and the civic responsibility they assume, 24/7 churches reflect a broad cultural desire for rootedness and convenience for overextended families. And in stark contrast to the issues roiling the big traditional churches, these churches, which are largely evangelical, offer relief from stresses on American family life, including suburban sprawl, with its vast commutes, and "drugs, crime and other youthful temptations," said Dr. Joe Samuel Ratliff, pastor of Brentwood Baptist. It was he who advocated the McDonald's at Brentwood as a way to "create a controlled, protective setting for our kids."
The churches reflect a desire by congregants for "a universe where everything from the temperature to the theology is safely controlled," Dr. Ballmer said. "They don't have to worry about finding schools, social networks or a place to eat. It's all prepackaged."
Though many of the churches, which are largely in the South and Midwest, are involved in missionary work, their congregants may be able to isolate themselves from the greater community — to engage in a kind of "Christian cocooning," said Dr. Bill J. Leonard, dean and professor of church history at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C.
Yet, church leaders say, their aim is not isolation but comfort and convenience for harried families. With their numerous ports of entry, from gyms to singles cafes, full-service churches make it easy to come and stay, they say.
The staying part has proved trickiest for religious institutions. Adult churchgoers, at the rate of one in six, "church-hop, based on their need du jour," said David Kinnaman, vice president of Barna Research, one of the new consulting firms helping these churches grow. One in seven will leave a church this year.
"People are looking at churches with a similar cost-benefit analysis they'd give to any other consumer purchase," Mr. Kinnaman said. "There is little brand loyalty. Many are looking for the newest and the greatest."
Dave Stone, the associate minister of Southeast, calls his church, which is open daily from 5:30 a.m. to 11 p.m., "a refueling station."
"If we can get people to come to our gym," he explained, "it's only a matter of time before we can get them to visit our sanctuary."
The church was deliberately designed like a mall. (The sanctuary is the anchor tenant.) Hallways 20 feet wide with curves enhance "people flow," said Jack Coffee, a church elder and chairman of the building committee. Preschoolers frolic at a Disneyesque play land, with mazes. There is an education wing for Bible classes, a concert-hall-size atrium with glass elevators, crisscrossing escalators and giant monitors that itemize the day's offerings: meetings to help smokers quit, a cross-trainers minimarathon and pat the Bible classes for 6-month-olds.
Such amenities are typically paid for by the congregation with three-year capital campaigns, on top of the church's operating budget, which is often financed with tithes, said Malcolm P. Graham, president of Cargill Associates' church division, a fund-raising consultant. A study by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research at the Hartford Seminary, finds the average annual income for a megachurch is $4.6 million a year. Annual contributions to Southeast Christian are more than $20 million.
Southeast Christian churchgoers speak of a 22,000-person family, and visitors are regaled with statistics: the coffeepot that serves 5,000 cups an hour, the 403 toilets. Southeast's size has spawned the invention of the Greenlee Communion Dispensing Machine, designed by Wilfred Greenlee, 79, a congregant. It can fill 40 communion cups in 2 seconds.