Editor's note: The megachurch is something that really must be experienced to be understood. Occupying its place in popular culture as a uniquely middle-American phenomenon, no other church has done it in quite such a contemporary way as Edmond's Lifechurch.tv (now known as simply Life.Church). Mike Mariani explores the origins of the megachurch-turned-media empire in this piece from This Land's Summer 2015 issue.
A young guy wearing a cobalt blue hoodie and shiny leather jacket has just robbed a woman’s purse. Rummaging through his quarry, the thief, all sinister swagger and furtive glances, passes by one of those fortune-telling machines with the wood finish and flashing white lights dancing across a litany of potential fates. He greedily pulls a coin out of the stolen purse and plays the game. The larcenist lands on “Death.”
So begins the first episode of LifeChurch.tv’s new series, I Deserve It. After this cinematic prologue, the video cuts back to Pastor Craig Groeschel at one of LifeChurch.tv’s campuses, who proudly declares this to be the church’s 19th Easter service. He’s using this Easter sermon to launch the I Deserve It message series, and soon weaves the hooded thief and the fortune-telling machine into a larger discussion about Christ, the crucifixion, diverging fates at Golgotha, repentance, and humility. On Easter Sunday, the video of Groeschel's sermon was streamed to all of LifeChurch.tv’s 23 satellite “campuses” across the country, in keeping with the church's highly popular but occasionally maligned multisite model. Publications like Christianity Today and countless Christian blogs at times deride multisites for what they perceive as a kind of “selling out”—an act of franchising and branding that runs counter to authentic, immemorial faith and evangelism.
Watching Groeschel’s sermon on video, you can more or less see why LifeChurch.tv has used technology to push past the boundaries of traditional services and beam Groeschel into each of its campuses and homes across the country and beyond. He’s confident and dynamic, with an athletic build fastidiously preserved from his days on scholarship for tennis at Oklahoma City University; outgoing; articulate without being didactic; and just the right amount of goofy. Two things really give this particular sermon its punch. When Groeschel tells the story of Jesus and the two thieves with whom he shared his pitiless fate, drying out on a cross under a scorching sun and the pecking beaks of scavenging crows, he sprinkles in autobiographical details about his own checkered past. He, too, was a thief, a petty larcenist in his prodigal college days, and sees himself—or his two potential fates—in the two men who died alongside Christ. Groeschel makes the gospel resonant, not through abstract sermonizing, but by laying bare the details of his own life. He also does the one thing all successful, riveting pastors do: he gives the Bible passages immediacy, as if the clouded, abstruse path to personal revelation most of us face while reading the Bible were blasted right open for him; the correspondence is perfectly translucent. Groeschel’s insight during the Easter Sunday sermon is that each person in his multifarious audience is one of the two thieves suffering next to Jesus: either giving up his repentance or smugly hiding it.
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In 1996, Groeschel began what was then known as Life Covenant Church in the humble setting of many American origin stories: an old garage. Craig and his wife’s friends let them use their spacious doublewide, which they had converted into a makeshift auditorium. In an act of shoestring prestidigitation, Craig insisted that they put a massive mirror on the back wall to create the illusion of a larger audience at those early homespun services.
In the next few years, Groeschel’s congregation expanded rapidly, leading him to open Life Covenant Church’s first facility in Oklahoma City. In 2001, Groeschel was approached by the Edmond-based MetroChurch, which suggested that the two congregations merge. Their name now changed to LifeChurch.tv, Groeschel’s garage prayer group was now a “multisite” church—technically just a self-evident description of a congregation that meets at multiple locations, but for some a crossing of the Rubicon that symbolizes a church’s unholy relationship with consumerism and corporatization. The online journal 9Marks has been particularly outspoken in its criticisms, asserting, among other critiques, that multisites have no biblical precedent, violate the tenet of a single assembly, and suffer from the paradoxical misnomer of being one church with multiple congregations.
For a time Groeschel would drive between campuses, delivering his sermons throughout Oklahoma. But in 2001, when his wife was in labor, Groeschel knew he wasn’t going to make it to both weekend sermons. So his LifeChurch team decided to videotape his sermon and show it at that Sunday’sservice. “The response was fairly unremarkable,” Pastor and Innovation Leader Bobby Gruenewald told Metroland in 2009. Which is to say, it was successful; according to Gruenewald, little, if anything, was lost in digital translation. They had somewhat haphazardly discovered a novel way to harness the charisma of a single pastor within a multisite church. They continued using videotaped sermons by Groeschel at LifeChurch.tv’s satellite campuses, and it did nothing to stifle their growth. Even during the early years as a multisite, many of the churchgoers in Oklahoma City and Tulsa never meet Groeschel in person. Their only exposure to the church’s head pastor was through his video teachings, and for them that was enough. Groeschel and his team followed up those satellite campuses with church plantings in Stillwater, another in Oklahoma City, and then two in Arizona.