One of the amazing outcomes of the first megachurch was that Paul, a chosen Apostle, was persecuted without the support or defense of the large contingent of Christians in Jerusalem. When James met with Paul he said, the members of Jerusalem’s megachurch have been informed that you teach all the Jews who live among the Gentiles to turn away from Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children or live according to our customs (Acts 21:21). This accusation was untrue. Paul taught Gentile Christians that they did not have to follow Jewish religious traditions and customs, but he left to Jewish Christians the choice of continuing or discontinuing the practices.
About a week after James’ conversation with Paul, as a reaction to that and similar erroneous accusations, the whole city was aroused, and the people came running from all directions. Seizing Paul, they dragged him from the temple (Acts 21:30). Luke did not write that Christians were among this mob, but where were the “murias” (translated by some as myriads) of Christians who were there in Jerusalem? A big crowd moving in the same direction is difficult to resist. One of the dangers of a megachurch is that if it is wrong about something, the large number of people pushing for their interests can be irresistible. Christians today must take heed. Similar things can happen again.
A Lesson from Recent History
For a historical example of mob-influence on a large church, let’s consider the German Evangelical Church in the 1930s.
At that time, within Protestant churches throughout Germany, a small percentage of radical, Nazi-leaning members formed a group they called German Christians to pressure the larger group of German church members to comply with their extreme ideology, which was strongly racist and anti-Semitic. With the support of the Nazi German government, the German Christians prevailed and gained control over leadership of the German Evangelical Church and its teachings. A smaller group of churches that called themselves the Confessing Church opposed the governmental influence.
Essentially, the religious doctrine of this German Evangelical Church degraded into the belief that the racial purity of the German people should be preserved by mixing Nazi ideology with elements of Christianity. Such a doctrine made it easy for church members to support, or at least not oppose, Nazi efforts to persecute and eliminate Jews and non-German parts of the nation’s populace. Such radical notions may not have been held as private beliefs of individual members, but when the government-inspired movement enveloped the German Evangelical Church, a mass movement gained control in the nation. One of its outcomes was the persecution of the Confessing Church with attempts to diminish or dissolve its membership. The other major outcome was the church consent to the horrors of extermination of undesirable people by the Nazi government.
The German Evangelical Church was not a single megachurch but a collection of many churches that had a dominant effect on the majority populace. Although a study of an ancient biblical megachurch is not an exact comparison to the emergence of a large church movement in a nation, similarities in effect are worth consideration. Could the political efforts in the United States that began with the “Christian Coalition” in the 1980s, found new invigoration with the “Tea Party” in opposition to the presidency of Barack Obama, grew into the 80-plus percentage of white Evangelicals that supported Donald Trump in 2016, became part of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, and is now the face of Christian nationalism in America, become an American version of the 1930s German movement?