From Meetinghouse to Megachurch: A Material and Cultural History

This account explores, from the perspective of material and cultural history, the rise of the evangelical megachurch - a church designed to attract a large following. In 1970, there were only ten megachurches. By the mid 1990s, however, megachurches numbered around four hundred, representing nearly 2 percent of the Protestant churches in the United States. In this new study, Anne C. Loveland and Otis B. Wheeler demonstrate that evangelical megachurches and their architectural structures evolved from multiple models and influences.The authors begin by focusing on the meetinghouses of the Protestant dissenters of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and the revival structures used by itinerant evangelists in the antebellum period. They proceed to the urban auditorium churches created by evangelicals during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the gospel tents, tabernacles, and temples built by fundamentalists, holiness people, and pentecostals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: and even the modern churches constructed by liberal, mainline Protestants during the mid-twentieth century.Illustrated with more than 150 images, From Meetinghouse to Megachurch fills a significant gap in the historiography of evangelical religion in the United States. Church leaders, students of cultural and material history, church architects, or anyone interested in evangelism will find this book of great value.