The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon by Bill McKibben

Author:Bill McKibben
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

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HANCOCK CHURCH, WHERE I went, was the biggest and most important Protestant church in town in those days, its history stretching back to those colonial pastors, exemplifying the power of that mainline consensus. As one member from that era recalled recently for a church history, you “couldn’t get elected to town office in Lexington without being a member of the Hancock Men’s Club.”

But a contender was growing that would surpass it.

Five families began meeting for worship in a basement beginning in 1948; by 1959 they’d raised $100,000 to construct Grace Chapel—they called it a chapel “because the founders envisioned a small church, no more than a hundred families.” But it continued to grow, drawing families from across a wide swath of suburbia. When I was a cub reporter for the local paper in my high school summers, the editor sent me off to look into the phenomenon. I remember meeting with several members of the ministerial team. Unlike my minister, they in no way resembled God; instead they had the polo shirts and the upbeat attitude of softball coaches at an on-the-rise junior college. And what they talked about was growth: they were about to open a new sanctuary that would hold fourteen hundred people. It would be the largest auditorium in town, the twelfth largest in metropolitan Boston. And they would have no problem, they insisted, filling it every Sunday. Twice every Sunday. “We anticipate an almost instant 25 percent growth,” one of them said. “The only thing holding back our growth is lack of space.” Indeed, “we are the fastest growing church in New England.”

Curious, I went to a few services, and I was instantly struck by how different it was from church as I knew it—and how much it was like everything else. In place of a preacher behind a pulpit, there were worship leaders holding microphones—the long kind, on a stalk, that were common then on talk shows. Indeed, the ministers talked back and forth, and people emerged from the wings to sing: it was a TV show. Having watched lots of TV, I felt very much at home: it was Mike Douglas or Merv Griffin, but about religion. And in place of the gravitas that settled over the Hancock sanctuary as the service began, there was a consistently cheerful air, a joy that felt slightly forced but alluring. This was the mall; again, having spent a fair amount of time in the food court, I felt at home.

I also, of course, thought it was tacky—I’d already spent too many years in the more austere confines of old New England Congregationalism not to disdain the glitz. But I also knew that television, and shopping malls, were … successful. At some level I knew I was seeing the future. So it didn’t surprise me over the next decades as this became one of—probably the—archetypal experiences of worship in America. The megachurch—Willow Creek, or Saddleback, or all the other variations that spread across the country—could be

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