From Meetinghouse to Megachurch: A Material and Cultural History

Anne C. Loveland, Otis B. Wheeler

University of Missouri Press, 2003 - Architecture - 307 pages

From Meetinghouse to Megachurch is a superb account, from the perspective of a material and cultural history, of the rise of the megachurch - a church architecturally 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 megachurches 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 erected 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. Loveland and Wheeler then focus on sixty-three of the more than one hu

Contents

• Building the Faith: 1
• The Meetinghouse: 5
• Building for Revivalism: 14
• The Auditorium Church: 33
• The Multipurpose Church: 66
• Building for Mass Evangelism: 81
• 6: 83
• The Gathered Church: 108
• Building for Church Growth: 114
• The Megachurch: 127
• The Full Service Church: 180
• The Worship Center: 191
• The Everyday House of God: 239
• Notes: 261
• Selected Bibliography: 295
• Index: 301

Bibliographic information

• Title: From Meetinghouse to Megachurch: A Material and Cultural History
• Authors: Anne C. Loveland, Otis B. Wheeler
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: University of Missouri Press, 2003
• ISBN: 0826214800, 9780826214805
• Length: 307 pages
• Subjects: Architecture / Buildings / Religious; Architecture / History / General; Religion / Christian Ministry / Evangelism; Religion / Christianity / History; Religion / Christianity / Protestant