The Megachurch Phenomenon

Church itself is objectively optional for Christians at best according to the Bible, with the only command that is even loosely related to the idea of weekly Sunday morning church being the nonspecific instruction to not give up meeting with fellow Christians in Hebrews 10:25.  Not attending or attending church have nothing whatsoever to do with whether someone is a rational, just, consistent, or selfless person, and never is anything resembling conventional church ever prescribed or even suggested.  Nevertheless, there are different church structures and sizes--I am talking about both the physical buildings in which people gather and the congregations themselves--that sometimes are fallaciously targeted for irrelevant factors.

To clarify, there is nothing wrong with wanting to attend a church every week or with actually attending even a subpar, philosophically/theologically inept, largely useless one, given that a person does not believe anything false or unverifiable, allow the staff or other congregants to influence them, or support whatever idiocy is on display: attending a typical church is just not morally mandatory or damning.  There is also nothing sinful about attending, starting, or otherwise participating in a megachurch, a church with a comparatively enormous base of attendees and likely far more staff members than smaller churches could either find or need.  Again, no Biblical command or condemnation pertains to whether churches of large sizes should exist, even though they are in no way necessities, the same as all other churches.

There is not anything morally illicit about having a church of any particular size (Deuteronomy 4:2, in yet another example of why this one verse's obvious condemnation of going beyond or not adhering to Yahweh's actual commands is so deeply vital to Christian ethics), so objections based on the number of people in attendance are automatically contrary to the Bible.  Megachurches still receive hostility from some Christians who subjectively dislike congregations of an arbitrary size or assume that because some prominent megachurches are filled with heresies, selfishness, and general philosophical stupidity, others must be filled with these things as well.  However, the size of a church is irrelevant to its ideological flaws or even to its successes in having members who actually live out genuine Biblical commands.

The potential for corruption to be concealed and for Biblically inaccurate and philosophically invalid ideas (the latter being invalid whether or not Christianity is true) increases, yes; still, a megachurch being or becoming a place where outright falsehoods or heresies are promoted, tolerated, or trivialized is simply a possibility that might or might not actually come about.  It does not logically follow from a megachurch being a megachurch that it is founded or run in the name of fallacies or that its leaders will aim to deceive or settle for superficiality, contradictions, and emotionalistic appeal to as many fools as can be reached by ideas without substance.  That one megachurch fails on these fronts does not mean another one will, but one that theologically fails is not in failure because it is a megachurch.

As individual megachurches become more and more integrated with popular culture, drawing attention and criticism from secular and Christian circles alike, it needs to be understood that a church's number of attendees does not determine anything about its moral, spiritual, or broader philosophical standing.  A megachurch with terrible leadership is only at fault because of its leader(s), not because it is a megachurch.  The Bible is not against megachurches specifically, though no kind of church gathering is morally required by Yahweh to begin with.  Beliefs founded on hatred of megachurches because of what some megachurch leaders have done or because of a love of traditional church sizes are Biblically invalid.