Global Megachurch Studies: The State, Evolution, and Maturation of a Field

Abstract

Over the past decade, the field of megachurch studies has matured and become global in its scope and orientation. The number of texts produced on megachurches since 2010 is nearly triple the number produced before that date, and many of the newest texts decenter North America. Megachurch studies today, therefore, is a properly international and cosmopolitan field. The article has four interrelated aims: (1) to provide a thorough overview of major themes and work in megachurch studies, with special emphasis on works emerging in the last decade; (2) to update two excellent state-of-the-field reviews by Stephen Ellingson (in 2008 and 2010); (3) to make visible the now thoroughly global nature of the field by attending fully to its international focus, something done only briefly and tentatively in Ellingson’s reviews; and (4) to develop (in the ample footnotes) something of thorough bibliography of key texts in the field of megachurch studies.