Former megachurch pastor Francis Chan, who founded the We Are Church house church network in 2011, says he stepped away from the megachurch model of worship due to a confluence of reasons, including a feeling that he would have more followers than Jesus and Paul if they existed in America's current Christian Culture.
Chan, who founded Cornerstone Community Church in Simi Valley, California, in 1994 and led it for nearly 16 years before stepping down in 2010, looked back on his departure during an interview with Christian rapper Lecrae on his podcast "Deep End with Lecrae."
"I remember one night telling my wife ... I just looked at her, and a thought came to me. I go, 'Honey, I feel like if the Apostle Paul or Jesus had a church in Simi Valley, mine would be bigger, and that is bothering me,'" he told Lecrae.
"I would have a bigger church than Jesus [be]cause I know how to keep a crowd. They didn't. And so you start realizing, 'Well, am I really being like Christ?' And then as I'm looking in the scriptures and I'm looking at what's commanded, like if God could have anything of a church, what is the main thing in Scripture?" he reasoned.
While Chan seems to suggest that Jesus and the Apostle Paul didn't know how to keep a crowd, the Bible records both figures ministering to large crowds on multiple occasions. Jesus regularly engaged his audience, sometimes numbering in the thousands, using a combination of preaching, teaching, and miracles, as seen in His feeding of the 5,000, where some estimates contend that up to 20,000 people could have been present.
In addition to his concern that he probably would have had more followers than Jesus and Paul in Simi Valley, Chan questioned if the people in his church were loving "one another as much as Christ loved us."
"I'm like, that's not what I created. I got a bunch of people, thousands of people; we're playing church," he said.
Chan said he was also concerned that the supernatural gifts of the Early Church weren't manifesting in his megachurch.
"Everyone in that church [Early Church] has a supernatural gift for the body, and I'm thinking, 'OK if I got 5,000 people with supernatural Holy Spirit — like God is in them either speaking through them, healing through them, whatever it is. There's 5,000 people with some sort of gift, and I don't know any of these gifts, and they're not being used in the church," he said.
He said his departure wasn't caused by "one thing" but more of a "perfect storm of all these truths of Scripture coming to my mind." All Chan wanted to do, he said, was "be faithful to [God's] word."
"I can let go of the numbers, I can let go of the fame, the money, everything else," Chan said. "I want to please You."
"I finally thought, I think I'm causing more problems than I'm helping the church, so that's when I decided, you know, let me step away and maybe get my thoughts together and maybe create something different," he continued.
Chan said he may have been a bit idealistic about what he expected his house church movement to look like, but he maintains that he is now much more at peace with himself.
"I would have felt so unfaithful if I didn't make the switch. Now, there was some idealism in my head; I thought this will be easy. They do it in China. There's 100 million of them in house churches. So, hey, this is going to be millions of people, and you realize, yeah, this is not easy. But I have peace, and that's where before I didn't have peace," Chan said.
"It may not look as successful having a bunch of homes everywhere with small groups that are loving each other and different people using their gifts, but I feel peace about it. I feel like I know, I really love these people, and they genuinely love me, and these relationships are deep, and a lot of them are using their spiritual gifts."
The 57-year-old says even though he is at peace with his house church movement, there are days when he feels the urge to get back in front of a crowd. But he believes the megachurch model is getting harder to sustain.
"I'm not going to lie; there are days when I think, 'Gosh, I really am more gifted to be in front of a crowd and just teach.' [If] you [are] just look[ing] at natural gifting, I'm better as a megachurch pastor, and who knows, I may go back to it someday," he said. "But I go right now, this is the peace that I have, and I believe this is the future. It is getting harder and harder for these guys with the big churches. You know a lot of them are good friends of mine, and they're miserable, and it's just a tough time to shepherd the big [churches]."
