I Dream Of An Amish Megachurch

The other night I dreamt that my extended family visited an Amish megachurch.

A bit of context

• I grew up Mennonite; my parents grew up plain Mennonite in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and Somerset County, Maryland, and my paternal grandpa was a Mennonite pastor for 50 years.
• A couple years back, our family participated in a homeschool co-op that was mostly comprised of plain Mennonite families at one of the churches my grandpa had pastored decades ago.
• Our family regularly hires Amish and plain Mennonite men for carpentry projects and to turn our venison into sweet bologna.

All that to say: I'm not as far removed from modern-day plain folk as most.

The Amish megachurch of my dreams

At one point in the service, kids came marching across the stage in some kind of Christmas pageant, then down into the aisles where they brought us gift bags with boxes of pop tarts. (Why? Because dreams. Actual Amish bakers would never permit such a Philistine pastry).

During the sermon, they had trained lay counselors on the sides of the stage, and people could go up and confess or deal with whatever was troubling them. My dad got up afterwards to make an announcement as a guest (about what, I can't remember... dreams are weirdly selective in their details).

Would Amish ecclesiology even allow for a megachurch?

It's hilariously antithetical. Few forms of church seem more foreign to the Amish ethos. And yet... their distinction between owning and using does make me wonder if they'd be okay with renting an auditorium every week. Amish regularly hire "English" drivers to transport them in vans. They hire people like me to build websites for their businesses, sometimes even complex e-commerce setups.

What megachurch tech would the Amish use?

Could they use microphones in an auditorium, as long as they don't have to own the PA system? Would they pay someone else to run the soundboard? Or do they, like many of their more assimilated Christian brethren, allow for less worldliness in their worship practices than they do in their business practices? Maybe they'd forgo amplification entirely, and the preacher would have to project. It's not unheard of; George Whitfield and Charles Spurgeon preached to crowds of up to 20,000 with their unaided voices.

Could you even fill a megachurch with folks within a buggy-ride radius?

The megachurch is more dependent on the car than it is on the loudspeaker. The limited range of buggy travel (which moves at 5-8 mph) would make it unlikely that enough Amish folk could converge on one place to fill a large auditorium each Sunday, perhaps excepting the densely-Amish areas of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. And even there, the norm of home-based services would mean that anything resembling a megachurch service would probably feel bizarre to an Amish person.

But weirder things have happened. And the Amish are really, really good at organizing.