Hahrie Han
speaker
207 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Hahrie Han’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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You know, and even though Cincinnati is a city, you know, leans left, you know, in the politics of Ohio, you still had a significant number of people that had to have supported Trump and also supported this ballot initiative. So I wanted to understand more. And I was initially doing research in Cincinnati because of this ballot initiative.
And people kept telling me, you know, there's this church that are sending all these volunteers. And that's not infrequent when you study political campaigns to have say, oh, there's a church that was involved. And, you know, usually it's, you know, in this situation, a situation like this is probably I sort of assume that it'd be some like lefty unitarianism.
You know, who sent people to, you know, make a few phone calls and here and there. And it turned out that it was this evangelical megachurch in Cincinnati that was sending hundreds of volunteers. And that's when I thought, okay, like this is unusual, like what's going on.
And when I dug into it, it turned out that all these volunteers were coming, had been animated to get involved in the campaign through a program called Undivided, which was fantastic.
a program that was started by the highest ranking black pastor in the church in you know in 2015 he had stood up and said he wants to do something on um you know the racial divide in cincinnati and he had such an outpouring of support after he preached about that that they decided to build a program and the program launched in early 2016
It was a six-week program designed to equip people to get involved in the work of building racial solidarity. And then that people were so animated by that program, they then got involved in this ballot initiative in the 2016 election. And so that's how I came upon Undivided to start.
And I was trying to understand how was it that it was having these really unexpected effects that we just aren't seeing in other kinds of programs like that.
So the technical definition of a megachurch is a church, I mean, it varies a little bit, but roughly about 2,000 people or more. But this church was the third largest megachurch in America. And so now it's a church that gets about 35,000 people per week to show up in person and about 500,000 people online.
So they have a scale that is unlike any of our political organizations because there are no political organizations that get 35,000 people once a week to show up, you know. And then at the time when I started researching them in 2016, there was about a 20,000 person a week church. So, you know, it's grown since then. But here's a couple other stats that I didn't know until I did this work.
The largest 9% of churches in America contain 50% of the churchgoing population. Wow. And so church attendance in America is heavily skewed towards large churches. And the average megachurch grew by something like, I don't have exact numbers right, but I have the magnitude right, by something like 34% between 2015 and 2020.
So these megachurches are not only drawing a lot of people, they're growing. And so these megachurches, there's a big debate about what the value of these churches are from a theological perspective. But say what you will, it's the growth edge of American Christianity right now.
Right, which is the modal church in America, just to be clear, right? Like I think the median church has less than 100 people and it's shrinking, right? And that's why it's like you get these like this crazy distribution.
Well, so just to give a little bit about my background. So I grew up in Houston, Texas, and I grew up going to a Catholic church. And so to me, when you say church, it means a priest wearing vestments with an altar and candles. And you sit and you stand and you kneel. I mean, there's a steeple. There's all these kinds of things that we would associate with church.
And what a lot of these crossroads included, a lot of these megachurches are like, they often exist in strip malls. Because that's where they can find space big enough to host the numbers of people that they're bringing together. There's often multi, like full bands on stage. So it's not just like an organist, you know, plunking out a few songs, you know, on the piano or on the organ.
But it's like, it's a full...
sensory experience right where it's you know the first time i went to crossroads i remember i was shocked that it's like when you sit down they dim the lights in the auditorium then these like spotlights come on and the band comes on it's playing really good music and then the pastor comes on and he's wearing jeans and a t-shirt and is like you know preaching from his notes on his ipad it's a it's a very kind of modern hip
experience that is its own form of entertainment in a way. And that's the theological critique sometimes that people have is that it might be engaging more people, but is it engaging people in authentic relationship with God or not?
It's white-dominant, and since it was the last time I've seen the data, it's 80% white and 20% non-white, which in Cincinnati is primarily black, but not exclusively so.
So Chuck Mingo is a pastor. He had grown up in Philadelphia in the black church. And so he had grown up, you know, having attended black churches his whole life. He moved to Cincinnati originally because he had a job with Procter and Gamble. And so they're headquartered in Cincinnati.
And so he went there and then eventually felt the calling to go into ministry and found a job as a pastor at Crossroads, which is a white dominant church. And so that was really unfamiliar to him personally. in a way, but he was able to kind of, he felt very called by God to be a pastor there. And so he became the head pastor for the kind of flagship campus of Crossroads and was extremely popular.
Showing 101–120 of 207 · page 6 of 11
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