'Hypocritical': Texas Megachurch Pastor Fires Back at Critics of Large Churches

Texas-based Pastor Ed Young believes those who think megachurches are “just too big” are hypocrites.

The founder and senior pastor of the multi-site Fellowship Church in Grapevine issued the bold statement in a video shared to his Facebook page. Young’s church, for context, reported a weekly attendance of 24,000 in 2020. The preacher noted in his video many have told him his congregation “is just too big,” but asserted it’s unfair to criticize the sizes of churches in places with large populations.

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“‘Your church is just too big,'” Young said, quoting what he’s heard from critics of Fellowship Church. “I’ve heard people tell me that a lot: ‘It’s too big. It’s a megachurch.’ Well, that’s got to be one of the most hypocritical statements someone can make, because the person making the statement goes to massive concerts. They would go to a game — a football game. They would go to a massive mall, and they never really say that about those entities.”

According to the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, a megachurch is a church averaging 2,000 or more weekly attenders. There were roughly 1,170 megachurches in the U.S. in 2023, a decrease from the 1,750 megachurches reported by the Hartford Institute in 2020.

Young went on to boldly assert, “Hey, if you think the church is too big, then you’re not going to like Heaven, because Heaven is going to be a big place. If a church is around a lot of people, it should be big in the context of being big.”

In 2020, a Lifeway Research study found the average church in the U.S. seats roughly 200 people, but the median weekly attendance is 65 worshipers. Megachurches, it should be noted, only make up about 0.5% of churches across the country, serving about four million weekly congregants.

Young’s comments come as a handful of megachurch leaders have in recent months faced intense scrutiny for immoral and concerning behavior.

Most recently, Robert Morris, the disgraced founder and pastor of Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas, was ousted from his prominent, longtime role in the spotlight after the now-adult Cindy Clemishire accused Morris of molesting her in the 1980s, when she was 12 years old.

“Like most believers, you don’t want to do anything that’s going to tarnish the name of God,” Clemishire told CBN News this summer of why she took so long to speak out about Morris’ alleged misconduct. “You don’t want to tarnish the church, you don’t want to hurt other believers, you don’t want to, you know, cause another person to not come to Jesus.”

Her goal, she stated at the time, is to keep Morris from continuing to advance in church leadership

Morris, when he resigned from Gateway as a result of the allegations, described engaging in “inappropriate sexual behavior with a young lady” in a home he stayed in during his 20s. He further stated it “was kissing and petting and not intercourse, but it was wrong.” Clemishire, for her part, took issue with the ex-pastor’s characterization of her as “a young lady,” given she was a prepubescent child at the time of the purported wrongdoing.

You can read more about that CBN News report here.