Lisa, a 58-year-old transit officer, grew up in the Catholic tradition. When she moved to New Haven eight years ago, she bounced around from church to church, but none really felt like home. Then, Lisa found Vox, an evangelical megachurch with nine campuses that span from New Haven, CT to Worcester, MA.
Lisa now attends Vox’s Sunday services at College Street Music Hall every week and runs an online community group for fellow parishioners. It was Vox’s mission of seeing “New England transformed from the least-churched region in the U.S. to the most spiritually vibrant place on earth” that drew Lisa in. “God has had an impact on my life,” she said, “I don’t think I would be here alive today without Him. So I want to see people get to know the love of a Father.”
Vox is emblematic of the church planting model in which a pastor moves to a new location, founds a church, and facilitates its growth across several campuses. This practice has become a popular method of evangelizing more secular areas of the country. Vox’s rapid growth demonstrates the viability of megachurches in New England, potentially portending the development of these popular churches as a force in the region’s religious landscape.
Lisa discussed Vox’s expansionary efforts with pride, beaming as she explained that Vox “is growing into its own little denomination.” It started with “one independent church then you plant churches. And so then you have a group of churches and at that point, it’s a denomination — a group of churches that are associated with one another.”
The church wears its growth-oriented mission on its sleeve. Upon entering College Street Music Hall, a parishioner ushered me in enthusiastically. She exclaimed, “You’ll love it! It’s like a concert!” A group of volunteers welcomed me at the door and pointed me to an empty seat, seemingly unphased that I was nearly half an hour late. The service was accessible and entertaining — live pop music blasted over loudspeakers, spotlights and a fog machine created a concert-like vibe, and the oversized screens, projecting close-up video as Pastor Kendrick spoke, made me forget I was sitting all the way in the gallery. Despite its large congregation, and location in a large concert venue, services at Vox felt warm and welcoming.
Scott Thumma, a professor of Sociology of Religion at Hartford International University, defines a megachurch as any church that has “2,000 people in attendance or more on a weekend. They usually also have contemporary worship and a charismatic pastor who has enabled that growth.” At Vox, Pastor Justin Kendrick is one of those charismatic pastors. Kendrick and his wife Chrissy Kendrick founded Vox in 2011.
Thumma identified Vox’s “user-friendly” environment as a key reason that megachurches are experiencing constant growth, even in more secular regions of the country. “They have a low boundary to get in, you can just walk right in there,” he explained. “They are often specifically set up for the consumer in the sense that they have a welcome center and explain what’s going on. They have lots of very pleasant greeters and signage, so you don’t have to be familiar with the church traditions and ways of doing things to come and enjoy the service.” Thumma also identified megachurches’ reliance on contemporary forms of worship — such as modern music, loudspeakers, and the use of screens — as another reason they attract large audiences.
Noah Riley ‘24 attends Vox every Sunday and plays the keyboard for them on occasion. After moving to New Haven, he tried a few different churches but “wasn’t really happy” until he discovered Vox. Now, he says he tries to go to Vox as often as he can. Noah attributes much of Vox’s appeal to its contemporary form of worship. “There’s a pretty big wave of progressivism here. And I think the old-fashioned, traditional church services might not appeal to the Yale community. I think Vox does a good job of having electronic components. They’ve got lights and fog. That helps attract younger people.”
Though parishioners like Lisa and Riley are optimistic about Vox’s ability to make good on its mission, and megachurches are certainly growing across the country, by Thumma’s estimate, less than 1-2% of them are located in New England. He explained, “New England, and its religious receptivity, is not like the rest of the country and especially not like the South where religious participation is an integral part of the culture and societal norms.” Further, the “parochial nature of New England’s towns” is anathema to the ability of megachurches to form and grow. To attract a weekly congregation of 2,000 or more, “people from one town would have to intermingle with folks from another town. This crosses cultural and socioeconomic boundaries as well as those unwritten rules about staying in one’s own town. Therefore, many of the current megas are in the marginal spaces between towns.”
On top of the problem of parochialism, Thumma explained that New England is also “a considerably secular area,” and is already “churched by Catholics and those mainline traditions. So while it has a quite sizable population that is not ‘claimed’ by any official faith group…that doesn’t mean that they aren’t loosely connected to a religion, or that they would be ideal candidates for an evangelical church. In some sense, churches like Vox and the Southern Baptist Convention see a predominantly Catholic and mainline area as ‘under-churched’ because, in their minds, only evangelical churches and Christians count. By that standard, New England is ‘under-Evangelized.’”
For its secular, parochial, and loosely Catholic population, some evangelical leaders consider New England to be “hard soil,” unripe for evangelical expansion. However, in the past decade, and as we have seen with Vox, some leaders have risen to the challenge. Tom Miyashiro, an evangelist who runs a youth outreach program in Connecticut, speculated that “a lot of leaders are attracted here because of the challenge.”
Two decades ago, New England had virtually no megachurches. Now, by the most recent estimate taken in 2009, there are more than 18 in the region. Since Vox’s founding in 2011, this number has certainly increased. Indeed, Vox’s model is a paradigm of the church planting strategy where pastors move to a community for the express purpose of founding a church. This strategy has become a popular approach to making inroads into New England’s “hard soil.” Thumma even expressed some optimism that it may be able to overcome the distinctly-New England problem of parochialism. He explained, “Vox is really one of the few congregations in New England that is using this strategy effectively, but it is a good one for the area.”
For most people loosely familiar with the concept, any mention of a megachurch sets off immediate mental alarm bells. Indeed, much of the mainstream coverage on megachurches details churches embroiled in scandal due to pastoral misconduct. Most recently, Hillsong NYC gained notoriety for a sexual abuse scandal — the story has since been turned into a three-part docuseries on Discovery Plus.
Though some tend to associate megachurches with misconduct, Thumma pushed back on the idea. “I would say in all my research that the episodes of clergy misconduct probably aren’t any greater at large churches than they are at any other sized church. But if you have a congregation of 10,000 people and you are caught in some sort of misconduct, it is broadcast much louder.”
As Vox continues on its mission to expand its reach in New England, megachurches’ reputation for scandal will be just one more obstacle the church has to face. Thus far, though, Vox’s broad appeal — attracting Yale students like Noah, who attends weekly with a regular group of students, as well as people like Lisa, who religiously make the commute to Vox each Sunday–indicates that the church is bypassing this negative association and succeeding in making cracks in New England’s “hard soil.”
Thumma still believes it is “highly unlikely” that New England will ever become the most-churched — or most evangelical — region in the country, due to a complex interplay of social, historical, geographic, and cultural factors. However, Vox’s loyal following suggests it is filling a previously untapped niche in the religious landscape. Perhaps, there is more room for growth than the experts expect.