Triple Canopy’s Joseph Clarke compares megachurches and corporations in a brief presentation called “Infrastructure for Souls.” His thesis:

Successful megachurches are like well-run companies, with intricate corporate structures devised to keep each member personally engaged; their pastors are like chief executives, maximizing the productivity of laborers in the evangelism enterprise. Jumbotron notwithstanding, the architectural and organizational tropes of the megachurch are best compared to those of the modern white-collar workplace.

He goes back to the roots of the megachurch in 19th century Protestantism, camp meetings and revivals. He looks at the paralell developments in church and corporate architecture, and the reasons behind the changes. In his ending comparison, he says that the corporate metaphor of a “body” is nothing new. It should sound familiar to the church:

In the corporate world, even in the midst of today’s layoff campaigns, companies strive to maintain an image of caring, and human-resources departments cultivate the psychological well-being of their employees by providing depression and anxiety counseling, online databases of relationship and parenting advice, and referrals to life coaches. Modern-day management acts as an organizational superego, struggling to order the behavior of employees and keep existential terror at bay.

The corporation achieved the status of legal personhood more than a century ago (and enjoys this benefit without having to suffer the frailties of the human body). But the underlying corporeal metaphor for an all-pervasive organizational infrastructure had been established long before the advent of modern companies. As Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians says: “No man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church: For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones.”

Take a look at his view of the architecture and the worldview behind it. It’s true that megachurches have a distinctive kind of architecture and it’s interesting to reflect on the reasoning behind it.