A random YouTube video led me to a realization about Christians’ inability to perceive their own self-focus. It’s one of those realizations that really changes everything forever. I’m never again going to look at anything Christians do in quite the same way. Today, I want to show you that video—and take us on a journey through specks and planks, and all the substitutes that Christians come up with to avoid doing all that boring shit Jesus actually told them to do.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 12/30/2025. They’re both available now!)
SITUATION REPORT: Did he not see he’s making the exact same mistake? (No, he sure didn’t.)
A random YouTube video led me to a realization about Christianity’s decline.
For the first part of the video, I was nodding along as I sewed. He’s right about a lot of his observations—off-base in a few small areas, but nobody’s perfect. Then, he arrived at the point of his video, which took up the last third of its 15 minutes:
This membership decline wouldn’t have happened if only Joel Osteen had Jesused like the video creator does. Osteen wasn’t “authentic” and his preaching “felt hollow when stripped from the production, the music, and the crowd.” In fact, the entire megachurch model “was built on spectacle, not depth, on growth, not discipleship, on entertainment, not authentic spiritual formation.” But don’t worry! “A new wave” of churches are trying to fix all that: by welcoming doubt, living out their faith rather than simply consuming megachurch baby-food, and studying the Bible rather than getting barely into it.
When I realized where he was going with his conclusions, I just stopped cold in the middle of what I was doing and said “Oh, please.”
This YouTuber, WATCHMAN INSIGHTS, is a very small account. In and of himself, he’s not important. (Read: Please don’t hassle him. He’s just one of many examples.) His videos—almost all of which appear to be AI-fueled adaptations/reuploads of other people’s stuff, like today’s was—are a hilarious mishmash of Biblical pseudoarchaeology, right-wing talking points, Endtimes blahblah, and a serious boner for Mel Gibson’s 2004 gorefest, The Passion of the Christ. Of late, he’s been uploading videos about the downfall of various big-name megapastors.
(Related: One of our dear community members, ssj, made a great fan edit of that movie. We showed it some years back. You might like it!)
But this YouTuber is dead wrong. The problem isn’t what he thinks it is. In fact, he’s part of it. And the solution isn’t anywhere as easy as just Jesusing harder.
Both the YouTuber and his video’s subject practice a completely self-focused version of Christianity. The YouTuber thinks that Osteen’s church is in decline because he’s not preaching the self-centered message that he himself thinks is most Jesusy. Neither of them are Jesusy at all. They’ve just found a way to practice their religion in different—but equally completely self-focused—ways.
The megachurch model is just a very obvious form of self-focused Christianity
For many years, Christians have criticized the “megachurch model.” This model involves huge buildings, massive crowds, and an endless list of perks for members. Those perks include parking garages, celebrity sightings, artisan coffee, and tons of activities geared toward specific groups.
To me, megachurches have always seemed like a sprawling, well-provisioned military base—like Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, where my mom did her monthly shopping. That place was just a whole other world. It had a movie theater, restaurants, shops of all kinds, the biggest grocery store I’d ever seen, a hair salon, and more. I couldn’t even think of any need anyone could have that might require them to leave the base.
(We lived in Alabama, so it was a bit of a haul! But their commissary’s food prices were incredible. And Mom always stopped at our town’s one comic book shop on the way home. BTW, I got my boxed set of Dungeons & Dragons from the Keesler PX, which also sold a bunch of Avalon Hill strategy games. That base was instrumental to my development in ways nobody could have foreseen back then.)
So when I heard about megachurches, I immediately put them in the same mental category as the big military bases I’d seen growing up. These were the days of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, of Jimmy Swaggart weeping on national TV, of the Crystal Cathedral and its visual spectacles.
These congregations were still growing when I was Pentecostal, and it was hard for me to understand how or why. Everything about these ministries felt hollow to me: feel-good preaching, little to no serious Bible study, slick and over-produced modern-sounding music, amenities that didn’t feel very Jesus-y, and crowds so big nobody could really form real connections in them.
But here’s the funny thing: As one late 2000s study revealed, many tens of thousands of people felt very differently! They resonated with the megachurch model. They flocked to these churches. Their pastors became celebrities in their own right. In response, all we Pentecostals could do in our little bitty “tabernacle” churches was grouse about their pastors catering to “itching ears.”
For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. [2 Timothy 4:3, New International Version]
Long after I left in the early/mid 1990s, megachurches continued to grow in both number and membership. By the 2010s, they dominated evangelical Christianity. It took serious capital to get one started, but once started they were war machines. When one opened in a city, it often cannibalized all the smaller churches around it. Those smaller churches just couldn’t compete with all those amenities and programs.
When Christians finally understood that they were in decline, around 2015, megachurches were just about the only churches that saw consistent growth. The smaller ones folded or desperately treaded water, but megachurches continued to blossom forth.
And their critics continued to be extra-salty about it.
Vindication for critics complaining about the self-focused models of megachurches
But years before their recognition of decline, sharp-eyed observers were already noticing cracks in the megachurch tower.
Willow Creek Community Church is one of the most successful megachurches ever. Its pastor, Bill Hybels, was influenced by the Jesus People movement of the 1960s. He founded Willow Creek in 1975. From a modest beginning in a rented theater, the church grew into a behemoth with 25k people attending weekly services.
Due to various scandals involving Hybels and his “theological mentor” Gilbert Bilezikian, the church has shrunk to a shadow of its former glory. Still, as of last year the church reported in-person attendance of nearly 10k people. That’s a staggering number of people when one considers that the vast majority of Christians don’t attend church every Sunday. Very likely, that figure indicates some 20k people (or even more!) attending off-and-on in rotation each week.
But back in 2007, they were still at the top of their game. That’s when they commissioned the “Reveal” report. They published a book about their findings, but the raw data and report itself doesn’t appear to exist online. Even so, this study caused an absolute uproar in the evangelical Christ-o-sphere. It looked like every single criticism made of the megachurch model was true:
- Tons of programs and amenities didn’t seem to create mature, consistent Christian behavior or growth toward a more “Christ-like” demeanor.
- Megachurches didn’t seem to teach members to perform devotions and Bible study on their own time. People who are able to do those things already won’t find much in these churches that they don’t already know.
- Worse, megachurches came off in the study like a one-stop shopping destination for Jesusing, not a house for prayer and worship.
You can hear the disdain dripping from the Calvinists in particular. One of them, Justin Taylor, wrote that the study revealed “a disturbingly low view of the Church.” (When they capitalize the “C” in “Church,” they mean all Christians everywhere. If it’s lower-case, it indicates one particular church in the big-C “Church” body.) Another, Jonathan Leeman, mega-blogged a review of the entire book, ending with his doubt that Reveal would ever change anything much about Willow Creek.
Not one of the critics of the megachurch model, me included unfortunately, realized they were all making the exact same mistake.
Alpha Course highlights this self-focused gospel better than anything I’ve seen lately
When my watch party took in Alpha Course 9 and 10 (see also: Answering Alpha series tag), one thing we talked about afterward was how completely self-focused it was. Not one of the videos’ presenters or testimony-bearers talked even once about the stuff I call “the boring shit Jesus specifically ordered his followers to do.” By this, I mean helping others 24/7, comforting those who need it, making sure the hungry get fed, and all that.
A couple of us were raised Catholic, so we got particularly annoyed by the relentless focus on YOUR experiences, YOUR beliefs, YOUR feelings of divine attention and love, YOUR life improving, YOUR miraculous (but oddly mundane and small-scale) miracles, YOU YOU YOU YOU YOU. A Protestant watching had the same gross feeling. It sprang out at us, too obvious to ignore, too offensive to pass over.
I simmered these observations a while, thinking about all the stuff I’ve read and heard from evangelicals about why anyone should become a Christian. It all had the same focus on YOU YOU YOU YOU YOU.
But this video about Joel Osteen’s megachurch finally lit the fuse on the realization I talked about in the beginning here:
The critics of the megachurch model are making the exact same mistakes, just in a different way.
How the hardliners are making the same exact mistakes they criticize
A long time ago, I staffed a MUD (Multi-User Dungeon, a text-based MMO) that had some serious problems. Like, these were more serious than the norm for MUDs. A friend of mine said he was gonna start a new MUD. It would be a fresh start, free of the problems this one had. I asked him what problems he’d observed, what the systemic sources of those problems were, and how he’d restructure his new game to avoid them. In response, he got mad—in a good-natured way, because I tend to bring the “yes yes, but what does that look like” vibe to the party that nobody likes.
But still, he hadn’t given any thought to that at all. So the unfortunate truth was that if he didn’t seriously reconsider these things, he’d just do what he was used to doing and seeing. And that would just recreate the same kinds of problems in the new game.
That’s what these more-hardcore-than-thou Christians are doing. They can easily perceive the “speck” in their neighbor’s eye, but not the “plank” in their own.
Instead of amenities, it’s intense Bible study. Instead of small groups catering to every single demographic, it’s creepy discipleship. All of it’s still YOU YOU YOU YOU YOU. It’s YOUR safety from Hell, YOUR understanding of “the original Greek and Hebrew,” YOUR relationship/walk/journey with Jesus, YOUR peace of mind, YOUR superiority over other Christians, YOUR feeling of belonging and church community, YOUR perception of authenticity, YOUR doctrinal squabbles.
When the YouTuber here talks about what he thinks will totally fix Christianity, he’s not talking about doing the boring shit Jesus specifically told his followers to do. When he talks about “authenticity” and faith that “demands effort,” he doesn’t mean feeding the hungry or giving to charity. Only one person in that entire video talks about that boring shit (timestamped 11:49). Even then, his words are extremely vague—and nestled between HIS theology education, HIS preference for smaller congregations, and HIS increased time spent in prayer.
The simple truth about Christianity is devastating to the self-focused crowd
When Christianity becomes reduced to soteriological narcissism, to borrow the excellent term from Sarah Augustine, it becomes nothing more than a commodity that can be chosen, bought, and sold. In such a framework, Christianity becomes an individual phenomenon, completely between that one Christian and their god, rather than “good news” for the entire Earth and all the life-forms inhabiting it.
(Soteriology: “Soter,” meaning savior, and “-ology,” meaning presence in blood—er, I mean, the study of. So soteriology is the study of how salvation works.)
And it’s perfectly okay that Christianity becomes a product in the marketplace and an individual experience. There aren’t any real gods behind any religions anyway. Like a lot of Christians do, I carry in my head a best-case version of their religion, but I don’t expect it to be binding or authoritative. And it’s not like any one religion is intrinsically better than any other, in terms of cosmology. People can and should be able to choose which one works best for themselves.
The problem for Christianity is that if people just want a ME ME ME ME experience, lots of other products can fill that need. Besides the many other religions out there and the tens of thousands of quirky takes on Christianity alone, they might take up yoga, start a tabletop roleplaying game with friends, improve their house, hone their cooking skills, or just wake up late on Sunday and read. Any one works about as well as the others, so it’s really just a matter of preference. For the most part, those nonreligious options cost a lot less, in terms of time and resources, than self-focused Christianity as well.
Maybe that’s why Christianity went from being fairly others-focused in its early years to being completely self-focused today. Nobody joins a church out of sheer bloody-minded determination to feed the hungry. Charity to the point of exhaustion doesn’t draw in crowds. Safety (from Hell or earthly troubles), miracles, and divine attention sure do.
And more-hardcore-than-thou Christians really do not like their religion being put on the same shelf as yoga and cooking. It has to be special, because THEY have to be special. THEY’RE in the right flavor of the right religion and believe all the right things. THEY are Jesus’ very favorite and prettiest princesses.
All that boring shit can take a hike. They’ve got a Bible study to do.
NEXT UP: Criticisms of Alpha Course arose early and never really ended. We’ll check those out—and see why these disagreements crop up so often. See you soon! <3
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