Some say a case study is a method or research strategy (Denzin and Lincoln 2011) while others see it more as an approach or simply a choice of what to study (Stake 1995). Because I employ various research methods, I see the case study as a choice of subject matter. My method more specifically consists of the ways in which I investigate the particular case. Creswell (2007:73) defines case study research as “the study of an issue explored through one or more cases within a bounded system”
(which may be one or several individuals, groups, programs, or activities). My megachurch study blurs the distinction between “within-site” and “multi-site” case studies, as I focused on one church spread across 17 regional sites with over 180 Home Churches.44
Case studies cannot offer much in terms of summaries of broad social patterns as they draw from a sample size of one. However, they can disprove the generalizations of others by demonstrating a case that does not fit the presumed pattern. Additionally, something of the general situation must rest in the particular case. Durkheim noted the privilege often given to general ideas and remarked:
… it is inadmissible that logical thought should be characterized exclusively by the widest scope of the representations that constitute it. If there is nothing logical about the particular ideas, why would the general ones be any different? The general exists only in the particular; it is the particular, simplified and stripped down. The general, then, cannot have virtues and privileges that the particular does not have (Durkheim 1912/1995:434).45
So I hope some of the general situation may be revealed in the particulars of this case study, and I do occasionally venture comment on wider patterns, especially as I compare my findings with other quantitative and qualitative research on megachurches and their charismatic leaders.
While some congregational studies include lengthy historical research (Warner 1988;
Thumma 1996; Wellman 1999) and others include a study into the local religious ecology (Eiesland
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44 I did entertain the idea of doing a comparative study between TMH and Mars Hill Church, in Grandville, Michigan, where Rob Bell was pastor. More cases offer more “generalizability,” but it would also mean going less in-depth in one particular case (Creswell 2006:76). Time proved the wisdom of this decision, as pastor Rob Bell left his post at Mars Hill in 2011, and a fine book on his charismatic leadership was published by James Wellman in 2012, offering a comparative analysis for my own study.
45 This quote arises out of a discussion on the epistemology of Durkheim in Stewart (2012:26), a qualitative study of three Pentecostal congregations. Stewart summarizes Durkheim’s thought as a median position between the empiricism of Hume and the innate categories of Kant: that is to say, our concepts are social constructed—from our everyday experience, but according to categories that are universally accessible to humans. Thus it is possible to study the particular as Durkheim did (aboriginal religion in Australia) and distil some of the universal elements of religion in general.
1999), this study depends on a recent sociological snapshot in order to examine the congregation’s relationship with its pastor. The church began in 1986, has had only two successive primary pastors since that time, and while I trace some of this history, as well as the biography of Bruxy Cavey, my focus is mostly on the current culture of the church.
One of my goals was to learn the craft of fieldwork study, in which one immerses oneself in a subculture in order to understand it from the inside out (Creswell 2007). I wanted to investigate the lived religion of The Meeting House—not just its official ideology. It has been said that the goal of such study is “not to crack a cultural code, much less to expose the internal contradictions present in any social group so that its members might try to resolve them. Rather, it is to bring to light the myriad ideas and actions, the relationships and rituals, that together give communities their structure”
(Haynes 2013). In this case study, however, it would have been difficult to avoid the performative contradiction that shapes the central identity of the congregation: it is “a church for people not into church.” Nevertheless, I do not emphasize the contradiction in order to prove the church to be incoherent or a sham or to call it to logical consistency, but precisely to uncover the lived
“paradoxical” dynamics of its rhetoric and practice as well as structure and action.
Some have said that case studies like this can be “critical”—a means of social activism or advocacy, of giving a voice to the marginalized and advocating for their cause (Creswell 2007:70;
Scharen and Vigen 2011). Attendees at The Meeting House are not marginal in terms of class, race, or education, but I do argue in chapter 3 that they are a stigmatized group in Canada—as conservative evangelicals. I did not choose this research project to advocate for them. Neither did I seek to critique them as a bourgeois group mainly perpetuating larger systems of social inequality. I wanted to understand (Weber’s verstehen) what drew so many people to the church and so observe the performance of their religion—sympathetically but not simply in their own terms. I sought to create a cultural portrait of The Meeting House through a “literary, almost storytelling approach” that characterizes some of the best qualitative research (Creswell 2007:72). I can identify with the
“hermeneutic” approach, which requires a “sympathetic appreciation of other’s realities” in order to find what meanings its patrons find compelling within it (Spickard 2007:127). This does not negate explanatory approaches or other critical perspectives; however, it does scrutinize dismissive labels that would hardly be recognizable to the persons being studied.
My method consists of six basic fields, similar to other megachurch studies (O’Neill 2010:xvii-xxii). First of all, I was an participant observer at many of their larger events for about two years. I attended over 38 Sunday services, often at Oakville headquarters but also visiting most of the 17 regional sites for at least one Sunday morning. Other events I attended included two all-site rallies
at a large sports arena, New Year’s Eve dance parties, baptism events, recreational events, various external speaking events for Cavey, and general membership meetings.
A second, more intimate field of research was their small groups, internally known as Home Churches. I visited five different groups associated with three different MH sites for eleven weeks each—for a total of 68 group meetings. The general venue was a review of Cavey’s Sunday teaching followed by snacks and then a time of prayer. My Home Church visits also included various other events: I worked alongside church members at their volunteer activities, exchanged presents at Christmas, joined in football, soccer, and bowling activities, and attended games nights, a pool party, and a progressive dinner.
My third field of research consisted of formal interviews with over 82 people using an open-ended interview style guided by some standard questions (See Appendix A and B). Most interviewees were attendees or staff, and represented ten different sites but over-represented the Oakville, West Hamilton, Kitchener and Waterloo sites. Many interview contacts emerged from my Home Church visits, although there were numerous interviews I obtained through snowball sampling. For example, I wanted to talk to someone who was explicitly converted to the Christian faith through TMH, and I asked around for referrals. To get a wider perspective I interviewed two pastors from neighbouring churches, six ex-MH attendees (also obtained by referral), and one former BIC pastor now Member of Parliament for Kitchener-Conestoga (Harold Albrecht). Ten interviews were done with couples who attended TMH together, but I interviewed no families or focus groups. I conducted dozens of casual interviews as well, which are included in my field notes but not tabulated as are my formal interviews.
There were 27 female and 55 male interview subjects in my sample, a ratio of 1:2, although according to 2011 statistics gathered by the church the proportions of attendees are 56 percent female and 46 percent male (including children).46 I had at least three interviews with each of the top
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46 The disproportion in my sampling reflects staff gender imbalances: 17 of my 21 staff interviewees were male. In 2013 there were 10 times as many male pastors as female pastors, if you exclude the associate pastors, which includes more females than males. Pastoral designation is given to those who manage one of the regional sites and to numerous administrative and executive staff according to their level of responsibility (it requires taking a summer course on Brethren in Christ doctrine and polity). So my desire to get a read on the different sites from the regional pastors meant seven interviews with male leaders (there were no female lead pastors at the time of my interviews). All but one of my executive leader interviewees were male as well, reflecting the senior leadership gender ratios. I interviewed many staff because while their interviews sometimes reflected the “promotional” rhetoric of TMH, some staff I would classify as “key informants” and became quite valuable to my work—for data, news, and references (Reimer and Wilkinson 2015:11). Of my interviews with attendees, the gender imbalance is significantly decreased—
35 interviewees were male and 25 were female. The remaining discrepancy can be attributed to the effects of my own gender, as I found it much easier to strike up rapport with male attendees. In two of the Home Churches I attended, for example, the group was segregated into gender-specific sub-groups for prayer, so I developed deeper relationships with the male participants. Still, a sample size of 25 female attendees gives me a reasonable representation of that gender.
executive leaders, pastors Bruxy Cavey and Tim Day, as well as multiple interviews with other executive leaders, and two former Overseer chairmen. Other imbalances include the fact that all but two of the total number of formal interviews were with Caucasians, which reflects the constituency of the church but not the demographic context of the Mississauga/Oakville/Brampton area. While the age range of interviewees did not include anyone under 18, my sample generally fits the demographics of the church, in which two-thirds of attendees fit in the 26-55 age range. I have used aliases for attendees’ narratives but not for executive staff such as Tim Day and Bruxy Cavey. (Appendix D contains longer profiles of interviewees.)
The interviews, the list of interviewees, plus numerous participant observation notes, were uploaded into Dedoose, a qualitative software program that allowed me to code the material and analyze some of the data. I could then print out the coded material, with attached references to context, in order to focus on certain themes, such as Purge Sunday, anti-evangelical remarks, or critiques of Cavey, for example.
A fourth source of data came generously to me from Meeting House staff. They conduct in-house surveys of their attendees every fall and spring, and they made the results of these surveys available to me without conditions attached. The surveys cover basic demographic data such as gender and age, but also frequency of attendance at Sunday services and Home Church, length of time they have been with The Meeting House, and their general religious identity before and since coming to the church (Christian, non-Christian, other religion). These surveys generally had a very high response rate and gave me a good indication of the bigger picture of the constituency. I made suggestions for supplementary questions that were of particular interest to me, but they were not used.
I did no surveys of my own beyond the questions asked of my 82 interviewees.
A fifth field of study included textual analysis of various primary data in the form of diverse media, including over 112 sermons, numerous websites and social media texts, Cavey’s “bestseller”
The End of Religion (2007) and Tim Day’s Plot Twist (2014).47 TMH reveals an oral culture, as Cavey and Day do not spend much time writing, and Cavey relies on significant editorial help from specific staff people such as Rick Maranta, who ghost-writes some of Cavey’s blogs. The church operates around their video podcasts more than any particular texts, creeds, or polity documents. In fact, most attendees I interviewed had not read Cavey’s book. In this sense, it is more a church of the new media than a church of the book; it is a community lived in rental spaces and on-line, connected by regional site Facebook pages and a podcast archive of almost fifteen years of sermons. The “teaching archive”
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47 There is one academic article co-written with Cavey on “the house church model” (Cavey and Carrington-Phillips 2012).
or what I call their electronic oral tradition was a primary source for understanding their theology, and especially helpful was the search engine they included when they developed a new website in 2012, which allowed me to search for teaching topics and key words through about 15 years of teaching by Cavey.
Finally, I collected some secondary material on The Meeting House as a sixth field of study—
from newspapers, blogs, and one Masters thesis (Masters 2007). This is not a large volume of commentary, as TMH operates under the radar of many mainstream journalists’ vision in Ontario.
There are copious amounts of journalistic material on megachurches and their leaders in North America and beyond, and this secondary material forms much of my contextual understanding of TMH and the general discourse that surrounds it—especially my discussion on succession and the future of TMH in chapter 6.
I began listening to Bruxy Cavey’s teaching podcasts in February 2010, and my first interviews took place in October of that year, when I began attending a Home Church at the same time. I personally asked Senior Pastor Tim Day for permission to study the church and interview attendees. I then sought the consent of site pastors who were responsible for the Home Churches in which I was a participant observer. Then I connected with the Home Church leaders and introduced myself, explaining the channels I had already gone through. My participant observation intensified in June 2011 as I began regularly attending the Sunday services and other special events, including new member classes and new regional site promotion evenings. This tapered off in June 2012 as I began to analyze my data and write my thesis but continued with sporadic attendance into the summer of 2014.
I enjoyed relatively free reign in the social network of The Meeting House. Senior Pastor Tim Day was always gracious and helpful, as was Cavey when I was able to get an audience. The staff varied in terms of their enthusiasm for my project, some becoming key informants and a few others reticent, perhaps protective of their church and workplace, making email connections and interviews difficult. As for attendees, except for a Canadian Broadcasting Company journalist, two gay members and the odd logistical impasse, my requests for interviews were always accommodated. The CBC journalist was quite busy with work and family and I assume did not want any extra attention. While I did interview two gay attendees, there were two others who I knew only through other contacts and who did not welcome the inquiry into their personal and religious life.
Many social scientists today identify themselves with regards to their location on an insider-outsider spectrum. Raymond L. Gold wrote of four potential roles for the qualitative researcher: the complete participant, the participant-as-observer, the observer-as-participant, and the complete observer (Gold 1958:217-223; Stewart 2012). While I would suggest that the two poles of the
spectrum would be difficult to inhabit in any pure way, my research falls quite directly in the camp of observer-as-participant. Unlike others who studied a church in which they were members or even associate leaders (Thumma 1996; Wellman 1999; Poloma 2003; Marti 2005; Stewart 2012) I began my research with a church I had never set foot in before choosing it as an object of study.
I had a brief encounter with Cavey many years ago. While I never attended any Sunday services in which he was preaching, I interviewed him in 1992 for an undergraduate sociology paper on the vocation of pastors (a cassette-taped recording I unfortunately no longer have). He was pastor at Heritage Fellowship Baptist church at the time, a few years before his divorce and his ministerial migration to the Brethren in Christ. Although I have a Master of Divinity degree from a Baptist seminary (McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton is affiliated with the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec), I do not identify as Baptist. Nor have I ever been formally connected to an Anabaptist church or Anabaptist para-church body. I was raised in a branch of the Reformed-Presbyterian tradition and continue to participate in a local Reformed congregation with my family, a tradition with particularly “deep differences” with Anabaptism (Bolt 1984:131). Cavey’s feelings for my particular tradition range from gracious to pugnacious, and during my fieldwork of The Meeting House he actually presented an entire teaching series (seven Sundays) that rigorously critiqued Calvinist soteriology (specifically, the five points of Calvinism). So while I am an insider on the basis of my general Christian identity, I am an outsider on the basis of my affiliation with a rival Christian tradition and as a religious studies graduate student at a public university.
Research Posture
Fieldwork is prone to challenge the conventional wisdom, bring nuance to neat theory, and allow for contradictions and partial accounts because it examines religion in its messy and diverse particularity (Becker and Eiesland 1997:19). One goal of this project was to introduce an evangelical megachurch without resorting to the McDonaldization epithets, and more specifically, investigate a megachurch congregation that deliberately differentiates itself from the rigid caricature of the militant, patriarchal, anti-intellectual, right-wing Moral Majority evangelical megachurch, what some have called “the 800 pound gorilla in the voting booth” (Einstein 2007:190; Teel 2008).
Scholars press for a conscientious approach to research on evangelicals, as they have been subject to academic bias that characterizes them as aberrant or duped subjects (Harding 1991;
Bramadat 2000; Bielo 2009). As mentioned earlier, megachurch pastors similarly battle the cynical stereotype of Elmer Gantry, and popular discourse often portrays them as powerful demagogues doomed to scandal and career collapse. I would not feign objectivity, but I did guard myself against
the dismissive attitude towards megachurches and their pastors, as well as the air of moral superiority that surrounds the quick epithets of “McChurch.” I also noticed a mixture of resentment and envy lacing some conversations I had with pastors about my research subject. Others sought a more instrumental approach, querying me for tips that would offer some secret formula for numerical success.
Unlike McCarthy-Brown (1991), Salomonsen (2002), and Moon (2004), whose participation in their host communities involved initiation, submersion, and for Moon, constant confrontation, I kept to a “minimal participation” research ethic that aspired to inconspicuousness. When at Home Church, if I was in line to pray, I prayed. If it was my turn to bring snacks, I brought the food. I learned from the very first Home Church I attended that complete silence on my part was experienced as eerie by others, especially if it was accompanied by scribbling notes to myself. A better approach I came to realize was freely offering bits of myself in discussions as to assuage any uncertainties about my character and purpose. Furthermore, as tempting as it was to use the gathered Home Church as opportunity for focus group-like questions, I restrained myself and observed the twists and turns of the discussion as it wandered where it did. Home Church leaders did not permit recording devices in their Home Churches, so I would scribble the odd note and work backwards from memory
Unlike McCarthy-Brown (1991), Salomonsen (2002), and Moon (2004), whose participation in their host communities involved initiation, submersion, and for Moon, constant confrontation, I kept to a “minimal participation” research ethic that aspired to inconspicuousness. When at Home Church, if I was in line to pray, I prayed. If it was my turn to bring snacks, I brought the food. I learned from the very first Home Church I attended that complete silence on my part was experienced as eerie by others, especially if it was accompanied by scribbling notes to myself. A better approach I came to realize was freely offering bits of myself in discussions as to assuage any uncertainties about my character and purpose. Furthermore, as tempting as it was to use the gathered Home Church as opportunity for focus group-like questions, I restrained myself and observed the twists and turns of the discussion as it wandered where it did. Home Church leaders did not permit recording devices in their Home Churches, so I would scribble the odd note and work backwards from memory