The Catholic Church should pay close attention to the successes of the evangelical megachurches, said Thomas Reese, senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University.
Because there is an overall decline in the number of its priests, the Catholic Church will probably need to adopt something like the megachurch model, at least regarding size, said Reese, an author who has written about the organization and politics of the Catholic Church.
It would not weaken the Catholic message to adopt some of the techniques used by megachurches, Reese said.
'If the Catholic Church wants people to come and stay, we need good music, good preaching and programs for kids. That’s what the megachurches do,’ he said.
Reese sees no reason to tinker with basic theology, however.
'I think their (megachurches’) theology is very weak,’ Reese said. 'The Gospel is much more challenging with its concerns for the poor and the oppressed. We don’t want to adopt “Gospel lite.”
'The Catholic Church is like the old IBM, a lazy monopoly. Before, if you wanted salvation in Latin America, you had to go to the Catholic Church. Now there is an alternative. In lots of small towns and villages in Latin America, there is no priest. So the evangelicals come in, find a good man in the village, convert him to their version of Christianity, give him three months of study and send him back to the village and start an evangelical church. We say that you need years and years of training. Well, you know, we’ve got a shortage of priests and they don’t.’