The Politics of Steven Furtick's Hairline, pt. 2
I went to Elevation Church (again)
This post is the second part of a series reporting on some visits I made to Elevation Church, a massive Charlotte-based megachurch. For part one, click here. For part three, click here.
You can hear the Elevation Uptown campus—which is actually in Enderly Park—before you can see it.
I thought, as I walked up, that the scene is the reverse of Joshua and Jericho. The land and the walls have already changed hands. Every seven days, folks set up inside and blare their speaker horns to announce their presence far and wide. One block up is a fresh hole in the earth, where a small older house has come tumbling down and two big new ones are now rising in its place. We still live inside ancient conquest narratives.
I’m not the only one in the building thinking about conquest stories as the source of metaphors to interpret the day. The first song of the service proclaimed that God is “taking over like it’s Jericho.” It used the repeated refrain, “You’ve never lost a battle.”
One singer, speaking in a moment of transition between songs, reminded the congregation that “we serve a God who’s undefeated.”
Then another singer led a song with the lyric, “our God is fighting for us always.” She was wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with the words “US Army.”
To understand this scene, you should know a little about Enderly Park, where it is all happening. Two miles west of Uptown Charlotte (uptown here is what most places would call downtown), Enderly Park is comprised of several adjacent neighborhoods that grew up beginning in the mid-1920s as a white, middle-class areas. In the mid-1960s, the several thousand residents here began moving their homes and their institutions, including their churches to the suburbs.1 They were motivated by changing cultural norms that made suburban areas six or eight or ten miles from the city center more desirable than denser urban areas. Even Lucy and Ricky had moved to the ’burbs, leaving behind their New York City apartment for a single-family home in Connecticut.
White people leaving Enderly Park were also motivated by the massive subsidies that governments at every level were dumping into the suburbs. Planning policy, infrastructure choices, highway construction, accelerated depreciation, and so on all made construction into farther and farther stretches of countryside artificially cheap. Neighborhoods close to the centers of cities were beginning to face years of subsidized neglect, while tax dollars financed The Dream for those who could chase it to the edge of town.
And, who moved were also motivated by racism at both interpersonal and structural levels. The city of Charlotte was destroying Black neighborhoods in five separate Urban Renewal projects, and large portions of those displaced were moving to west Charlotte. White folks left quickly from fear and because of perceived financial incentives—in a racist society, Black neighborhoods are undervalued simply because Black people live there. By the early 1980s, Enderly Park was largely a Black neighborhood. It has remained that way until recently. The trajectory is reversing. Housing prices are way up2 and the exodus of neighbors from the area—most of them poor, all of them Black—is underway.
To understand this scene, you should know a little about Elevation Church:
· Founded in 2006 by a group sent out from Christ Covenant Church in Shelby, NC.
· Among the founders were Steven and Holly Furtick. Steven’s title at the church is now Lead Pastor. Holly is part of the pastoral staff as well, though her title is unclear.
· Elevation’s growth was explosive, from 121 at their inaugural service in 2006, to 22,036 one decade later, making it one of the fastest-growing churches in the United States.3 Reports cite current weekly attendance at more than 26,000.
· The church now has nineteen campuses across North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Virginia, and Ontario. Of those, it owns at least eight campuses with cumulative tax-assessed value over $81 million.4
· The church and Furtick are lightning rods for critiques of evangelical megachurches. Early on, he seemed to invite critique and to relish fighting back. Now Furtick and the church seem to ignore it altogether.5
So that’s the context in which I was standing on an October Sunday morning, while the young woman in the US Army sweatshirt was praying and encouraging us to sit down as the preacher came to join us. And then, by hologram, Holly Furtick appeared.6
I’d tell you what the sermon was about, but, like Steven’s sermon from a couple weeks prior, I’m not entirely sure. (You can watch them if you want: Holly. Steven. YouTube has a helpful playback speed setting, so you can watch in double time.) Both of those sermons were a bit like horoscopes to my ears. They were intentionally vague so that listeners could hear what they needed—or wanted—to hear. They avoided any serious engagement with scripture or with the world we collectively inhabit. I think this is common in prosperity-adjacent preaching, though I’m not sure because I avoid those preachers. I don’t find sidestepping the Bible to be a helpful homiletical strategy.
Clearly, I’m skeptical of the Furtick preachers and their skill in interpreting Scripture texts. But bad theology still has a hermeneutic at work. You could see it in Pastor Holly’s sermon. She drew from Acts 1 (the text comes about 12 minutes into the sermon). In the text, the disciples are trying to figure out what comes next in the aftermath of Jesus’ death and resurrection. They ask, “Jesus, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6) They are asking about the politics of Jesus, and they receive an answer that re-orients them to the kind of political power Jesus is offering. “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses…” he says (v. 8). By the time we reached the reading of the scripture, Pastor Holly had spent twelve minutes preparing us to hear the disciples’ question as a childish one. They were asking about the meaning of Jesus’ execution and resurrection in occupied territory. In Pastor Holly’s reading, their question was silly—Jesus wanted them to have, well, Jesus. But that’s not what Jesus says. He says they will have power.
Later, around 26 minutes in, she did a similar thing. She rightly identified the discontent that humans feel with the difficult material questions of our lives. That’s exactly what the disciples were asking about in Acts 1. But her response sidestepped Jesus’ counsel—and the testimony of the book of Acts—that what follows such questions are confrontations with empire through the expressions of the unusual powers and convictions that communities gathered around Jesus have. Instead, her counsel was to be a good imperial subject. Go back to your job or your neighborhood or the places of your righteous discontent. Go back there, she said, and wait. Hold your questions, rather than engaging the struggle for the world God dreams of.
The strangest bit of homiletical malpractice started around minute 33, where she recounted from Matthew 11 an encounter between Jesus and John the Baptist. John, at that time, is a political prisoner soon to have his head chopped off. Through his followers, he asks of Jesus, “are you the one who is to come?” Which is a political question. Jesus responds with a political diatribe that goes on through the end of the chapter. He lampoons the royalty, proclaims liberation for the poor, and reproaches the cities (which is to say, centers of power) that have rejected him. But Pastor Holly continued with the horoscope bit. Somehow the text is about asking questions about nothing in particular.
You could call it a “hermeneutic of distraction.” The scriptures read those mornings I visited Elevation were about the political, economic, and spiritual challenges of ancient Israel in a time of wandering and uncertainty, or of Palestinian Jews facing Roman occupation and uncertain how to reckon with the life of Jesus. The song lyrics sometimes referenced biblical stories and images of communal struggles for place and purpose, for stability rather than precarity. But the song lyrics mapped those struggles onto individual human hearts. The preaching trivialized real, burning questions, and replaced them with, in Dr. King’s words, “pious irrelevancies.”
And here’s the crux of the matter: at Elevation Uptown, everything I have described is taking place precisely in the middle of an ongoing battle over space and place. The community just outside the warehouse/sanctuary doors is in the middle of a political, economic, and spiritual struggle to hold some ground so that poor people, especially poor Black people, can try to develop a place to thrive. Elevation Church has a direct response to that struggle. They are building a $100 million real estate portfolio, under the leadership of a white guy trying to look racially ambiguous, behind the banner of their God who is “fighting for them always.” Their God has little to say, in their auditoriums, about the social order in which they live. It does not benefit the winners of history to talk about their conquests while they are still ongoing, only later, when the resistance has disappeared and the disinherited have had to move on elsewhere.
That’s the story of my visit to Elevation Uptown, which is definitely not uptown, and the name is definitely not an accident, which I’ll pick up next time in part three of this series.
[My thanks to Jeremy Markovich for the assistance with some of the backstory on Elevation. Jeremy publishes one of my favorite Substacks, North Carolina Rabbit Hole.]
News on Our Trespasses: Publication is now just three months away, which means it is time to start booking talks, readings, and podcast appearances. If your church, Rotary Club, local bookstore, or top-secret fraternal organization is interested, I’m ready to travel.
Don’t forget to pre-order soon. Pre-orders are great for authors and publishers. Not to mention that if you order now, the book will magically appear in a few months, after you’ve forgotten about ordering it. It will be a little gift for yourself. You can order it from any bookseller, or use this button for a personalized copy from Park Road Books:
One last note: I always leave you with a little music here, usually something that I’ve recently discovered. Here’s something I heard by way of my friend Armando Bellmas. It’s James Brandon Lewis, a tenor sax player whose work you might associate with the term “free jazz.” The album is a fresh take on Mahalia Jackson, the important gospel singer who played a significant role in Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
Next time: Steven Furtick responds to the haters. Plus, part three, on naming and re-naming.
Here’s a bit more on white flight from Enderly Park:
One example: in 2018, QC Family Tree purchased a house that appraised for about $120,000. We recently had to have another appraisal done to refinance the balance on the loan. The current market value is about $337,000. That’s a ridiculous change of 281% in just five years.
See, e.g, “Elevation’s report shows growth, omits key details” in Charlotte Observer, March 27, 2017.
Tax assessed values often lag far behind market values, so $81 million is probably a low-end estimate.
The world of megachurches is full of practices that might raise of few eyebrows. Here are some past news items about Elevation: “spontaneous” baptisms, methods for getting preacher books on the NYT Bestseller list, the extravagant mansion, having your salary set by a secret board of your friends who are also megachurch pastors, and the blueprint for building a megachurch, which includes an extra-weird first paragraph.
At this point, Furtick seems to have learned the old line that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Look: I’m giving them some very small amount here. I’m aware of that, and I’m also aware that you wouldn’t read a series about your local regular old church pastor’s hairline.
It wasn’t hologram, just a simulcast video. But you wouldn’t be surprised if it was a hologram, would you?