Megachurches: Streaming to a Barn Near You

Despite its size and reach, only one sermon is preached at Eagle Brook each week. It’s preached at the campus Hegseth attended in Lino Lakes, the “broadcast campus” where the service is recorded, produced and livestreamed to all other in-person campuses, as well as its “online campus” (what it calls people tuning in from personal devices) and “viewing groups” and “viewing churches” (what it calls people who gather to watch Eagle Brook content together).

As with many megachurches, Eagle Brook has embraced technology to deliver and amplify its message. Through its savvy use of technology, outsized budget and ability to resonate with viewers, Eagle Brook has expanded beyond its main campuses in the suburbs of Minnesota into rural areas across the Midwest.

Its reach is vast. In an average week in 2024, about 24,000 people attended Eagle Brook locations in-person. An additional 27,000 devices streamed the livecast online.

Who makes up these tens of thousands, and what exactly are they watching?

Lights, camera, ‘Jesus’

As a pastor’s kid who grew up Lutheran, I’m no stranger to church. But as soon as I turned off the highway to Eagle Brook, I realized that it was unlike any church I had ever attended.

Like a sports arena, people in neon yellow vests directed traffic in the massive parking lot. Scores of people filed neatly through the entrances and into the corporate-esque lobby. An armed police officer stood along the back wall, just next to a vending-machine-like “giving kiosk” where people could make financial contributions to the church. That, or they could take out their phones and use Apple Pay on the Eagle Brook mobile app.

A line formed at Eagle Brook’s chain coffee shop, people eager to buy Starbucks-like drinks to bring into worship. The purpose of the coffee shop, according to Eagle Brook Pastor Jon Taylor, is to “give [visitors] a sense of something that’s recognizable.” He tells Barn Raiser the goal is for newcomers to think “I might not understand the music, I might not understand yet what this message means to me, but oh, I understand coffee.” The target audience: the average American who participates in halls of capitalism but not yet in the halls of worship.

Blurring the boundaries between religion and business is not something new, according to Joseph Slaughter, scholar of religion and history and author of Faith in Markets: Christian Capitalism in the Early American Republic (Columbia University Press, 2023). Slaughter’s research has primarily focused on businesses that emulate American Christian entities (see Chick-fil-A), but, as he tells Barn Raiser, it can work the other way too.

Eagle Brook pastors have rejected accusations of the church being business-like. “We are not a corporation, a business or a factory,” Pastor John Alexander preached in a 2015 message. “We are a church. Jesus Christ is our CEO, boss and leader.” Alexander did not, however, reject the premise behind those accusations. “We are unapologetic about growth. We plan for it, anticipate it and go after it.”

Indeed, like many businesses, growth is key for Eagle Brook’s model. The church measures growth in many ways. Its 2024 Annual Report hails growth statistics for the year: Right next to financial contributions and attendance, it boasts 9,509 “decisions to follow Jesus” and 2,772 baptisms. Eagle Brook baptisms—unlike more traditional churches where baptism is an individualized ceremony—are done in batches, either at one of the church’s indoor pools or a designated outdoor space marked by signage akin to a 5k running event. After dunking in the water, participants can pose with Eagle Brook signs that read “I got baptized.”

This genre of baptism is common in evangelical megachurches. In the course of research for her book Red State Christians: A Journey into White Christian Nationalism and the Wreckage It Leaves Behind (Broadleaf Books, 2022), Rev. Angela Denker—Lutheran pastor and journalist—visited Saddleback megachurch in California in 2018 as it celebrated its 50,000th baptism.

At Saddleback, Eagle Brook and other megachurches, the most sacred part of baptism seems to be the statistic.

“It’s like an assembly line,” Denker tells Barn Raiser of her experience. “I think people are really hungry for finding something sacred. Instead we’ve commodified the sacred.”

Walking into the worship space was like walking into a movie theater or concert hall. Multi-colored spotlights illuminated the stage, the rest of the room fading to complete darkness as the service began. The first 20 minutes felt like a rock concert, with a band playing electric guitar and drums, lights flaring and flashing different colors, people lifting up their hands.

Taylor likens the production to “the stained-glass windows of yesteryear.” It’s about creating “an environment for people to experience the kind of awe and wonder of worship,” he says. Eagle Brook’s lighting designers are artists, Taylor says, who use “light to create and bring out emotion and feeling.”

This is exactly the effect it had on Jeremy Freeland, who started attending Eagle Brook in 2017. “I could feel the vibration of the music sitting there, and that just touched me in a way I didn’t expect to happen,” he tells Barn Raiser about his first Eagle Brook experience.

Freeland had been missing this in his prior church experience. He grew up attending a local church in rural Woodville, Wisconsin. He always liked the idea of church—even envisioned himself becoming a pastor when he was younger—but he was disappointed by his early church experiences.

“People are falling asleep in the pew next to you,” Freeland says. “And I just thought, God deserves more than that. [God] deserves us hands up and singing atop our lungs and praising him,” he says.

“When I found Eagle Brook, I was just awake,” Freeland says. “I was like, this is what I envisioned. This is exactly what God deserves.”

The emotion-heightening audiovisual opener sets the stage each week for the main act: the sermon—or, to use the term Eagle Brook prefers—the message.

Messages are reserved for what Eagle Brook calls “teaching pastors:” a cohort of four men entrusted to preach regularly at the church. The most well-known teaching pastor is the Senior Pastor, a position first filled by Bob Merritt. Merritt grew Eagle Brook into the megachurch it is today. When he started in 1991, the church numbered only 300. By the time he retired in 2020, average attendance at any given campus on any given weekend would dwarf the entire town of the tiny church in rural Falun, Wisconsin, where he got his start.

Merritt was preaching when Freeland first attended Eagle Brook’s Woodbury campus. Despite being projected onto a screen in an auditorium with 1,500 seats, Freeland says, “it literally felt like [Merritt] was just standing in front of me having this conversation with me.”

“I didn’t think I would ever get over the loss of Pastor Bob Merritt,” Freeland says about Merritt’s retirement. “He was number one. I had this attachment to him.”

But Freeland has grown fond of Merritt’s successor Jason Strand, who seized the mantle of Senior Pastor just as Covid hit in March of 2020. Strand, 46, grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis but not in church. Christianity came into his life after a college girlfriend dumped him, handed him a tract, and told him he needed Jesus. In 2007, he received his Master of Divinity degree from Bethel University, a private Baptist seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. Soon after, he was hired at Eagle Brook as a teaching pastor.

Strand preached the weekend I visited Eagle Brook. He opened with a story about being approached at the airport by multiple Eagle Brook viewers—first an online viewer, then an attendee at the Brainerd campus—and asked to take a photo. A couple bystanders asked him if he was a famous actor or singer. The attention was a sea change from the church of 800 congregants Strand started at as a youth pastor, where, he joked, “nobody wanted to take selfies with me.”

Just as the line blurred between religion and business, so too did the line between pastor and celebrity. According to Slaughter, celebrity preachers are nothing new. They go as far back as the 19th century, when Henry Ward Beecher, a Congregationalist and abolitionist, became widely regarded as the first American celebrity preacher, paving the way for the famous evangelists of the 21st century (see Billy Graham, Rick Warren, Mark Driscoll). Today, the typical megachurch pastor appears both extraordinary and ordinary—at once a near-celebrity and your average-Joe, preaching to thousands while wearing jeans and sneakers.

This is how Strand appeared at Eagle Brook. In one sense, the magnitude of his platform made him seem larger-than-life, his proclamations endowed with the collective aura of sanctity.

In another, he seemed like a guy you might run into at the grocery store. His style is akin to a motivational speaker’s, using plain language, relatable jokes, and real-life examples to bring his message to life. In the message I watched, he even addressed a hypothetical viewer working in a factory, attempting to step down from his exalted position on-stage to level with a working-class listener.

As I sat in the padded chair of the Eagle Brook auditorium, I watched people creep toward exit doors during the closing prayer, some doing the sign of the cross as they snuck out to beat the traffic like the ninth inning of a baseball game. Others filed out after the service, as quickly as they came in. Quick-in, quick-out, thousands come and go each week to receive the Eagle Brook message at 9 and 11 am.

When I asked Taylor what the worship experience is supposed to feel like for people, he said, “people just feel a sense of safety, and a little bit of anonymity , as they first start coming to a church.”I understood what Pastor Taylor meant by “anonymity”—I glided easily in and out of church without anyone asking who I was. I did feel anonymous at Eagle Brook, at least as a white, straight-passing person that could more or less fit into the Eagle Brook mold.

Whether it’s the anonymity Eagle Brook affords to some newcomers, the relatability and charisma of its senior pastors, the flashy production value of its services, or the familiarly capitalistic feel of its infrastructure, Eagle Brook is drawing people in. And keeping them coming back.

Live from a bar, barn or dead church near you

Eagle Brook is attracting not only folks from the suburbs of Minneapolis, but also folks from rural areas across the Midwest.

“The megachurches are coming for rural America,” says Denker.

Freeland doesn’t live in Woodbury, where he attended Eagle Brook for the first time. He made the 45-minute pilgrimage across the state line from his home in Knapp, Wisconsin, a village of less than 500. He was one of many who commute from rural areas to Eagle Brook for church, according to Taylor. Citing a heat map Eagle Brook uses to track attendance patterns, Taylor says that several Eagle Brook campuses in suburban and exurban areas—namely, its Brainerd, Red Wing, Apple Valley, Anoka campuses—pull a fair amount of folks from surrounding rural areas.

Freeland loves Eagle Brook now, but when his wife first suggested making the trek to the church, Freeland didn’t get it. “I couldn’t figure out why she would travel all the way to Woodbury to go to church,” Freeland remembered thinking at the time. “And there’s a little church in every little town that we go through to get there.”

All the little churches in all the little towns faded in the rearview mirror as the couple drove to Eagle Brook one Sunday morning. Many were likely struggling to keep their doors open, as has been the trend with mainline Protestant churches in recent years.

Strand said as much himself in a 2021 message. “Since Covid, churches in small towns are closing their doors every day,” he preached.

Strand’s answer: more Eagle Brook. “With technology, we can stream an Eagle Brook service into any town in the world,” he says. “All we need for them to have is internet access, a TV and a building to meet in.”

Strand’s vision has come to life in recent years. Especially during and after the Covid-19 pandemic, Eagle Brook has dedicated resources to support what it calls “viewing groups” of people who meet regularly in a shared space to stream Eagle Brook content. Viewing groups have launched across the country—in states as far away as Florida and Arizona—and across the world, with one recently starting in Liberia. At home, viewing groups have broadened Eagle Brook’s access to the rural Midwest.

“They just started seeing this simple model work in so many different places,” says Madison Gulley, an Eagle Brook Pastor designated to support online viewing groups. “Whether they’re in cities or in rural towns—in apartment buildings or barns.” Gulley is referring to a viewing group in a farming community in Hancock, Minnesota, which streams Eagle Brook content from a converted barn. Other rural viewing groups stream Eagle Brook from homes, auto shops and movie theaters.

One even started in a bar. After in-person Eagle Brook services temporarily stopped due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Freeland started a viewing group in the bar he owned in Knapp: Boo’z Bar, the name a play on a childhood nickname for Freeland and slang for alcohol.

On Monday nights, Freeland transformed the bar into a church, clicking the TVs from sports to Eagle Brook services. He didn’t know how it would go at first, fearing that bar regulars might think, as he puts it: “Holy moly, it’s a holy roller that owns that place.”

But the regulars kept coming back. “The people that I would have least expected to show up showed up,” says Freeland—people he had only seen drinking at his bar, not talking about church or God.

“The next thing you know, you’re sharing this building and message and people’s arms are in the air praising and it’s like, holy moly, these are not the normal people that we see on Saturday night drinking it up,” Freeland says. Folks kept flocking to Boo’z Bar on Monday nights, so much so that the crowd started to outnumber the available barstools.

Then a church down the street went up for sale. Just two doors down from Boo’z Bar, Gospel Mission Baptist Church closed its doors for good after a long battle to get people through them. The old church had struggled with attendance even before the pandemic; after Covid, it was left with only two members.

“They just couldn’t do it anymore,” says Freeland.

A crowded bar and an empty church before him, Freeland seized the opportunity. He bought the church, renamed it ForGiven Church, and started streaming Eagle Brook services into the sanctuary in 2022. The bar crowd migrated from Boo’z on Monday nights to ForGiven on Sunday mornings to watch Eagle Brook services.

The church’s pews aren’t empty anymore—Freeland estimates average attendance at 35 people, up to 70 on busy Sundays. The people who come are mostly from the Knapp community or close-by.

ForGiven is not the only rural church to stream Eagle Brook services. A handful of churches have started outsourcing their worship material to Eagle Brook, often due to the difficulty of maintaining attendance and a full-time pastor in rural areas. Eagle Brook calls them “viewing churches.” They use the buildings and sometimes the staff of the churches they inhabit. “The only difference in their service is that they stream Eagle Brook services,” says Gulley.

Gulley says viewing groups and viewing churches can “bring unity” among people with different faith backgrounds—“especially in small towns, where there’s maybe one or two denominations that have a really strong presence.”

The emergence of Eagle Brook in rural areas is reminiscent of a trend that Slaughter calls the “Walmart effect.” Like when a Walmart opens up in a small town and local businesses die out, “a new splashy, trendy, medium-sized church or megachurch model can sap congregants from otherwise similarly conservative churches where the vibe is more traditional, stodgy and less contemporary.”

Gulley and Freeland both talk about how Eagle Brook viewing groups have cultivated a sense of community that they had been missing since the Covid-19 pandemic. But as Eagle Brook expands into the rural Midwest—sometimes into the carcasses of old local churches—it’s worth considering what is lost in the process.

Local churches have historically served as bedrock institutions of many rural communities. More than preaching a sermon each week, local pastors provide one-on-one pastoral care, facilitate hospital visits and funerals and connect parishioners with resources.

“In smaller communities, you may not have a psychologist or a psychiatrist, but may you have a local pastor,” says Denker, who has researched rural churches extensively. “I find there is a network of connections among small town pastors. When that network falls apart, you lose those community resources.”

Worse, Denker says, “you end up with people seeking care on the Internet, which leads them down into these rabbit holes of radicalization and hate.”

Eagle Brook is filling a ministry void for rural Midwesterners that was once filled by members of their community. Instead of hearing a sermon from a local pastor each week—someone who knows the community, has a pulse on what matters to them—they are watching a pastor they may have never met, way off in a Minneapolis suburb they may have never been to. With messages designed to be both universal and personal enough to resonate with tens of thousands, Eagle Brook cultivates a false feeling of closeness with viewers, blurring the lines between community and content.

Lost in the process is connection to community resources, community-led ministry and the ability to know and be known by your pastor.

Crusade of ‘the good guys’

As Eagle Brook continues to be streamed into more and more rural spaces, it’s also expanding its cultural and theological crusade into those spaces.

I listened to dozens of Eagle Brook messages dating back to 2015, which are available on audio streaming platforms. Packaged neatly into attention-grabbing graphics and titles, the messages’ substance range from banal self-help advice about lowering screen time and improving finances to heavier topics like “Sexual Sin” and “Are we living in the end times?”

Some messages promote forgiveness for one’s self, friends and family members. Some messages promote compassion for people struggling with addiction.

Others, I found, stoke fear toward groups of people who do not conform to the Eagle Brook ideal.

One such group is non-Christians. Strand and other Eagle Brook pastors have dedicated entire messages claiming to debunk other religions, usually dedicating extra time to Islam and other religions that do not enjoy a privileged status in the United States. They don’t preach outright hatred or violence toward non-Christians, just patronizingly suggest that their creed is less-than. “Are all religions created equal?” Strand asked rhetorically in a 2021 message. “No,” he answered, “because Jesus Christ is equal to no one.”

Another group is people who do not identify as heterosexual or do not conform to binary gender expressions of male or female. Strand routinely pathologizes such people in his messages, veiling his anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments as “objective” biblical truth. In a series of 2022 messages on gender and sexuality, Strand adopted a hands-up, “I don’t make the rules” tone while urging gay people to consider celibacy and gender-expansive people to resist succumbing to what he argued was a sinful cultural fad.

And though Eagle Brook’s predominantly white pastors have preached to its predominantly white viewership about the importance of so-called “racial unity,” its messages are at best uncritical and at worst complicit in systems of white supremacy in America.

In May of 2015, a month after the police murder of Freddie Gray and a year after the police murder of Michael Brown, Strand preached about the persistence of evil in human history. But instead of condemning the anti-Black police violence that killed Brown and Gray—whose names he didn’t mention at all—Strand condemned the protests that erupted as a result: “For all of our so-called progression, we still have riots in Ferguson and Baltimore.”

Similarly, in a 2021 message, the year after Minneapolis residents hit the streets en masse to protest the anti-Black police murder of George Floyd, Strand compared Minneapolis to the biblical depiction of Nineveh as a city laden with crime and unrest. He expressed a need to expand Eagle Brook’s influence into Minneapolis and other urban areas where he said there is “spiritual darkness.”It seemed to me Strand wasn’t only talking about spiritual darkness here.

The norms are clear. The lines are drawn in the sand.

“They’re watching a message where they’re always the good guys,” says Denker. “Where the white, suburban, middle-class Christian watching it is always on the right side.”

Not only are they watching a message where they are always the “good guys,” but they’re watching a message where the “good guys” are under attack.

Strand routinely evokes biblical battles between righteousness and evil when preaching that conservative Christian values are marginalized in modern culture. Not just the values, but the people themselves.

“Around the world today, more Christians are losing their lives than at any other point in human history. And it happens within our borders as well,” Strand preached in a 2017 message. This marginalization makes the church’s proselytizing mission necessary. “[Eagle Brook] will always be the church that goes after one more person,” Strand preached in a 2021 message. “One more in Duluth, one more in Fargo, one more in Minneapolis, one more to the ends of the Earth.”

Eagle Brook claims to be entirely non-partisan: “I’m a pastor, not a politician,” Strand preached in one sermon prefacing an anti-abortion message. But much of its core ethos aligns with those on the Christian right, including former attendee Hegseth. Hegseth’s 2020 book American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free, as the title implies, is a battle cry for Christianity to save America from the “isms” that Hegseth identifies as its biggest threats in the chapters therein: namely, leftism, genderism, socialism, secularism, multiculturalism and Islamism.

This battle cry is best articulated in mega-sized venues not unlike Eagle Brook. Hegseth recalls a Billy Graham megaservice he attended as a teenager, describing it as “an American Crusade if I’ve ever seen one.” To Hegseth, the size of the crowd was more spiritual than the message. “I don’t remember the sermon, but the scene was that of an evangelical Trump rally.”

These days, Hegseth’s interests seem to have gravitated to the likes of Doug Wilson, the pastor of Christ Church (part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches Wilson founded in the 1990s) in Moscow, Idaho. Wilson fervently advocates for Christian patriarchy and theocracy throughout all levels of society. In recent years he has been accused by several former members of Christ Church for allegedly mishandling or downplaying cases of sexual assault, marital violence and child abuse in the community. On August 7, Hegseth reposted on his X account a CNN segment on Doug Wilson’s “Crusade for Christian Domination in the Age of Trump,” which featured Wilson and other pastors saying women should no longer be allowed to vote. “All of Christ for All of Life,” Hegseth wrote in his post.

“Crusades work,” Hegseth writes in his book, “because they don’t just explain—they proclaim.”

From an Eagle Brook service to a Trump rally, proclaiming seems to be working with white American Christians right now: proclaiming conservative Christian values to mega-sized audiences, proclaiming lines drawn in the sand, proclaiming an “us vs. them” mentality. All this proclaiming serves to validate the identities of white American Christians as they are, thereby excusing them from reckoning with their privilege, contemplating nuance or working to understand those different from them.

In her book Disciples of White Jesus: The Radicalization of American Boyhood (Broadleaf Books, 2025), Denker writes that we are experiencing a cultural renaissance in which many are reexamining America’s violent and racist history and broadening conceptions of gender and sexuality. This has provoked a backlash. She writes, “You can see how someone offering certainty might seem compelling, like a life raft in the midst of a swirling sea.”

Perhaps this is what Eagle Brook offers the tens of thousands of white Christians who each Sunday tune into the “broadcast campus”—a life raft of certainty amidst a sea of change. And as Eagle Brook continues its technological expansion across the Midwest, people cling on.

Betsy FroilandMore by this author →

Betsy Froiland is a Minneapolis-based freelance writer. Her work focuses on rural faith communities and is featured in the Daily Yonder.