Josh Howerton is a megachurch pastor at Lakepointe Church in Texas. He is a massive squish who bends to the cultural ties. Consequently, he has built a megachurch. Unsurprisingly, this megachurch has a massive fornication problem with numerous couples living together without marriage, let alone before. However, Howerton hatched a creative solution to remedy this sin by encouraging these couples to get married and holding a mass wedding.
52 couples volunteered for the occasion and got married in megachurch fashion, and the internet had a lot to say about it.
The pictures show that the audience of those who choose to get married skews much older than you would think. Most of these couples skew Gen X, and there are even boomers in the mix.
Megachurches often pull in MCU enjoying normies and give spiritual infants milk. But the older skewing fornicators are not instances of shaking up to pool resources together to get through college and early career, or those who “accidentally” had kids together. It’s an older crowd that should know better but is trying to do right. Perhaps they show more wisdom than the youth who resist the urge to get married.
This is also somewhat an indictment on Josh Howerton who let rampant fornication get this far and go unanswered in his church. Statistically, these 54 couples who answered the marriage altar call are likely the minority of cohabitating couples in Howerton’s congregation.
Josh Howerton’s idea perhaps should be implemented by copycat megachurches, as these people would be better off getting married or splitting entirely than in their current state, as 1 Corinthians 7 loosely advises us on this current mass predicament. However, this idea does not look as though it appeals to young couples.Â
3 Responses
Were these weddings only a church ceremony, unreported to the state of Texas, or were they intended to also be legal in the eyes of civil law?
If church-only, that seems a good solution to the problem of some states wanting to compel pastors to perform gay or other non-traditional weddings. Everyone who wants to be married in the eyes of the law does so in a civil ceremony, and only those whose marriage is approved by the church also have a religious ceremony via the church.
Neither Christian tradition, nor Scripture, create a separation between a spiritual and civil marriage.
@Ray True, the thing that got my evangelical pastors really upset was my courthouse wedding, which I consider more biblical than a “church wedding”.
The church wedding was invented by the RCC about 1200 years after the fact, and mostly stuck around because that happened before reformation.