Across the nation there are hundreds of thousands of religious congregations and as

Lisa de Jardin reports some of the biggest known as mega churches are facing challenges

as the culture around organized religion changes.

Woven into the U.S. political conversation is another discussion about religion and its role in the country.

A rising force has been mega churches, Christian congregations with 2,000

worshippers or more. While there are fewer than 2,000 of those mega churches,

a fraction of churches overall, they are so large that they draw nearly 7 million

Americans on average. They grow even as Americans overall become less

religious. Recently though mega churches have also been in the spotlight for the

resignations of two high-profile pastors. To look at this more deeply, I'm joined by

Scott Thama, a professor of sociology of religion at Hartford International University.

Scott, first of all, how much have mega churches grown,

especially relative to other churches since the pandemic?

Well, they certainly took a significant hit, probably even more so than other congregations during the pandemic, but they are very attractional and consequently many people flock to them because they had all of the

amenities that people were looking for in a congregation.

They had robust Sunday school programs, youth programs,

and exciting worship.

And so consequently, they've drawn in a lot of folks when other churches haven't.

Now in terms of what we've heard about these two pastors, the two that we're talking

about are Tony Evans who said he committed a sin but he didn't specify what that was as he resigned.

The other is a pastor named Robert Morris.

He's also someone who's worked with former President Trump as an advisor to him.

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