Photographer Joe Johnson’s series Megachurches takes us down the aisles, inside the sanctuaries, and behind the scenes of jumbo-sized places of worship. Taken while the churches are not in daily use, Johnson’s photographs focus on both the mammoth interior space and the churches’ details — stage design, audio-visual systems, lighting, and convention hall seating — that make the facilities tick.

It is estimated the number of megachurches in North America has risen from only 50 in 1980 to over 1,800 today. Johnson’s interest in them began when he visited his mother in North Carolina and accompanied her to a mega service. He wanted to experience contemporary evangelical life.

“It was an admittedly voyeuristic impulse to watch what happens live,” says Johnson. “I was stunned by how sensorial the spectacle had been. There was a highly produced aural and visual sophistication being brought to the act of worship.”

Megachurches have recently been in the news. Last month, in Southern California, the congregation of the Crystal Cathedral Ministries celebrated its final service within the Crystal Cathedral, the infamous Philip Johnson-designed megachurch. Crystal Cathedral Ministries, which pioneered the megachurch phenomenon, was forced to move out of its super-modern home after financial woe, some scandal, and a 2011 bankruptcy filing. The purchase of the Cathedral by the Catholic diocese of Orange for $57 million means worship will continue in the glass-facade superstructure. Different denomination, same God.

Despite Crystal Cathedral Ministries’ public fall from grace, other denominations that use the megachurch formula are booming across America. According to the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, the main body to report on worship behavior, megachurches are “one of the most robust religious organizational expressions within North America.”

Shortly after Johnson’s first taste of the megachurch experience, he moved from Boston to the Midwest, where he was surrounded by them. He has photographed in North Carolina, Missouri, Illinois, Kansas, Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, Iowa, and as far west as Colorado. The venues have developed far and wide, anywhere “with money and the population can sustain a mega church,” he says.

Johnson has observed that there is more going on in megachurches than prayer. Serving multiple functions, megachurches are “places where entertainment, doctrine, and politics converge,” he says. “The subject was visual, complicated, topical, and I had to make work about it.”

Corporate management guru Peter Drucker once described the rise of the corporation and the emergence of the megachurch as “the most significant sociological phenomenons of the 20th century,” remarking that the megachurch is “the only organization that is actually working in our society.”

While the demise of Crystal Cathedral Ministries is a strike against the claim, Drucker was correct in observing the extraordinary growth of mass-choreographed worship. Dozens of different Protestant denominations operate megachurch services, which are defined as those having 2,000 or more attendees each Sunday. Of the 56 million church-going Protestants, 6 million attend a megachurch each Sunday. It’s worth noting that megachurches represent a shift in worship-styles but not an increase in absolute numbers of Americans praising the lord. The number of Americans who express no religious preference has quadrupled since 1991, to 14 percent. Despite the megachurch explosion, total church attendance has remained fairly even.

The churches Johnson visited were open and welcoming, and access was easy. Occasionally, he receive a chaperone and only in the largest institutions did interactions become “business-like” to the extent that Johnson would have to allay legal liability concerns. In those cases, Johnson politely answered questions and offered to send along scans of the photographs he made.

“Church administrators are much more of a pleasure to work with than security guards,” says Johnson. “Most often someone would turn the lights on and leave me to it.”

Frequently led by charismatic “pastorpreneurs,” megachurches are often likened to corporations. MBA degrees are as relevant as ordination when it comes to managing the large scale outreach and communication operations of big congregations. Megachurches have often been criticized for adopting corporate-style market research and advertising campaigns to attract new worshipper-customers, but much of that could simply be seen as providing a better customer-service experience. Instead of wooden benches and drafty naves of old chapels, megachurches boast convenient parking, coffee shops, restaurants, bookstores, childcare, and a host of other familiar needs typical of our service economy. These conveniences are snagging worshippers from smaller churches and attracting people who didn’t attend service with any regularity in the past.

“Megachurches seem to be about being everything for everyone,” suggests Johnson. “Like a Wal-Mart or a Swiss Army knife, it’s about how many of my needs can be met in one place.” Which bleeds over into the content of the sermons as well. He noticed contemporary concerns covered by the pastor at his mother’s North Carolina megachurch in addition to more traditional decoding of scripture into life lessons. U.S.-Israeli policy, free markets, regulation, and whatever Christopher Hitchens’s new book was at the time, were all part of Sunday service.

Critiquing faith or presenting some form of exposé is not Johnson’s intent. “Megachurch” is an umbrella term that refers to size, and while there are common factors among them (very active seven-day-a-week congregational community, complex organizational structure, more affluent attendees, televised services), the sermons and messages are unique to each church.

“I regret that I approached the project with a bundle of assumptions. My attitudes softened with respect to the congregations,” he says. “The megachurch designation is one of scale, not necessarily one of message. I was never interested in a critique of faith itself. This work was motivated by questions I had about the faith industry,” says Johnson who tried to be neutral by balancing wide shots with details.

“I’ve tried to provide varied propositions for how one might think about the subject,” he says. “Some pictures deal with the subject’s physical scale, while others may revel in a sort of seductive materiality of particular objects. The work runs the gamut of a critical — at times snotty — deadpan sensibility to moments of earnest wonder.”

All images: Joe Johnson