Ben Myers re-posted his piece on mega churches, together with a response from Shane Clifton. It's not a for-and-against defensive argument, but an illuminating conversation about the different aspects of mega church pentecostalism. No church is perfect, and every church-goer decides at some point what elements of church really matter to them, and which bits of bad stuff they are prepared to put up with.

Ben writes about various aspects of his visit to Hillsong – the welcome, the venue, the atmosphere, the inspiring but bizarrely heretical sermon ( “Why are you trying to help
people like that when even God can’t help them?”, and “The Bible isn’t a book about God’s love for man; it’s
a book about man’s love for God.”) But his most interesting observations concerned the dominance of the screen as mediator (reminding me of Dante's hatred of bankers, not because of anything to do with money, but because anything that is mediatory is one step of separation between god and peole, or people from one another). Ben says:

Every moment of the service, from start to finish, was broadcast on to
huge screens around the auditorium. When the pastor spoke, he would
address one of the many cameras. When the worship-leader spoke to the
congregation, he would speak into the camera. Even the heartfelt altar
call at the end of the service was addressed to the camera. During the
worship songs, the screens would be filled with the faces of those
gorgeously happy singers and musicians; then a camera would pan across
the crowd of raised hands before cutting back to a shot of the
worship-leader’s face, full of adoration and passionate sincerity.

What
made this so interesting was that the songs’ lyrics were also
superimposed over these images; so if you wanted to join in singing,
you had no choice but to turn your face away from the altar (if there had been an altar), away
from the congregation, even away from the flesh-and-blood performers on
stage. In short, participation in worship was possible only through the
mediation of the screen. The entire worship service was
orchestrated primarily as an event of the screen, so that one could
take part only by turning towards the screen and participating in its
projected images of worship.

The Protestant reformers used to
complain that the Roman Catholic priest was “doing worship” for the
whole congregation, standing in their place and performing everything
on their behalf – and a similar complaint is often made about today’s
Pentecostal megachurches. But I think the function of the screen raises
a much more interesting problem: not merely that the congregation is
worshipping vicariously through the onstage performers, but that the
entire worship event is actually taking place onscreen.

At this morning’s service, even the worship leader himself was not a direct participant in the worship event – the real worshipping subject was his onscreen image.
The flesh-and-blood performer participates in this worship only
indirectly, through a vicarious participation in his own projected
image – a larger-than-life image which becomes the bearer of
transcendence. Similarly, the congregation is involved in worship only
vicariously, through the mediation of the screen. This is an instance
in which the screen comes to possess more ontological depth than the
flesh-and-blood world itself; the projected image becomes “more real”
than reality. 

The whole post is here, followed by Shane's reply here. It's a good read.