Geoffrey Lentz Reviews: Megabelt by Nick May

Megabelt is the title of a new book written by Nick May.  He says that the title came from a blend of “Mega-church” with “Bible-belt”, but eventually the neologism developed its own identity.   The book is a fictional account of a young man growing up in the evangelical subculture of the Deep South (the Bible-belt).  Fictional it may be, but it is the story of my life and the lives of many of the people I grew up with.

The book is filled with sarcasm and irony as it critiques old-fashion Southern churches and new Mega-churches, alike.  For those familiar with this subculture, the book will be hilarious.  It pokes fun at the phenomena of terribly written church signs, tells story from the emotional high of summer camp, and opens up a world where a displaying a church bulletin saves you 10% at restaurants on Sunday.

I had a brief opportunity to interview Nick last Saturday.  My first question to Nick was ‘what did your parents say(his parents were my youth directors in middle-school)’.  He said that they had been supportive of his effort and had actually been able to step back a laugh a little.  There will be some that upon reading this book will be insulted and think that May has gone too far and is hurting the church, but I think most “belters” will find it humorous.

May explained to me that his motivation for writing such a book was not out of some deep pain or hurtful place.  All in all, his experience in the ‘mega-belt’ was positive.  But through his life experience and his journey through college he has been able to step out of the bubble of the “belt” and see a Christian sub-culture that has shaped his life.

I found the afterword of the book written by Jon Morris helpful.  He states:

I finally saw that in the place I had grown up, Christianity was really just another social byproduct, one as natural as sweet tea and backyard barbeques.  I realized that, in some ways, the bible-belt had cheapened the teaching of Jesus to just another set of moral values, just another pledge to tradition.  Religious devotion and church membership had merely become flaky substitutes for the revolutionary movement Christianity was marked by at its outset.

Referring to St. Paul’s exhortation to not be conformed to the patterns of the work but to be transformed, he goes on to say:

What if this pattern of the world, the very pattern which Christians are called to resist, were a pattern of religion itself?  What if the world in question were one in which the majority claimed to be Christian?

In short, Megabelt is not about attacking the church, but trying to find a more faithful way of being the church God has called us to be.  It represents one fictional case study from the emerging church.  Nick May presents not an end to the evangelical church, but instead its future-a new reformation of faithfulness.