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The popularity of any one individual Evangelical Church or congregation is 100% dependent on the personality of the Pastor. These "Bible Churches" lose or gain members based on how popular or unpopular the Pastor and his personality rate with members. They also share the flaw of many reformist churches and that is that the Bible is the infallible word of God, written by God. It's interesting that in the Orthodox Catholic and Roman Catholic Churches the Bible is not the center piece of those respective churches. The Gospel is read at Liturgy and Masses, and it is the word of God and unquestioned by those that practice the faith. But Bible study has never been a strong part of either Catholic faction. The reason is quite simple, under pressure from Emperor Constantine the church was ordered to compile the story of Jesus and his message in a book that was to be the basis of understanding of the Christian Religion. There was never universal agreement as to what ‘stories’ made the book and which were rejected. The Bible is at best a compromise with good intention to portray Christian beliefs and the message of Christ. It was also intended to define and set the power of a manmade power base of ‘Organized Religion’. I believe in the Bible as a guide as to how to lead my life, but the message is only reveled when the entire content of the Bible is used to reach decisions, not just one passage or line. Even prior to the written Bible Saul (St Paul) decided that to grow converts to Christianity it was not helping the cause if converts first had to become converts to Judaism. Christ was a practicing Jew; the path to Christianity is a progression through Judaism. Not many grown men were keen to be circumcised to have to convert. So Saul did away with over 800 Jewish laws to make it easier to convert pagans to Christianity. In Leviticus he keeps the passage that dealt with “a man lying with a man”, but did away with not eating shellfish or pork. The point is that all organized religion is flawed, and to base everything without question on the Bible, written by man, can lead to conflicts of God’s true intentions on how we should live. Evangelicals seem to have more hate that love for the fellow man than any other Christian religion. They also seem to place more on intentions rather than results, and maybe that explains the popularity of this religion. Compare the core of Evangelical beliefs to the Sermon on the Mount, seems to me that the is a disconnect between the Evangelicals and the tenets of the Sermon on the Mount.
