size – Protestia

Venue Church used to be among the fastest-growing churches in the nation, topping 1500 people spread across four services and two locations. Then the pastor and senior leader, Tavner Smith, cheated on his wife, divorced her, and subsequently had an illicit affair with his worship leader/ personal assistant, resulting in a mass exodus of staff and congregants.

How bad is it? Based on a video from their church service yesterday, attendance is down an estimated 95%. While the church’s YouTube channel is careful only to show Taver preaching, whoever controlled the stream made a rare misstep and shared the church sanctuary before the service, revealing how bare and stark it is. There are huge gaps between the chairs, between the rows, and the center aisle is practically a chasm, with scarcely two dozen people.

This video is only a couple of minutes before their Sept 18 service started. It's a ghost town. pic.twitter.com/rTgkS8pHXI
— Protestia Videos (@ProtestiaVids) September 19, 2022

With the church hemorrhaging money, owing creditors at least 130k, having no cash reserves, and defaulting on their rent for months, they declared bankruptcy several weeks ago in an attempt to hang on to their building at least, which was vision-casted by Smith in happier times.

This is unlikely to happen. Another thriving church, Rockpointe, is looking to expand, announcing to their congregation that they are still seeking to purchase the property and take it over, working with banks, lawyers, and real estate agents to pry the facilities out of the cold, begrudging hands of the disgraced pastor who has no path forward other than to sell.

A Tulsa-based megachurch has publicly claimed that an estimated 75,000 people have been saved at their church services in the last 18 months, but where have all these new converts gone, and why isn’t this body any bigger?

Pastor Michael Todd leads Transformation Church. He is known for crowd surfing during his church’s worship service and spending a lot of money. In the last two years, he’s given away $3,500,000 in houses, cash, and cars, spent $65,000 to buy 168 pairs of shoes, gave $600,000 in “reparations,” and purchased $66,000,000 in real estate.

He’s also known for frequently appearing on Preachers n Sneakers Instagram account for wearing insanely expensive clothing, preaching sermons in a shirt featuring his wife in a bathing suit, preaching some good old-fashioned modalism, and for giving the world perhaps the grossest illustration in church after he snorted and then hocked a loogie full of spit and snot into his hand and rubbed it in another man’s face.

During a year in review posted on Instagram on December 28, 2021, Transformation Church claimed that “46,348 people have given their lives to Jesus at Transformation Church this year! THIS CAN ONLY BE GOD!” They also claim at least 27,525 baptisms in the month of May.

These are unbelievable numbers, given that at the end of the year, the church had only around 5000 members, according to his Amazon profile.

In the first three months of 2022, Transformation Church says that another 10,456 people have “given their lives to Jesus at Transformation Church this year,” averaging 3500 a month. Another four months have passed since then, if they’re keeping the same pace, that’s another 14,500 salvations.

In most churches, if someone is brought from darkness to light, they almost always remain at the church they are saved at or attend the church of the person who led them to the Lord.

Transformation Church claims 75k salvations in the last 18 months and will likely end up owning to 100,000 by the end of the year, and yet have only* grown between 1000-1500 people in the last two years. So where are the other 98,000 people going? What happened to them? Where did they disappear to?

It would be like a 100-member church claiming they had 2000 people saved at their church in the last 2 years, but only grew by 20 people. Does it make sense that they get saved at church and then never go back, or is it more likely that their claimed 100k salvations is wishful thinking and does not live in reality?

We think it’s pretty clear.

Editor’s Note. It’s possible the number of members TC has is slightly off. The church is undeniably growing. They had 300 members in 2015, when Todd took over, and according to a story by Tulsa World, 4300 around right before the pandemic. Even if they have 6000 members now, or more, 95% of these supposed new converts are apparently not attending the church or calling it home.