Church of the Highlands / Chris Hodges / Association of Related Churches (ARC)

Church of the Highlands was founded in February 2001 in Birmingham, Alabama by Chris Hodges, a former associate pastor at Church of the King in Mandeville, Louisiana under Larry Stockstill. The church grew rapidly from 350 founding attendees to approximately 60,000 weekly attendees across 23 campuses by 2024, making it one of the largest US evangelical megachurches. Hodges co-founded the Association of Related Churches (ARC) in 2000 — a church-planting and franchise-network organisation that has planted approximately 1,000 churches across the US and internationally, including Elevation Church (Steven Furtick), Transformation Church, and many others.

The ARC model is what distinguishes Church of the Highlands from a generic megachurch and what places it on this dataset. ARC provides: (1) start-up grants and operational templates to founding pastors; (2) a 'lead pastor' authority model with limited functional accountability — the founding lead pastor has functionally unilateral authority over staffing, finance, and doctrine; (3) a 'spiritual son' relationship between ARC mentors (Hodges, Stockstill, Greg Surratt) and planted-church pastors that creates downstream accountability obligations to the network rather than to the planted-church's local elders; (4) a 'big-event' worship and tithing template optimised for rapid growth.

The 2020 racial-insensitivity controversy was the public exposure point. In May 2020 a local Birmingham journalist documented that Hodges had liked multiple Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump Jr social-media posts that local Black faith leaders found racially insensitive. The Jefferson County Board of Education and the Birmingham Housing Authority both subsequently terminated their facilities-rental agreements with Highlands; an internal review followed; Hodges publicly apologised. Subsequent reporting by Religion News Service (September 2020), the Deconstruct the Church podcast (2022-2023 multi-episode series on ARC), and Christianity Today (2023) documented broader concerns: (a) the ARC 'lead pastor' authority model producing serial pastoral failures at planted churches; (b) substantial church-resource flows from planted churches back to ARC and to founding-mentor churches; (c) anecdotal accounts of staff who challenged Hodges being separated under NDA agreements.

Documented coercive-control patterns at the local Highlands level are limited; this is a corporate-megachurch governance critique case rather than a full-spectrum coercive-control case. The CLCI 22 (High, lower boundary) reflects the documented authoritarian ARC franchise governance structure, the documented suppression of internal accountability concerns, and the 'spiritual son' downstream-accountability mechanism that researchers like Diane Langberg have described as a structural enabler of pastoral abuse cover-up — without the severance, financial extraction, or thought-replacement patterns characteristic of higher-band entries.