Megachurch vs. Orthodox church

It's am amazing thing to be reading the morning NYTimes and see a photo of your friends. But that's what happened today: here's a story about Protestants moving to Orthodoxy, focusing on Holy Cross Antiochan Orthodox Church in suburban Baltimore. Excerpt:

So [Cal] Oren pulled to a stop, and as the children stayed in the car, the grown-ups gingerly padded into the sanctuary of Saints Peter and Paul Antiochian Orthodox Church. A lifelong Presbyterian, Mr. Oren knew virtually nothing about the Antiochians or, for that matter, Orthodox Christianity in general. He had always associated Ben Lomond with hippies, geodesic domes and marijuana fields.

As he entered, a vespers service was under way. Maybe two dozen worshipers stood, chanting psalms and hymns. Incense filled the dark air. Icons of apostles and saints hung on the walls. The ancientness and austerity stood at a time-warp remove from the evangelical circles in which Mr. Oren traveled, so modern, extroverted and assertively relevant.

"This was a Christianity I had never encountered before," said Mr. Oren, 55, a marketing consultant in commercial construction. "I was frozen in my tracks. I felt like I was in the actual presence of God, almost as if I was in heaven. And I'm not the kind of person who gets all woo-hoo."

The ineffable disclosure of that evening, a 15-minute glimpse into Byzantium, rattled everything certain in Mr. Oren's spiritual life. Even as he and his family kept attending a Presbyterian church near their home in suburban Baltimore, he stepped down as a ruling elder and Bible-study instructor. In 1995, he attended his first service at Holy Cross, an Antiochian church here, about 10 miles south of Baltimore. By late 1996, he was a regular, and in May 1997, he and his family converted and joined.

Funny, but this made me think of a long passage from a book I'm reading now in galleys, "Tinsel" by Hank Steuver. It'll be out in a couple of months, and it's going to be a huge and controversial seller in Texas, I predict. Hank, a Washington Post writer (the guy who did a profile of me when Crunchy Cons came out), spent two or three Christmas seasons living in Frisco, a boomburb north of Dallas, and has written a delicious book about how Christmas is lived in contemporary America. In the chapter I just finished, Hank writes about attending a megachurch in Collin County. Celebration Covenant Church is hugely successful, apparently, but reading Hank's detailed description of the worship there made me realize how completely alienated I am from this sort of thing. Rock bands, self-help, success-in-life sermons, hands raised high, etc. Believe me, I'm not saying that in a look-down-my-nose way; I mean that if that were the way Christianity were presented to me, I don't think I would want anything to do with it. I fully concede that many good people would react exactly the same way to the liturgical way we worship at St. Seraphim's. Still, as an observer of American life, reading Hank's chapter about megachurch worship makes me realize how very little I know about a religious mainstream in our common life.

I want to ask readers who go to a megachurch: what is it about the megachurch style that you like? What do you think you wouldn't like about Orthodox worship, or worship in another liturgical church? I hasten to say that I'm asking out of genuine curiosity, not in any kind of hostile way. Let's try to keep the discussion polite, please.