Some notes from various sources for a seminar in which I participated today…

The new TEC Hymn:

Our gospel is inclusive. (The other one’s passe.)

We welcome all the sexes, Transgendered, lesbigay. And though we’re loudly preaching Our relevant good news, We are a tad perplexed by So many empty pews.

–Rev. J. M. Deschene, Rhode Island

Turning the Mainline Around

New sociological studies show that evangelicals may well succeed at renewing wayward Protestantism.

By Michael S. Hamilton and Jennifer McKinney | posted 07/25/2003

Elaine Pagels, the famous historian of early Christianity, once told a revealing story about the social world behind the scenes of high-powered biblical scholarship. As a young up-and-coming professor at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, she was invited to a closed-door, after-hours smoker. The men there (Pagels was the only woman)

were all prominent Bible scholars. Many of them didn’t even believe in God, and those who still called themselves Christian were anything but orthodox.

The liquor flowed freely, and as these men got in their cups, they began to sing old gospel songs. To her astonishment, they knew all the tunes and words by heart. Then it dawned on her—these atheist and liberal Bible scholars must have grown up in evangelical churches.

Had Pagels herself grown up in evangelicalism she might not have been so surprised. Evangelicals have long known that it is easy for individuals and institutions—especially professors and universities—to slide down the slippery slope from orthodoxy to infidelity. Once down the slope, there’s usually no climbing back up. It’s a one-way street from evangelicalism to liberalism, a street that many individuals and colleges, and all the mainline Protestant denominations, have gone down. This bit of evangelical folk wisdom has a counterpart in sociology’s sect-to-church theory. This theory claims that orthodox religious groups in a secular environment will gradually and inevitably become more like their environment. Once secularized, they do not again become orthodox.

As American evangelicals move into the 21st century, however, we may soon witness a new thing under the sun. Contrary to folk wisdom and traditional sociological theory, the mainline Protestant denominations may be poised for a historic change—a return to orthodox Christianity.

Judging by the recent headlines, the mainline Protestant denominations seem as liberal in theology as ever. United Methodist Bishop Joseph Sprague recently restated the old liberal creed for a Methodist seminary audience by asserting that Jesus was Joseph’s biological son, that he never performed any supernatural miracles, that his body was never raised from the dead, and that the orthodox creeds of the historic church are true only to the extent that they mean something different than they say.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/008/1.34.html

Mainline Churches:

The Real Reason for Decline

Benton Johnson, Dean R. Hoge & Donald A. Luidens

Copyright (c) 1993 First Things 31 (March 1993): 13-18.

America’s so-called mainline Protestant churches aren’t what they used to be. For generations on end, the Methodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, and kindred denominations reported net annual membership gains. As recently as the 1950s their growth rate equaled or exceeded that of the United States as a whole.

But in the early 1960s their growth slowed down, and after the middle of the decade they had begun to lose members. With very few exceptions, the decline has continued to this date. Never before had any large religious body in this country lost members steadily for so many years. By 1990 these denominations had lost between one-fifth and one-third of the membership they claimed in 1965 and the proportion of Americans affiliated with them had reached a twentieth-century low.

Many theories have been advanced to explain why these old denominations have fallen on hard times. The least credible theory attributes their decline to the secularizing effects of industrialization, urbanization, and the spread of mass education. If secularization were the sole explanation, all but the most culturally insulated sectors of American religion would be losing members. In fact, many sectors are holding their own very well and others are growing. Biblically conservative nondenominational Christian fellowships, for example, are among the fastest growing, and their typical location is not in rural Appalachia but in major metropolitan centers. To explain the decay of the mainline denominations, one must look instead for special factors at work within these churches themselves or in the lives of their constituents.

The first step toward identifying these special factors was the discovery, in the late 1970s, that the principal source of the decline was the tendency of many adolescents who had been confirmed in these denominations from the early 1960s on to drop out of church and not return. It was the children of the members themselves-and especially those born after World War II-who were leading the exodus. Some, of course, returned to church when they married and had children, but not enough to replenish the ranks. In the meantime, of course, the average age of the membership was steadily increasing. One can sit today in the balcony of a typical United Methodist church and look over a congregation of graying and balding heads. Unless there is a surge of new recruits, rising death rates will diminish the ranks of the mainline denominations even further in the years ahead.

Why have so many young people departed? One theory attributes the decline to the shift toward greater individual autonomy and freedom from institutional restraints that got under way in the mid-1960s. This shift, which found its most flamboyant expression in the counterculture, was spearheaded by young white people from middle-class families, a disproportionate number of which were, for historic reasons, affiliated with mainline Protestant churches. Another theory traces the decline to the fact that middle-class people born since World War II are far more likely than their predecessors to have earned higher degrees, presumably absorbing in the process the agnosticism of modern academia.

But other theories attribute the decline to factors internal to the mainline churches themselves. The first of these, widely propounded in the late 1960s but no longer heard, attributes the exodus of young people to protest against the churches’ supposed indifference to the sufferings and struggles of the blacks, the poor, and other oppressed groups. The advocates of this notion argued that if the church did not become “relevant” it would lose its youth. Another theory, highly popular among religious conservatives today, makes the opposite argument. It contends that people have left the mainline churches in protest against the support that denominational officials and agencies have given since the mid-1960s to left-wing causes such as abortion rights and Third World revolutionary movements. According to its proponents, those who have deserted the mainline churches have done so in search of a richer spiritual diet.

A third intra-religious theory was advanced by Dean M. Kelley in his controversial book, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, published in 1972. Kelly argued that the mainline denominations have lost members because they have become weak as religious bodies. Strong religions provide clear-cut, compelling answers to questions concerning the meaning of life, mobilize their members’ energies for shared purposes, require a distinctive code of conduct, and discipline their members for failure to live up to it. Weak religions allow a diversity of theological viewpoints, do not and can not command much of their members’ time or effort, promote few if any distinctive rules of conduct, and discipline no one for violating them. In short, strong religions foster a level of commitment that binds members to the group; weak religions have low levels of commitment and are unable to resist influences that lower it even further….

Of all the various theories of mainline church decline, Dean Kelley’s receives the most support from our findings. The mainline denominations do seem to be weak in the sense of being unable to generate and maintain high levels of commitment among a substantial portion of their adherents. Although we are skeptical of Kelley’s argument about the relation between strictness and church growth, he is right that weak churches are in a precarious position as organizations because further weakening may diminish their members’ commitments to the point of noninvolvement.

Our findings also support Kelley’s contention that the mainline denominations did not suddenly become weak during the 1960s, but that their internal strength has been ebbing away for several generations. Many of our baby boomer respondents told us, for example, that they had only the vaguest idea what their own parents-or more commonly their fathers-believed, which suggests that silence on matters of faith is not new in many Presbyterian families. Moreover, we heard such reports from people whose parents attended church every Sunday. It seems likely that a significant portion of mainline Protestant parents of the 1950s did not have a deep commitment to the tenets of orthodox Christianity. Perhaps the contemporary critics of the religious “revival” of that decade were right to claim that the surge in church membership was motivated more by a desire for family “togetherness” and social respectability than by deep spiritual hunger. In many cases, the family’s outward conformity was a thin shell that their children broke with ease when they left home.

http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9303/johnson.html

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The decline of the mainline churches is more the result of early adoption of family planning among mainline members and less about disaffection with the theology of the mainline, according to research by Michael Hout, Andrew Greeley and Melissa Wilde, reported in Birth dearth: demographics of mainline decline, last year in the Christian Century and other publications.

“Unlike the right, the religious left has no media empire of its own; the right does not rely on the kindness of the wire services. Over the course of the last 10 years, I have seen no serious attempt on the religious left to build a comprehensive, integrated media empire of its own.”

http://homepage.mac.com/larryhol/iblog/C1482802393/E20060801154632/index.html

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Theories On The Decline of The Mainline Denominations by pastordan

Fri Aug 11th, 2006 at 11:57:05 PDT

As this important report from the Columbus Dispatch indicates, the causes for decline in mainline denominations (Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, UCC, sometimes Disciples of Christ) are complex:

a.. There’s competition from other churches that simply wasn’t there in the “golden era” of the 1950s. Gosh, those evangelicals know how to work a microphone.

b.. Some ethnic identities have faded in importance in American society. Nobody really thinks about the “German” or “Scottish” church up on the hill anymore. (Mahanoy will no doubt try to argue that’s not the case in Central Pennsylvania. Let him, I say. It only proves the point and how backward Perry County is.)

c.. Mainline denominations haven’t done quite as good a job as other churches of integrating spirituality into their practices. We’re too cerebral. (Interestingly enough, of the Christians I know who hang out around SP, most of them come from churches that do a good job of interweaving spirituality. That probably means something, though what, I don’t know.) We’re getting better about such things, as churches begin to understand that there is room for a quieter spirituality – and spiritual seekers – not aligned with the enthusiasm of evangelical churches.

d.. Other denominations are more nimble than Mainliners in responding to cultural shifts. Or, like the Catholics, they simply don’t give a damn. I incline to the latter, but oh well.

e.. Church is a much more voluntaristic affair these days. People feel less constrained to go to Salem PresbyLutheran United Church simply because Grandma goes there.

f.. There have been broad sociological shifts in where people live and where they tend to worship. In market terms, Mainline churches lost shares in the suburbs by sticking with small, urban congregations. Not mentioned in the article but also true is that the rise of more evangelical churches tracks almost exactly with the shift of population to the South, and Catholic growth is very nearly in lockstep with immigration patterns.

g.. Last, there’s not much of a tradition of outreach in Mainline Churches. Some people think it’s tacky to do evangelism. Others – well, others are Lutherans. They don’t talk much about such things.

Notice what’s not on that list? Yup: conflict over social issues. That doesn’t mean they’re not there. It’s just that, as church sociologist Nancy Ammerman says, research has shown that contentious national debates, such as during the recent Episcopal General Convention in Columbus, don’t cause significant numbers of people to leave.

One other explanation put forth by Ammerman herself is also missing from this list: the “high walls” theory. Many of the more conservative denominations teach their members to make their primary contribution within their community, which is one of the reasons you see things like “Christian daycare centers.” It’s the community ministering to one another. Mainline denominations, by contrast, tend to emphasize making contributions in the greater world – ie, being a good Christian might mean being the best leader of the local library board you can. That takes ministry outside the church, which is good for community foundations (research how the American public school system came to be sometime), but which can leave members wondering why one has to be a Christian at all.

http://www.streetprophets.com/storyonly/2006/8/11/143553/978

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Huge membership declines in the Presbyterian Church USA, United Methodist Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Episcopal Church from declining birth rates and weaker denominational ties have sapped their collective strength.

The mainline churches have been paralyzed by internal theological and political debates. Stark divisions between denominations’ “liberals” and “conservatives” make it difficult for Christians even to communicate with one another.

http://titusonenine.classicalanglican.net/?p=14243