I've been what could be considered a
Mainline Protestant for 20 years. In those 20 years, I've learned
something about mainliners:
We really suck at planting churches.
Let
me back up a moment. I started attending Calvary Baptist Church in
located in the Chinatown area of Washington, DC in the fall of 1992. It
was and is an American Baptist congregation and like many mainline
churches was active in the community. Since I darkened the doors of
Calvary, I've been part of Mainline Protestantism. I moved to
Minneapolis and joined a Disciples of Christ congregation which became
my denominational home. Today, I work full-time as a communications
specialist for the local presbytery of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and
part time as the Associate Pastor of a local Disciples of Christ
congregation. So, yeah, I'm a Mainline Protestant.
If there's a
theme that has been running in the background all these years, it's the
one about liberal Protestants being in decline. All of the major
Mainline Protestant denominations keep experiencing decline, with more
and more churches closing and the surviving congregations growing grayer
and grayer.
I've been around enough to see how we deal with this
issue. Sometimes we ignore it and talk about the potential problems
with evangelicals, sometimes we talk about "transformation" and about
changing the church (but never seem to make any real changes), and
sometimes we seek to blame someone or something for the decline.
What
we don't do, or don't do very well is planting new churches. All of
the mainline churches have some kind of new church planting movement to
get local judicatories and congregations to get involved in new
churches. While I don't think they are absolute failures, they aren't
always astounding successes. New churches get planted, but not at the
rate that we are closing churches.
There are good reasons to start churches, but for whatever reason, the general populace in mainline churches are not that excited. (
I've shared my own experience with this.)The same goes for pastors.
Why is this the case? Why do we suck at planting new communities of faith?
I think it comes down to one word:
eccesiology, the understand of who and what is the church. Wikipedia describes ecclesiology as such:
In its theological sense, ecclesiology deals with the church's origin, its relationship to Jesus, its role in salvation, its discipline, its destiny, and its leadership.
The
problem here is that we have lost the sense of what the church is and
how it related to Jesus and to God. If we don't know why we have
churches, then why in God's name would we plant any?
What does it
mean to be a church? Why should people belong to a faith community?
How does that congregation relate to the community around it?
These are questions we need to be asking, but in many cases haven't.
Since
we don't have a language to describe church, other things fill the void
which frankly do a bad job. In writing on the future of the Mainline
Church,
James Wellman notes that the emphasis on social justice might actually be harming mainline churches more than helping them:
The
‘former' Protestant mainline churches show no signs of stopping their
decline. The emphasis on an educated clergy has created an elaborate
system of bureaucracy that tends to repel entrepreneurial personalities
and attract introspective intellectual types that are more comfortable
in the classroom than in the pulpit. Moreover, the growing movement to
ordain gay and lesbian men and women, while noble from a liberal and
progressive perspective, tends to shift the focus of attention away
from family ministries. Without an emphasis on families, churches tend
to decline rapidly. Liberal Protestantism, statistically, does not keep
their children and youth in their churches. The aging of these
churches is also well known.
These churches focus most of their
energies on ministries of social justice, particularly on meeting the
needs of the homeless. This group tends to advocate inclusiveness and
tolerance, making clear what they reject, but they are often unclear as
to what they support religiously. As a small subculture, they will
continue, but no longer, in any sense, as a mainline. Ironically
enough, in some ways, their marginalization is a function of their
success in ministries of justice. Most of their causes are already a
part of the American mainstream, for example: women's rights, abortion
rights, and even, to some extent, gay rights. Many Americans ask, then,
why even go to these churches? (emphasis mine)
Contrast this with how Evangelicals see the church:
The
future for Evangelicals appears to be more open and perhaps expansive.
Evangelicals, again broadly speaking, tend to see the Bible as
inerrant; they counsel conversion and look to Jesus' blood atonement as
the requirement for salvation. They also tend, stylistically,
to be much more deliberate in using modern and contemporary methods of
music, worship, and, more broadly, communication. Some have argued that
they are accommodated to the culture, but when interviewed,
Evangelicals argue, "No, we use modern methods to reach out to those
who are lost in order to share the love and salvation of Jesus Christ."
That is, Evangelicals argue that they are "less" accommodated then
what they call "liberal or progressive Christians."
In general,
however, Evangelicals rarely talk about the ‘former' mainline; they
talk much more about how to reach those who are unchurched and who have
not heard the gospel of Jesus Christ. In large part, because they are
so structurally decentralized, they have become fragmented and
entrepreneurial. Because of this ethic and ethos, young leaders with
entrepreneurial personalities are drawn to this kind of Christianity,
which ensures, in part, that their dynamism will continue. As to
whether Evangelicals are now the mainline is simply a question they
don't ask. They are far less interested in dominating economic or
political institutions then in evangelizing young people. Indeed,
Evangelical youth are much more likely to stay in the church than those
in the liberal or ‘former' mainline churches. The growth of
Evangelical churches, at least from their present state, seems to be
assured.
The Lutherans have this phrase that
sums up what it means to be a Christian and what the church is for:
called, gathered and sent. Evangelicals know they are called by God to
spread the gospel. They get it. We don't really know if we are called,
don't know why we gather or why we are sent. We've lost that language
and replaced it with talk of justice. I'm not saying that we should all
become conservative churches and drop issues like gay rights or
poverty. But those aren't the reasons we are church. As Wellman notes,
as society becomes more accepting of gays, why go to church. If I can
get all that I want from a Democratic caucus meeting on poverty or the
environment, why the hell plant a church?
If Mainliners want to
grow again, then we need to go back to basics: we need to know why we
are church. We need to be develop again the sense of being called by
God, gathering together for common fellowship and prayer and being sent
to preach the good news of Jesus. When we can actually name why we want
to plant churches, hell why we are church, then maybe we will stop our
decline into irrelevance.
