Part 2: Changing Shapes of Churches and Religion
Chapter 13
Mainliners and Sideliners
William McKinney, dean of Hartford Seminary and a first-rate sociologist, uses sports images to describe how the privileged mainstream Protestant churches have moved from the mainline to the sideline.
The early Protestant groups built the stadium, supplied the teams, and defined the rules of the American religious game, says McKinney. In the late eighteenth century, the Protestant were forced to admit other teams. By the 1920s, other teams had their own stadiums, but mainline Protestant churches still supplied the umpires.
"What's happened in the last 30 years is that umpires are gone and nobody knows what the rules are," McKinney says.1
In the new ball game, liberal Protestantism is only one player among many.
In American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future, McKinney and co-author Wade Clark Roof describe the startling, continuing decline in America's mainline churches. They note that the Protestant majority slipped from 67 percent in 1952 to 57 percent in 1987.2
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Hardest hit are the liberal churches that have been the core of American religious life and are today the mainstays of the National Council of Churches. In the mid-1960s, many well-established Protestant churches not only stopped growing, they began an exodus to the sidelines or clear out of the stadium.
Roof and McKinney define mainline, or mainstream, churches as "the dominant, culturally established faiths held by the majority of Americans."3 These include the Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, United Church of Christ, the major Lutheran bodies, and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).
"For all these churches," Roof and McKinney wrote, "those losses represented an abrupt and dramatic turnaround in their privileged status and respectability: churches seemingly as American as apple pie and the Fourth of July suddenly fell upon hard times. As many as 10 of the largest Protestant denominations were in the throes of what can only be described as a serious religious depression."4
In 1965, when eight of the largest mainline Protestant denominations were close to the zenith of their growth, they had a combined membership of 30.8 million. But in 1988, the total was 25 million, a decline of 18.8 percent of its 1965 membership total, and the Christian Church (Disciples) lost a staggering 44 percent after a de facto schism.5 (See chart on next page.)
Between 1987 and 1988, these six families of faith (three major Lutheran bodies had merged into one) counted a net loss of 194,000 members. That's the equivalent of closing down a 530-member church every day of the year!6
Rodney Stark, professor of sociology and comparative religion at the University of Washington, says the history of organizations shows that whenever a denomination gets liberal, it declines. So mainliners like the Methodists are in trouble, while sects that broke off from Methodism are "still growing like gangbusters . . . The splits grow until they, too, become liberal." Stark adds that
In the 1990s we will see the evangelicals growing and the oldline mainliners declining. They're already old and not virile. The church bureaucrats have seen it [the writing] on the wall, but they always say that religion itself is going out of business. They don't have money and staff; they must know that something is wrong. But there is immense duplicity [on their part]. The problems aren't going to go away.7
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Meanwhile, the existing mainline members are graying. Fast. The average age of members of American Baptist Churches was sixty-one in 1991; 38 percent of United Methodists in 1990 were over fifty, compared with 26 percent of the U.S. population at large; and a 1988 study of Presbyterians showed that because nearly half the active lay members were headed for retirement, money problems will be "almost beyond belief." Other mainline agencies face a similar pocketbook crunch.8
According to the 1990 Yearbook of Churches, giving in nine U.S. denominations was 3.5 percent higher in 1988 than in 1987 — from $331.35 to $344.97 per member. When the increase is adjusted for
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the 4.4 percent inflation rate, however, the denominations actually received less real income.9 And there is "a quiet, building crisis" over decaying church facilities; the cost of maintaining aging churches grows steadily, especially in urban areas.10
McKinney agrees that the oldline denominations are "in a deep funk . . . These are tough times for the groups that once dominated religious life."11
And it's likely to get worse before it gets better.
Why the Deep Funk?
What has happened? And why? Can anything be done about it?
While the churches historically identified as the most ecumenical have been losing ground, gains in Protestant evangelical and fundamentalist churches — mostly in freestanding, interdenominational or nondenominational congregations — have been flourishing. So have the neo- Pentecostals and Roman Catholics.
In other words, the "market" for religion hasn't shrunk, but "market share" has shifted drastically.12
At the center of the Roof-McKinney analysis is the belief that the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s demolished a "bridge" between religion and culture that was highly traveled in the 1950s — the heyday of the National Council of Churches. When the bridge was in place, "a vital synthesis of beliefs, values and national ideas existed, sustained by a cold war ideology and close links between civic society, national visions and self-understanding." The churches most clearly aligned with those dominant cultural values, the authors say, were the liberal mainliners. Their beliefs, values, and behavior "were virtually indistinguishable from the culture."
Along came the assassination of President Kennedy, the civil-rights struggle, an unpopular war in Vietnam, and the generational conflict, all of which "contributed to a sense of despair and disillusionment," say Roof and McKinney. These events weakened the sense of shared cultural values like patriotism, hard work, success, and family and no longer inspired a common religious solidarity or nurtured the faiths most closely associated with those values.
Conclude Roof and McKinney: "The bridge between public and private faith
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collapsed, and liberal optimism and belief in utilitarian progress and rationality faltered."13
At the same time, the distinctive identities of mainline denominations faded and "brand loyalty" weakened. Children no longer remained in the church in which they were reared. And many never bothered to find a church to replace the one they left.
"In today's secular, individualistic culture," Roof writes, "religious belonging is often not viewed as a presumed outgrowth of belief. It's a matter of taste and preference." His research shows that the "big story in religious switching" is the young adults who, rather than changing churches, have simply "drifted out of the established churches without fanfare or bridge-burning experiences."14
Elizabeth Nordbeck, a United Church of Christ clergywoman, agrees. Mainline worshipers "don't storm out of their fellowships in righteous anger and into the waiting pews of the independent conservative Christian congregation across the street. Instead, they simply drift away in apathy," she says.15
Cultural and sociological factors have played a part in this massive shift, but so have increasing mobility of the American people, competition from the constant planting of new churches across the nation, a decline in the birth rate, and an anti-institutionalism that some say is a holdover from the 1960s.16 Organizational reshuffles, headquarters-relocation, and denominational-merging also have played their part. But none of these reasons adequately explains why some religious groups — notably the conservatives — are thriving.
One oft-quoted explanation for the mainline malaise is that church leaders have been preoccupied with political and social issues, having mistaken priorities and neglected the fundamentals of biblical faith. That critique comes not from conservative churches.
"Not only are the traditional denominations failing to get their message across," asserts Time religion editor Richard Ostling, "they are increasingly unsure just what that message is."17
The mainline Protestant denominations that are losing members share the same patterns. The proportion of their members under thirty is well below the national average "and they are virtually invisible when it comes to evangelism."18
A study conducted for the Episcopal Church Center revealed that
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Episcopal church members fall "considerably short in terms of regular and consistent . . . study of Scriptures, evangelism and invitation, financial giving, churchgoing, prayer habits, and small-group participation."19
Can the Sidetracked Get Back on the Main Line?
"Recovering the Gospel seems a lot better bet for reversing membership decline than does recovering liberalism," advises Alan Wisdom in Religion and Democracy. "Unfortunately, it is not clear that oldline agencies have put aside their political enthusiasms . . . We must learn to distinguish our political judgments, which we make tentatively, from the eternal Gospel of Christ, which we receive by faith."20
Sounds a bit like Glenn Tinder's question about politics: "Can we be good without God?"
Officially, at least, many oldline churches are declaring evangelism to be a ministry priority.
The Episcopal Church is calling the 1990s the "Decade of Evangelism."21 In its General Assembly in 1989, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) adopted evangelism and church development as twin priority goals.22 The United Methodist Council of Bishops, acknowledging that the denomination faces a "critical turning point" and that many Methodists "have no vital relationship with God," resolved that they "must choose to be faithful to Jesus Christ in our time." And the bishops asked church members to join them in plans to "fast and pray" for new congregational vitality.23
At the National Council of Churches, a new working group was formed in 1990 to explore better relations among mainline Protestants, evangelical Protestants, Pentecostal Christians, and Roman Catholics.24
And within most of the mainline denominations there are committed — sometimes militant — conservatives who would rather stay in and fight than switch churches. They are at work through a variety of renewal groups whose goals range from "promoting a more biblical, orthodox theology to steering denominational leadership away from preoccupation with a liberal political agenda."25
The Rev. John Mulder, president of the Louisville Presbyterian Seminary, believes the 1990s will be a kind of "mobilization of the
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moderate middle." Toward the middle or late 1990s the Presbyterian Church will begin to reverse some of its losses, or at least stabilize. He argues that evangelical Protestantism is becoming more mainline while the mainline is becoming more evangelical.26
Mulder also sees "a lot of ecumenical activity at the local level; a banding together for common purposes in practically every urban area of the United States."
To him, "the megaquestion" is whether a kind of secularization is developing in the U.S. similar to that prevalent in many European nations. "The challenge is from the direction of secularity rather than conservative forms of Protestantism," he said.27
That's a concern shared by Roof and McKinney: In the 1990s, liberal Protestantism's major "competition" will not be from "the conservatives it has spurned but the secularists it has spawned," they say.28
And like most researchers — including Marty, Barna, and Gallup — they are not sanguine about any quick turnaround to the mainline churches' slide in numbers or social influence. It's unlikely the mainline "A Team" will ever again own the stadium. But then, neither will any other "established" faith.
The next millennium may be a good time for renewal, but not for restoration. In McKinney's words,
The oldline denominations have no hope of reaching out to the new populations of America — to people of color, to those drawn to the TV preachers, to those who struggle to make ends meet — if they remain bound to the notion that it is either possible or desirable to restore our churches to their earlier position of dominance. It is only when we accept the fact of our own new off-centeredness that we will have a chance of partnership with peoples whose current experience is also not of the center but of the margins.29
The Rev. Dorothy Bass, a professor at Chicago Theological Seminary, offered similar counsel to a gathering of theological educators, saying that the margins of society may be a good place from which to minister. After all, "the most lively and faithful periods of the church's history have not been periods of establishment and ease,"30 she reminded them.
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On the other hand, Hartford Seminary sociologist Jackson Carroll comes at the dilemma from a wholly different perspective. He says that the new contours of Protestantism will materialize "in special interest-oriented groups that cut across denominational lines, and that reflect social, political or theological agendas on either conservative or liberal tracks."31
It looks like "pew people" of 2001 will want to be in on the action once again — not sitting on the sidelines.
