ck height=1> Yahoo! is not affiliated with the authors of this page or responsible for its content.

                                                            
Cape Retired ClergyJanuary  19,2005

                             Are the Mainline
Churches Sidelined?

Gabriel Fackre

I accepted the title for my remarks today as   my guess
is that it is on the minds of all of us in this room.. Most, if not
all of us, gave our lives in and for one or another mainline denomination,
and, therefore, we are rightly concerned about its future.  Indeed,
many of you could give this presentation, and in the discussion period
, I hope you will have your say.

Yes,
we worry about the state of the church. We pick a Time magazine  issue on Whats Next? and come to the
Getting Religion section and its all about evangelicalism, 
and its issues from rock bands of Christian music to creationism and
intelligent design. Not a whisper about mainline Protestantism (I include
here the Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, UCC, Disciples, many Baptist,
many Lutherans, some Reformed and others whose steeples have been a
long time on our main streets) As Copenhaver, Robinson and Willimon
in their book Good News In Exile put it simply: We believe in that, in many
ways, this new era can be described as a time of exile. For North American
Protestants, it is a time of loss, relinquihsment, disestablishment.
(2)   Side-lined!  We have gone in media ling from the
mainline to the old-line and now the side-line. rch?

Yea?
We might say, wait a minute. What about a bustling congregation like
the one in which we are meeting? And look here, and look there and you
will find others like it. But if you turn to the hard data, we have
to concede that the mainline is no longer what it used to be in the
heyday , lets say of the postwar world, when many of us had our ministries.
When President Eisenhower came to help dedicate the new offices of the
National Council of Churches on Riverside Drive, the God box as it
was affectionately and significantly called in those days. The mainline
Churches  seemed to have had the lock on the God-box back then
. All this was reflected in the building boom  in churches of an
earlier day, with new congregations starting up in the suburbs all over
the country and. sanctuaries often well filled in downtown congregations.
Well, you know the story since and the statistics now: the dramatic
numerical decline in our denominationsover half the membership in the
last 40 years for some (worse in Mass Conference UCCfrom 235,000 in
1960 to 93, 708 last year, according to our interim Conference Minister).
Numerical decline and  cultural disestablishment. Would George
Bush dedicate a National Council building today, even if it had the
money to build one? You know hes talking and listening to other people,
one small indicator of the sidelining of the mainline.

If
so, its worth beginning by asking, first How come? Answers from the
experts are fascinating: fertility rates say the sociologists in the
Oct 7 Christian Century report; failure to get with the times in
our ways of doing things, say the church management people. No time 
lively music and Christian bands that will pull them say the praise
music people. Lack of jazzy national advertising, say the marketing
experts. Too liberal in political positions, say the right wing experts
Need for better youth programs, more aggressive evangelism, more small
groups, more pastoral calling. There is a cottage industry of 
analysis and prescription  out there. And so worried pastors 
may be reading more of Lyle Schaller than St. Augustine.

First,
an observation on the current hand-wringing and solution-proposing.
It did not start with an October study in the Christian Century. 
It was with us ten years ago as with Tony Campolos Can the Mainline Make a Comeback? Or in the same year, two
sociologists Hadaway and Roozens  Rerouting the Mainstream. And, yes, further back, in the 60s
and 70s when the decline and disestablishment began. Many in this room
will remember Dean Kellys analysis comparing the no-growth mainline
churches to the growing evangelical congregations in his famous book, Why the Conservative
Churches are Growing. I went over some of this literature of
the past 40 years that  had accumulated on my bookshelves. Ill
bet you have some of it too, even as one proposed solution after another
was given a try, especially those suggested  by the sociologists.(Parenthetically,
if the Christian Century October experts are right, there is not much
we can do about it if its fertility rates. I think of our own family.
Dot and I had five kids, and although they are all in mainline churches
today, I dont see them going beyond the 1, 2 or 3 they have.)

But
Im not convinced we must look to sociologists as the last word on either
the diagnosis or the prescription.. Some of you may remember the sociology
of the 1960sPeter Berger and his must-read book, The  Noise of Solemn Assemblies and Gibson Winter, The Suburban
Captivity of the Churches. Bergers analysis sounded like the
death knell of the local congregation and Winter was famous for dismissing
the congregation as on an irrelevant place  for what he called 
hatching, matching and dispatchingbaptism, marriage and funerals--
and he added,  womens  programsall irrelevant to the secular
ferment of the time which required new forms to replace the congregationcoffee
houses, industrial missions, leisure ministries. While never giving
up on the local church, I have to admit I was in the 1960s pretty convinced
by this analysisthat the future lay with the new forms, helping to
start a coffee house ministry in Lancaster, PA, being on the WCC North
American Working Group with Bob Spike, Letty Russell, Harvey Cox , Colin
Williams and other visionaries of the day who took this line. But now,
it is interesting (and sobering)  to note that most of  the
much-heralded new forms are long gone, but  350, 000 congregations
are still around in this country. Sociology is helpful, but it is a
fallible discipline often reflecting the agenda of the sociologists,
and not the voice of God.

The mitake, I believe,  in
both the analysis and prescription of the pulse-takers and popular prescribers
is a focus on methods, without raising the deeper question of what a
church is supposed to be, of asking the theological question. Its a
question that should be asked by the churches that are growing as well
as those that are  declining because it may be that church growth
is purchased at too high a pricenamely  going with the flow, a
popular  trendiness that has little to do with what a church is
supposed to be. When we  meet our Maker, God will not say, show
me your membership stats.. My guess is, God will ask , Show me your
scars. How have you led your church to take up its cross and be faithful
to its Lord.--be  a church is supposed to be?

Now I dont mean by that the kind
of remnant theology popular in some quarters in the 60s when the loss
of members began, one being resurrected again in this decade as some
congratulate themselves on the loss of members because we are willing
to give offense. Yes, we are, relatively speaking, on the margins, and
yes that is an opportunity for us to have some integrity and not being
beholden to the values of the surrounding culture. But there is more
to it than that. The early church was counter-cultural, yes. But in  story in Acts 
3000 people did sign on in the first days. It is possible to be faithful and also fruitful.

Ah,
the story in the book of Acts. That is where I want to go in seeking
a theological response to the present condition of the mainline churches
today , It will force us to ask a different kind of question: Not simply
whether and why  the mainline churches are sidelined, but the
prior question, what, in fact is a church? The answer is given in our
first appearance as a church on the day of Pentecost. There you have
our model, our charter. The question is do we look anything like this
any more? Are we a mirror image of the congregation that appeared on the day of Pentecost? In that
perspetive, whats important is not whether we are mainline, or old-line
or side-line, but whether we are  we frontline What we looked like at the front of our Christian
history.

Now,
of course, we cant simply replicate what happened that day, as circumstances
have changed  Well see that , for example, when we look at one
of the features of first-century Christianity , when the Jerusalem church
pooled all its possessions an redistributed according to need expecting
the soon-coming end of the world. For all that,  there is a lesson
here for todays St. Johns-by the-Gas