Picking up on the thread I began yesterday with Joe Carter at The Evangelical Outpost and Rusty Lopez at New Covenant, I want to take an extended look why I think the church, particularly, mainline denominational churches such as the ones I serve, must take this latest movement in the church as more than just a passing fad. Joe and Rusty both have some good thoughts up, as well as good conversation threads going on in their comments. This is going to be a very long treatment, so I will probably break it up into installments. Since much of this subject touches on a thesis I am thinking about proposing for my D.Min. at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, I sincerely welcome any comments and helpful corrections to my thinking you might wish to contribute. (If you don't whack me, the faculty certainly will!)
What makes this movement different from others that have gone before it? In some ways, nothing. Each generation reinvents itself, or so it thinks. The work of people like William Strauss and Neil Howe that began with their book, Generations, and continued with their subsequent books would suggest that a generational cycle will continue to repeat itself as it has for most of the history of the United States. However, I'm convinced that something different is occurring this time in their cycle that has dramatic implications for the institutional church. The church that is the Bride of Christ will never die, but institutional expressions of that church within a particular societal context may fall by the wayside.
In 2001, I did a project as part of my coursework in which I studied some of the factors that contributed to the astronomical growth at the church wehre I came to know Christ, Forest Hill Church in Charlotte, North Carolina. (Forest Hill would probably be considered a seeker-sensitive church, but it did not begin that way. Twenty years ago, it was a dying, mainline Presbyterian congregation of roughly 300 members. Today, it has probably 3,000 people participating in its community, some members, some not.) This research began with reviewing a book that starts off with a thought-provoking title - Death of the Church. It has an even more provocative subtitle - "The Church has a choice: to die as a result of its resistance to change or to die in order to live." Written by Mike Regele, along with Mark Schulz, his co-founder of Percept Group, Inc., Death of the Church sets out to analyze the elephant in the church's living room, the church's loss of influence, relevance and outright numbers over the past two generations.
(NOTE: The original paper I turned in will be available later as a Microsoft Word document or a PDF file if you're interested in the footnotes and bibliography.)
Percept was founded in 1987 by Regele and Schulz as a marketing information and research company, providing information tools to church leaders. Percept conducted the first of a series of its "Ethos" surveys in the fall of 1991, followed up with another survey in the fall of 1993. Since then Percept has continued to gather data as part of a ten year project to collect and distribute information about the beliefs, attitudes, concerns and religious behavior of the American people.
Percept's first "Ethos90's" survey demonstrated that American's faith involvement had declined dramatically in the 80's. The second Ethos90's survey in 1993 confirmed the finding and showed this significant trend to be continuing into the 90's. Regele reports that, "the group of people in this country saying they have no involvement with their faith is growing by millions a year! We were shocked at the pace of the decline across the board - Catholics, traditional Protestants, conservative Evangelical groups - no one has been exempt."
Percept states that even if so-called "mega-churches" were the answer, it would take 500 new mega-churches a year, each with 12,000 persons in attendance, to re-engage the 6 million new people each year who say they have no faith involvement. Clearly, this demographic trend is going against the church. A brief look at the statistics for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) (PC (USA)) confirms this. Between 1965 and 1985, the PC (USA) saw a 24% decrease in its membership. This is further compounded by a demographic shift in the remaining church population. At a time when the surrounding population is anticipating a dramatic rise in the senior sector as first wave of the so-called "Boomers" begin to reach retirement age, the participation of younger Boomers and the succeeding generations is also in decline. Concurrently, while the general population is becoming increasingly diverse (Regele suggests that by the year 2050 there will be no single majority population in the United States), mainline congregations remain largely Anglo-American in composition. Regele noted in a 1996 interview with The Door:
There's a tremendous disconnect between the boomers and the traditional mainline Protestant denominations - they just aren't there. And if we've disconnected from these younger generations, and we're not doing the job connecting with these generations, then you're not going to be around. It's not terribly hard to figure out.TO BE CONTINUED ... Posted by Mike at January 6, 2004 04:03 PM | TrackBack
Rev. Mike, I like your comments on the em-church fad and, for the most part, I agree with you.
After thinking more about this issue I'm starting to come to the conclusion that it is much bigger than just the demographics of a spoiled group of children that have a short attention spans and need to be stroked every 14 seconds. (okay, maybe I need to settle down a bit...)
Seriously, I think this issue goes past age group values, past whether the church was effective in the last two decades, and past whether we are witnessing a transformation of the institutional church. Consider two points (also consider I have yet to *really* think this one through): 1) C. S. Lewis said something along the lines that God would rather have his children poor, so that they would not tend to rely on themselves (major paraphrase here) and, 2) How much does it *really* cost us to be a Christian in the U.S.?
If I see a mega-church with mulitple thousands in attendance on any given Sunday morning, my first inclination is that they're serving "candy." If I see a church in the Sudan in which people attend despite the fact they may die for it, my first inclination is that they're receiving "meat."
Ask yourself this, how many of the thousands of people inside a mega-church, if the military were to suddenly show up and announce that anyone professing to be a Christian was to be hauled off to prison, would remain?
I'm positing that the dismal figures in church attendance in the U.S. over the last couple of decades are not necessarily the *fault* of the church, but rather an outcome of affluence and an enormous amount of free time.
Like I said, I still need to think on this to better structure my thoughts. But, I give it to you for dialogue.
Posted by: Rusty Lopez at January 7, 2004 03:24 PM