by Charles Denison. Atlanta: Chalice Press, 2005. ISBN 0827223293. Pb., 114 pp., $15.99.
Have you taken time lately to browse through the magazine section of your local Barnes & Noble or Borders bookstores? Gone are the days when a few magazines — Time, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated — dominated the racks.
Now you find literally hundreds of titles, each appealing to a narrow segment of the magazine reading audience, e.g. Cigar Aficionado, American Ceramics, Ad Busters.
Through his book Mainline Manifesto: The Inevitable New Church, Charles Denison wants us to understand that the American cultural landscape is similarly fractured and that our evangelism (and especially our new church development) needs to take account of that reality.
Generational language — Builder, Boomer, Gen X, Millennial — we once used to talk about different cohorts in the culture is increasingly unhelpful. Instead, Denison suggests, we need to see that Gen X, to use an example, is really composed of distinct subgroups like Latino Urban Gen Xers, Rural Anglo Gen Xers, Korean 1.5 Gen Xers, and Young Life Gen Xers.
Each, he proposes, deserves a church that transmits the gospel in a language, culture, and style that is native to that subgroup.
Denison seeks to counter the malaise many of us in the mainline/old line traditions feel as we watch our denominations’ membership numbers continue to drop. He reminds us that, throughout history, God has always made sure that there was a church to transmit the gospel into new cultures and new eras. The form of the church changed from era to era and changed often, but God has never left the gospel without a vehicle for its transmission.
The malaise in which we find ourselves, he says, results from our having misidentified means as ends. As we worry about the decline of mainline influence in the culture, we have held on tightly to the trappings of styles of worship and mission that have worked in the past.
Instead, Denison argues, we should be asking the question, “How can we incarnate the heart of the Christian message in a style that emerges out of the fractured cohorts themselves?”
His plea is for those of us who are leaders in mainline traditions (Denison himself is Associate for New Church Development in Louisville) to become as entrepreneurial as have our brothers and sisters in more conservative, evangelical traditions.
“Be bold,” he urges us, “be wild and relevant and hip and ancient and whatever works to be indigenous, to connect a tradition of openness and love and cultural-positive embracing of art and music to an emerging culture of tomorrow’s Christianity.” (p. 55)
Denison does a good job of reminding us how Bill Hybels built a culture for worship around the youth group culture in which so many of the Boomer seekers who have attended Willow Creek were raised.
It would have helped if he had done a better job telling us what he believes to be the particular genius of the mainline church that we similarly should seek to incarnate in fresh and culturally sensitive ways. I’m not sure that his designation of mainline churches as “culture affirming” (using a simplified form of H. Richard Niebuhr’s typology) gives interested pastors or presbytery executives enough of a lead as they seek to follow his guidance.
I thoroughly agree, however, with his assessment that the way for us to grow out of our current malaise is through new church development. Starting fresh and seeking to establish culturally relevant expressions of the timeless message of the gospel will be a far better investment of our energy than efforts to transform older congregations into a new form of church that those congregations’ present members may well resist.
The key here is that we need to become more entrepreneurial as a denomination. Gone are the days when we can require five acres and five years of funding to be in place before we hold an opening worship service.
We need to encourage young pastors who are indigenous to the various subcultures Denison identifies to launch out in whatever way the Spirit leads them and then encourage them in whatever ways we can as their new expression of the gospel begins to take root.
Denison’s book will encourage pastors and presbyteries who are willing to step out in faith and see if God is not ready to do a new thing in their midst.
Jim Kitchens is pastor of Second Church in Nashville, Tenn.
