Mainline denominations (and “mainline” is a label many consider increasingly problematic, as those denominations grow ever-smaller) aren’t the natural default church choice for very many folks. In other words, Americans don’t generally end up at mainline churches anymore out of habit or because it’s expected. If they show up on Sundays, they’re choosing essentially a counter-cultural move.
But what they find in these churches often isn’t counter-cultural enough. Many are longing for a different way of being church — and some see the melting away of the old approaches, the swings in practice and in religious identification, as signs of a reconfiguration shaking the Christian world.
Marcus Borg described it as “the emergence of a new way of being Christian.”
Brian McLaren calls for churches to pay attention to the big questions of life — not just their own internal preoccupations.
And Diana Butler Bass speaks of a new kind of Christianity — organic and powerfully transformative. This is the kind of faith, she said, that might entice those who are slipping into the “no religion” category to give Christianity another hearing. She calls this new approach to Christian practices “green faith,” something generative, like “the small shoots in the great Easter hymn that break through the frozen earth.”
It’s “a generative faith” for a new generation, but not only for those under 40, Bass said recently at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. It is also “for all of us who have come to this new millennium, and who care about the future of Christianity.”
This trio – Borg, McLaren, and Bass – were the keynote speakers at the recent 2009 Festival of Theology& Reunion, held at Louisville Seminary March 15-18 and focused on the theme “New Ways of Being Church.” The three are friends who have shared the stage together before; each is an author capable of stirring a little controversy into the pot, particularly for those who feel they’re too liberal, too mushy in their theology, not focused enough on salvation.
Hearing their remarks was kind of like watching a long, epic movie. They moved back and forth across the landscape of religious history, quoting Socrates and Galileo and Time magazine. They threw out enough ideas to make one dizzy keeping track. One common denominator for the three: for American Christianity, the watchword is change.
As Joe Phelps, pastor of Highland Baptist Church in Louisville, said in introducing McLaren, they envision a church “that’s both ancient and alive.”
McLaren, an evangelical author of such books as A Generous Orthodoxy and Everything Must Change, used the metaphor of a shifting river bed. “River beds are always moving, a grain of sand here, a grain of sand there,” he said. And every once in a while — and perhaps we’re in the midst of such a time — there’s a deep, irrevocable shift. “When that happens,” McLaren said, “your old maps no longer describe the new reality. … The world is never the same.”
The speakers admitted they’re not exactly sure what to call this changing reality. They threw out phrases such as “green Christianity” or “neo-traditional” or emerging Christianity for a post-partisan world. “We are moving from a conventional form of Christianity” – when people went to church because it was expected – “to a more intentional form,” said Borg, a retired professor of religion and culture at Oregon State University and the author of books about the Bible and Jesus.
Until about the mid-1960s, there was a cultural expectation in many communities “that people would be part of a church,” Borg said. When he grew up in small-town North Dakota, for example, “everybody had a religious identification.” And the mainline denominations, so influential at that time, “provided an acceptable and safe way to be Christian,” without asking anything too radical.
But that’s all changed. “Very soon the only people left in mainline denominations will be those who are there with intentionality,” Borg said. “There are no conventional reasons anymore for people to join a church.” And while the mainline denominations will never be as large as they once were, “intentional communities can be exceedingly vibrant,” he said, filled with people who are “yearning for something and working for something.”
A small intentional community of 200 can be more powerful, Borg said, than a more lethargic one of 2,000.
The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), released in March 2009, found that the percentage of Americans who identify themselves as Christian has been dropping — from 86 percent in when the survey began in 1990 to 76 percent in 2008.
Those who identify with no religion — atheists, agnostics, and those with no religious preference — essentially doubled, from 8.2 percent of American adults in 1990 to 15 percent in 2008. “The challenge to Christianity in the U.S. does not come from other religions but rather from a rejection of all forms of organized religion,” the ARIS report states.
For Diana Butler Bass, an historian of religion and author of the just-released book A People’s History of Christianity, those statistics are like a signpost pointing the way to what needs to change.
“People don’t even like the label `Christian’ any more,” Bass said. So she’s seeking a new kind of language to describe the kind of post-partisan, organic, dynamic congregations she encountered doing research for a previous book, Christianity for the Rest of Us.
At Calvin Presbyterian Church in Zelienople, Pa., north of Pittsburgh, one man described it as “the church for all the people who got kicked out of the rest of the churches,” and another as “church for the rest of us.”
She sees it as beginning with words that Jesus spoke: “Love God and love your neighbor.”
McLaren described, through the centuries, changing viewpoints on how the world works — and how periodically, such as when the medieval world gave way to modernity, there are fundamental shifts. And at this time, when the world is being transformed by technology and becoming increasingly secular, to talk about a new way of being church “isn’t just a small problem of our musical style,” he said. “Think of all the energy that’s been spent worrying about the stupidest things. … But there’s this deep thing going on.”
It’s an age, he said, when Christians bring more credibility to their faith by appreciating their Buddhist neighbors than by critiquing them, by sharing power through networks, by being post-institutional and post-organizational.
Some are forming communities of practice, “group spiritual practices of opening our souls to the reality and presence of the living God.”
And there are shifts in Christology. “If you want to call Jesus `Lord,’ shouldn’t you at least pay attention to the things Jesus said?” McLaren asked.
He predicted a resurgence in evangelism, although many “don’t want to be the marketing department for a narcissistic spiritual message.” That’s completely different from “being recruited for the healing of the world … right in the nick of time.”
