Religion in America: Pumping life into mainline Protestantism
"When people talk about Protestantism, it's about evangelicalism and Pentecostalism," says Diana Butler Bass, a senior researcher at the Virginia Theological Seminary. "Most people think mainline Protestant churches are dead." Director of the Project on Congregations of Intentional Practice, a three-year study of 50 churches across the country that's scheduled to end in 2006, Bass set out to find whether the stereotype is true—or whether, as she puts it, there's "a new kind of mainline congregation developing in the United States that's moderate to liberal theologically, taking traditional Christian practices seriously, and is experiencing an unnoticed vitality."
"I've been going out and looking to see if enough of these congregations exist that we can say there's a trend. And now, 2-1/2 years later, I can say with perfect confidence that there is."
What traits do the churches share?
These are congregations that are constructing an alternative to the norm. They're not the most famous congregations in the country. Most of them are midsize, they don't have really famous pastors; they're not megachurches. Most of them are between 200 and 500 members. There's a cultural push that's making them relevant in the lives of younger adults. That's very unusual in the mainline. There are people in their 20s and 30s in addition to congregants in their 70s and 80s. So these churches are not the stereotypical picture of the mainline church in decline, where there are 25 members, all over the age of 60. We're looking at a phenomenon that's about 6 percent to 7 percent of all the mainline churches in the country, but this is very promising stuff and very unexpected. No one thought any of the mainline churches were doing anything very interesting.
You talk about these as "intentional" churches. What does that mean?
They think about who they are; they think about what they're doing, and they reflect on Christian tradition in very significant ways. They pick up patterns of practice out of Christian tradition. They do things like hospitality, which is not cookies and tea. It's a practice of welcoming the stranger into the heart of the community, and they do it in some radical ways. We have congregations that have huge homeless ministries, where the homeless are members of the congregation. One church found a need for a cerebral palsy live-in center, and they built the home on their church property. So you go there, and there are all these folks [who are] zipping around in their carts and are fully members of the church. It's a bringing-in of people who might otherwise find themselves outsiders.
One of the most interesting practices is "testimony." I was born in 1959 and brought up United Methodist. No mainliner ever talked about his or her faith. That was rude. There's a church in Connecticut where people get up and talk about the power of God in their lives and why their faith matters to them without being embarrassed or modest–a practice you typically associate with evangelical churches or African-American churches. But this is a white, elite congregation in the shadow of Yale Divinity School. These are people who are mostly moderate to theologically liberal churchgoers who testify one day and go out and protest labor practices on campus the next.
advertisement
