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.
There are a whole host of spiritual practices usually associated with individuals. An Episcopal church in Arlington, Va., reconstituted their congregational life by thinking of themselves as an urban abbey. It's a lay monastic vision of the ordering of one's life, but instead of being done out of a monastery, it's done out of a church. They have a certain expectation of study and scriptural text, service to the poor, and they ask the congregants to do a retreat once a year. [But] they don't have to wear hair shirts inside out or anything like that.
How did the intentionality come about?
Most of these churches engaged in a Christian practice of discernment. That simply means that people in the congregation began a process–this is so unlike the mainline Protestant churches I grew up in where they listened to God's voice, trying to discern what God would have for them. It sounds so simple, but most mainline churches became mired in very businesslike ways of doing things. They thought of themselves like companies and that if you applied strategic long-range planning, it would work, and it was very secular. Most of these churches rejected that and found ways to work that were spiritual. That was a radical thing for these churches to do. They broke with the ways of doing business that their parents and grandparents had. As one of my friends said, "It's not rocket science." When they go back to the simplest things, they're experiencing new growth. They didn't know they had everything they needed.
How do these churches differ from evangelical churches?
They have a different theological structure. Most of these churches have more ritualized forms of liturgy. They're connected to traditional denominations, so the forms of government are different. There's more openness to gay and lesbian people, and there's a complete acceptance of women clergy and the whole range of issues associated with contemporary feminism. They share something with evangelical churches, and that is [that] they're a lot more expressive. Religious experience matters. They believe in things like healing and even a sense of the miraculous. The Holy Spirit is very personal. They share that kind of emotive stuff, but the framework in terms of tradition, political issues, and theological emphasis is entirely different.
Can you quantify their vitality?
In these 50 congregations, most have grown by at least 10 percent over the past 10 years. However, we have a couple of congregations that have doubled in size. Calvin Presbyterian Church outside Pittsburgh has gone from 200 to 400 congregants. Another has gone from 500 to 1,400 in eight years. A good number of them have experienced some very significant growth. But none of them is declining, and even those in difficult areas are holding their own. They're not threatened by closure.
What lessons do you draw from these churches?
I think it's very suggestive of what you can do when you use your imagination and you allow a congregation to be creative. It offers a potential pattern that mainline congregations can embark on that could spark new life. It clearly has very political consequences because of the amalgam they are: They are liberal and socially active in terms of their public involvement. These places are very much the middle of American religion. They talk in a language of being in the middle. We were with them during the 2004 elections. They don't want to be used by the political extremes. They're extraordinarily upset about the characterization of congregations being identified with the religious right. They'd say, "We're faithful but we're not fundamentalists." They're interested in figuring out how to do that in the public square, and, if they do, that it might change the public conversation about the role of religion and party politics right now. So I think whatever happens will end up having public and political consequences.