Whither Mainline Protestantism? (Part I)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that mainline Protestantism in the United States is in no good health. Simply put, every mainline Protestant denomination is losing, if not hemorrhaging, members. (It is less acknowledged, though equally true, that Roman Catholicism's numbers would be no better were it not for the many Latino immigrants to this nation. Though the reasons, and perhaps some of the solutions, for this are much the same, it is beyond my purview at this time.)

Much of the decline is due to two factors that we can do very little about:

1. Demographic changes, i.e., plummeting birth-rates in the white middle-class and the decline of the American small town. I have experienced the latter first-hand. (Incidentally, my birth-rate has been, and will remain, as steady as it ever was.) Real communities have been under assault by a mentality of hyper-mobility that seized us in the years after the Second World War and has only worsened. The great majority of both the congregations I serve in Dixon are members 55 years of age, or older, because their children have moved elsewhere, be it the suburbs, the Southwest, or somewhere else equally unpalatable. (Mr Wendell Berry speaks eloquently on the "boomers" and "stickers" of America.) Solving this particular problem requires more moral character than our society is capable of, at least at this time. We will, eventually, be forced to confront the problem of hypermobility, when we finally reap the consequences of an economy founded on improvidence. But that may be decades, perhaps generations, in the future.
2. Unprecedented disillusionment with all social institutions, cultural and religious. Consider the numbers of unions, of bridge clubs, of the Knights of Columbus: every group with a notion of "membership" — an extraordinarily important and rich concept in Christianity that is almost never adequately emphasized — has seen its numbers decline. This is only exacerbated by advancements in technology, which have served to make each man bound in a nutshell (though, he might believe, king of infinite space). Society is atomized, a state from which it will not soon recover.

Realistically speaking, we must accept that the Church will be smaller. Never again will it have the cultural and moral influence on American society it has enjoyed for centuries. I am optimistic that this will be beneficial for the Christian faith, as it will at least reduce that dangerous tendency towards complacency, towards an imagined sense of security.

(Here it is worth remembering Rudolf Bultmann: "The world's resistance to God is based on its imagined security, which reaches its highest and most subversive form in religion." — Das Evangelium des Johannes, tr. G.R. Beasley-Murrary [Oxford: Blackwell, 1971], p. 267)

But there is a third reason for the precipitous drop in church membership, one that should concern us very much and which we can work to amend. Simply put, the mainline Protestant denominations have lost their justifications for existence. Why do we go to church? It is not for entertainment, for better entertainment can be found elsewhere. It is not to solve social problems, for there are far more efficient means of effecting social change. It is not to socialize, for there are surely other groups of people far more tolerable than any given parish. (I admit, of course, that people do in fact attend church for these reasons. Indeed, they are not bad reasons. But they are not sufficient reasons to justify the Church's existence.) We go to church because it is our bounden duty and our joy to praise and serve God; because we draw strength — indeed, our very reason for being — from the twin sources of Word and Sacrament. Any church, of any denomination, that has forgotten this has no business remaining a church.

I wish to examine this further, but I dare not exhaust my reader's patience. That is to say: to be continued.