Is the Mainline Holding Together Two Different Faiths?

Is there a theological schism no one wants to name?

TL;DR:
After hearing two very different Mainline ordination services in the same day, I found myself revisiting Ben Crosby’s argument that liberal Christianity and historic Christianity may increasingly function as “two different religions.” Reflecting on Mainline decline, Canadian church closures, and differing understandings of Jesus, communion, and the church itself, I wrestle with whether many Mainline institutions are trying to hold together fundamentally incompatible theological visions—and whether that helps explain why so many churches now feel uncertain about their purpose.

The Catholic, UCC, and Anglican churches

The Two Religions—Still on My Mind

This week I attended an ordination service within the Mainline tradition.

I’m going to try to be intentionally generic here. My aim is not to belittle or insult the newly ordained pastor or the church involved.

But earlier that same day, I had listened to an ordination sermon from Jason Micheli, and I couldn’t shake how drastically different the two services felt.

In Micheli’s sermon, he boldly declared that Jesus was truly risen from the dead—something that, if I’m honest, I suspect at least some clergy in the other service might question or at least hedge around. More than that, Micheli proclaimed that the resurrection was not merely the resuscitation of a corpse, but that “God resurrects not his remains, but Christ’s entire life,” and that “Jesus is alive and exactly because he lives with death behind Him.”¹

It was strikingly different from what I heard later that day, where I repeatedly heard phrases like “Mystery untamed” and “Companion Jesus.”

And sitting there, I couldn’t help but think about a blog post I’ve had sitting in my drafts since last summer—one I wasn’t sure I actually wanted to publish.

But after experiencing those two ordination services in the same day, I keep wondering if maybe that original essay was onto something.

Again, I hesitate to say this. I generally dislike the online hot-takers who constantly trash progressive Mainline churches and pastors. So I say all this with some humility and hesitancy, recognizing I may be wildly wrong.

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Faith in Jesus, or faith of Jesus?

I recently read Ben Crosby’s essay Reconfessionalization, Rechristianization—an awkwardly titled but deeply thought-provoking piece arguing that Mainline Protestantism still lives in the long shadow of the liberal-fundamentalist battles of the early 20th century.

One idea in particular has stuck with me: Crosby’s distinction between the “faith in Jesus” and the “faith of Jesus.” In the post, Crosby discusses J. Gresham Machen’s book Christianity and Liberalism and argues that “our churches at present suffer from insufficient attention to the core Christian message of incarnation and redemption.”

But what has really stuck with me since is his—and Machen’s—claim that these are two different religions.

Here’s the quote I can’t shake:

“On the other hand, there is what Machen calls liberalism: a form of religion which rejects the specific historical claims made by Christianity as untenable in the face of modern science and history, and instead sees in Jesus an ideal of a life lived in conformity to the will of a (possibly-impersonal) God. The goal is not, for liberalism, faith in Jesus but the faith of Jesus, generally understood as a nondogmatic, experiential commitment to the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.”

“While Machen admits that he is treating these two religions as ideal types, and in the actual lives of mainline clergy and laity some combination of ‘liberal’ and ‘Christian’ beliefs are often held together, he argues that the two religions cannot ultimately coexist within the same ecclesial structure” (my emphasis).

A Canadian Case Study - Faith Without a Mediator

Crosby’s words stirred a memory of a trip to Canada a some years back. While there, a local pastor took us on a tour of Toronto’s historic downtown churches.

We visited three cathedrals: Anglican, Catholic, and United Church of Canada:

The Anglican cathedral was alive with music and people—an organ rehearsal filling the sanctuary with sound.

The Catholic cathedral was also buzzing with activity: people praying, a small funeral service underway, and a steady stream of visitors.

But the United Church sanctuary was eerily quiet.

A beautiful old Methodist building—now part of the UCC² since the 1925 merger—it stood nearly empty. Aside from the few of us visiting, no one was in there.

As we drove back, I was told that in one nearby region alone, 8 or 9 United Church congregations had closed since the early 2000s. The idea, at least as I heard it, was that the UCC had leaned heavily into what Crosby might call the “faith of Jesus”—a vision of Christianity that, while morally commendable, ultimately made the church feel optional.

What I found compelling in that observation—and what echoes Crosby’s concern—is that once Christianity becomes about living like Jesus without believing in Jesus and his work through the church, then the church becomes an “unnecessary overhead.”³

This aligns with something I’ve been convinced of for a while: people want to give themselves over to something bigger than themselves. For a time, big institutions like the United Church carried that kind of magnetism. But as trust in institutions has eroded, newer generations have found little compelling about a declining and seemingly irrelevant institution that offers nothing unique or revelatory—only “unnecessary overhead” getting in the way of doing “the work.”⁴

The Church Matters—Because Jesus Does

This way of thinking stands in stark contrast to voices like Andrew Root and Dwight Zscheile, who emphasize that Jesus and salvation are mediated through the church.

Root puts it boldly:

“The church’s only purpose is to proclaim to the world that God acts in the world for the sake of the world’s salvation.”
— Churches and the Crisis of Decline

“Christian faith is impossible outside the church.”
— Faith Formation in a Secular Age

And again, I struggle with this idea that we’re talking about two religions, but I’m reminded of the words of Zscheile and Pogue:

“Late-modern Western culture assumes every individual’s path to meaning and purpose is equally valid. It rejects any ultimate public framework for truth other than its own secular relativist one. Many faithful members of local churches have been shaped by this cultural ideology without even recognizing how deeply it contradicts the gospel of Jesus.”

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What Is Actually Happening at the Table?

I say this not as a right-wing hot-taker—or at least I hope not to be—but as someone still deeply committed to the Mainline and its often awkward but important mixture of inclusion, liberalism, academia, history, and faithfulness.

I was reminded this week of my own ordination into a Mainline denomination more than a decade ago, a burden and responsibility I still take extremely seriously. So my aim here is not simply to tear down institutions. Rather, I find myself wondering: are we unsuccessfully trying to hold together two fundamentally different understandings of Christianity within the same institutional structures?

UMC pastor and author Jack Shitama has repeatedly told me that human sexuality was never really the central issue in the UMC, but rather the most visible expression of a much deeper divide—namely, how we understand scripture, theology, and the faith itself.

I’m increasingly beginning to understand his point.

Not that everyone in the UMC or progressive Christianity⁵ is basically a wannabe Unitarian-Universalist.⁶ That would be unfair and inaccurate. But I do think Shitama is right that there are, at times, genuinely irreconcilable theological differences underneath the surface.

For my own part, I’ve chosen to remain within the more liberal branches of Christianity because, as much as they frustrate me at times, there are so many good, faithful pastors and churches whose ministry I deeply respect—plus I’ve found the faithfulness, discipleship, and spiritual fruit of many LGBT Christians impossible to simply dismiss, among other things.⁷

But I also don’t think this tension is merely about denominational distinctions or sexuality debates.

What struck me in the ordination service was not a disagreement over transubstantiation versus consubstantiation, to use a historical example. The deeper issue seemed to be whether communion was actually mediating something real—or whether it functioned primarily as a symbolic moral encouragement, a small spiritual and emotional boost to inspire us to do better.

By contrast, in Micheli’s sermon, he quite literally declared that “Jesus is on the table, because the table is in him.”

That is a radically different theological imagination.

Certainly, some traditions understand the Lord’s Supper more as remembrance than sacrament—I’m reminded of my own Baptist roots—but even there, what is being remembered is still death and resurrection, not merely a vague story about Jesus inspiring love, inclusion, or human flourishing.

Is What Happened in Canada Happening Here?

I’m not Canadian, nor do I have deep expertise on the United Church of Canada. But if those observations are accurate—and they resonate with what I’ve seen in similar contexts—it seems to me that an embrace of cultural ideology over theological identity can leave churches empty, both literally and spiritually.

Churches without theological confidence often become churches without people. A Christianity without creeds eventually becomes a Christianity without a congregation.

And once again, I return to Crosby’s unsettling but important question:

Can these two religions really coexist under one roof?

And this is where I come back to those two ordination services. Because, even as I sat as an observer in one, I couldn’t shake the feeling that, though the institutional words spoken over the ordinand asking their commitment and promise to serve the church and the ministry of God, there were two starkly different visions of Christianity at play.

Like, in Micheli’s vision of ministry, the pastoral role is about giving one’s life to Christ, and probably even more boldly than that—subsuming our life into the life of Christ.

In the other ordination service, the vision of ministry was something like helping people find their “divine spark” and “encounter mystery beyond themselves.”

I just don’t know how these don’t end up being two wildly different forms of ministry and quite obvious why the Mainline church is in such a state of disarray.⁸

A Final Hesitation

And this is where I keep finding myself torn.

Because on one hand, I genuinely do not want to become one of those cynical internet commentators constantly taking shots at Mainline pastors and churches. I know too many faithful, thoughtful, compassionate clergy within these traditions to simply dismiss them. More, I recognize my own limitations, biases, and blind spots. I may very well be wrong about all of this.

But at the same time, I can’t shake the growing sense that something deeper than “style” or “emphasis” is at stake.

When one ordination service centers on the risen Christ who conquered death, and another speaks primarily of “Mystery untamed” and “Companion Jesus,” it begins to feel like we are not merely describing the same faith with different language.⁹

It begins to feel like we are talking about fundamentally different religions.

Again, I hesitate even writing that sentence.¹⁰

But if Mainline Christianity becomes primarily about activism, inclusion, and human flourishing¹¹ detached from concrete claims about who Jesus is and what God has done through him, then I think we would all be better off with the Unitarian Universalists, rather than the “embarrassing God” of Christianity.¹²

And perhaps that is precisely what Crosby and Machen were trying to warn about.

Not that liberal Christianity lacks sincerity or compassion.
Not that progressive Christians are bad people.
But that at some point, the theological center shifts enough that we are no longer talking about the same thing.

Maybe I’m wrong.

Honestly, part of me hopes I am.

But I also increasingly wonder if the emptiness of so many Mainline churches is not simply about demographics, secularization, or institutional decline.

Maybe, at least in part, it is because people intuitively sense that a church unsure of what it believes about Jesus will eventually become unsure of why it exists at all.

Reconfessionalization, Rechristianization

1. I’ll be honest, I’m not sure I totally grasp what Micheli is saying here.

2. I’m not sure if the United Church of Canada technically uses the “UCC” moniker.

3. I really think this is the inverse of what is happening in Evangelicalism, where the Christian faith has been so individualized that people think they can be good Christians while rarely attending church.

4. Progressive Christianity moves people out of church.

The Death Spiral of Progressive Christianity: Why the Mainline Church is in Crisis

5. For instance Clint Schnekloth is a self-identified progressive pastor who I really respect.

6. I don’t mean to disrespect UU folks. It’s rather that I’m not sure we’re both Christians.

7. I’m adding this footnote after initial publishing because I want to be more clear that I affirm LGBT Christians.

8. Perhaps this is why, as I argued in a recent post, some seminaries seem increasingly to be forming activists rather than congregational pastors.

9. I’d add that I felt this tension in the moment as I heard the words. I know these are just words, but I’ve also repeatedly heard that “language matters.”

10. As uncomfortable as it is to admit, I cannot fully shake this concern. And to be clear, I am not arguing that social activism and deep Christian faith are irreconcilable.

11. Again, to be clear, I am pro-inclusion, human flourishing, and the church’s engagement with justice. The subtle but important distinction, however, is one Andrew Root highlights in his book on eschatology: acts of justice and mercy are not about constructing the Kingdom through our own efforts, but bearing witness to God’s coming reign.

12. I’m thinking of Eugene Peterson here, by way of Katherine Willis Pershey. I’m reminded here of his repeated concern that pastors not become primarily activists, managers, or religious entrepreneurs, but caretakers of souls and witnesses to the gospel.