I love this article and appreciate how humbly and generously you approach the assertion that we may be talking two different religions here. I think we are. Not that I am looking for reasons for more schism. I’m a (60 something) postulant for the Episcopal priesthood. After leaving my Baptist roots just after college (I’m also gay), I entered a tradition that prides itself on its big-tent open-mindedness. “You don’t have to hang up your brain when you come inside” is a long-standing refrain. Which I embrace. At the same time, despite the precipitous decline of members in the Episcopal Church nationally, I have consistently attended, in very different parts of the country, congregations that were vigorous and growing. They were inclusive, they were largely politically progressive (though they tried to keep overt political messages out of the liturgy), they were intellectually honest and at times theologically adventurous, and at the same time they strongly believed in the resurrection of Christ and the centrality of the Eucharist and the Real Presence of Jesus at the Table. So, what do you call that? I think we need new words.
I read an essay the other day discussing the difference you are talking about. He saw it this way. Progressive churches think the number one problem in the world is injustice caused by people not living as Christ taught us to live and love and our job is to bring the love of Christ to the world. The other side thinks the biggest problems in the world are sin and lost people going to hell. Their mission is to convert the lost and get their sins forgiven. I guess the former are the ‘faith of Jesus” crowd. If the “faith in Jesus” version causes you to turn away from the poor and oppressed and actively support things that do them harm, count me out. If you only care about what happens to people in the afterlife you can justify all manner of casual cruelty.
I've been reading Machen this month...and I find him lacking. I'm Mainline, on UMC Conference Staff and describe myself as "ontologically conservative." I love this article because I've had a draft about a similar thing in my own notes. You are making me want to finish writing it.
The Episcopal Church’s fracture of the early 2000s was exactly the result of this. Our Progressives who are largely Faith of Jesus forced a series of votes that drove off Faith in Jesus groups. The Anglican Church of North America ACNA is the result. It is growing while TEC is 1/3 the size it was in 2000.
I deeply appreciate your attempt to write honestly and with vulnerability about hard stuff! I absolutely think it's deeply painful for us in this culture and age to say that there are better ways than other ways -- and that's the main claim of Christianity. I think for me, that's why I believe the center is trusting God. We can trust Him because we see Him so clearly at work in Christ, but He's not excluding anyone who doesn't yet know Christ either. Keep diving into the deep, these hard things to publish, they are some of the best!
Yup. Your instincts seem accurate. And what is so disturbing is that the two sides increasingly can't seem to understand what the other is talking about! Instead of probing into the deep theological issues that you perceive, people simply want to focus on presenting political epiphenomena such as human sexuality.
I read Machen back in the early 80s when I was a college student trying to come to terms with my call to ministry. The university was UM in affiliation, but not Christian in orientation. Sure, there was a chaplain, a chapel, and chapel services once a week. I was in the chapel choir (where people who knew how to sing could drown me out). I had a great experience and grew in my faith in my time on campus, but that growth mostly came from opposition to what was offered there.
Fast forward to today. After over thirty years as a UM Elder, I'm a pastor in the GMC. I saw how the UMC adopted a mission statement that tried to hold those two visions of Christianity together:
1. Make disciples of Jesus Christ
2. For the transformation of the world
One group was all about that making disciples of Jesus. That was their center.
The other group centered on the "for the transformation of the world."
Both are biblical, but torn apart as they too often were, the second could often be reduced to a political ideology helped along by Jesus the cheerleader. Most of those years it looked like a Democratic political ideology. (Now many of us in the GMC have to watch out for adopting the exact same emphasis but with a reduction to Republican political ideology.)
Like you, I know many faithful people who remained UM. The trajectory I saw that brought me to the GMC was what you point out in your piece: Incarnation & Resurrection too often reduced to metaphors (at best).
I was the chair of the Church Council at my UMC during disaffiliation. . It was a horrible PTSD inducing experience. Secular politics play a huge role in our situation. There was one man, who chaired our trustees, who wanted to disaffiliate because he did not like our female pastor, and he wanted to control our church. That one man stirred up so much enmity and division. He pushed lies and hate. After Church Council voted not to take a vote, that one man led a significant group of people to form a GMC congregation. Our UMC congregation is still going. That new church rented a building about one mile from our church campus, and from what I can see on that church’s website, they repeat nearly everything that was done in our congregation, even down to using the same children’s ministry programs and literature.
I have been UMC my entire life. I grew up in the South and lived in the Midwest for over 30 years. I have chosen to remain UMC because of prevenient grace and the open Communion table. I believe in lining up my life with the divine Jesus, God’s Son, who loves us and wants to help us connect ourselves to God. Out of that love Jesus extended to me, I should love and care for others because Jesus loves and cares for me.
The disaffiliation experience reminds me that focusing on imperfect people and imperfect institutions, like churches, is not a good idea.
I am no longer Church Council chair. For now, I remain the delegate to Annual Conference. I am still figuring things out spiritually.
I think you are on to something and probably said it better than most...or at least from our mainline vantage point. I've always considered myself an evangelical mainliner but I hesitate to use that first moniker anymore given it's political baggage. Thanks for creating some discussion.
I agree that there are faith in Jesus people throughout the Mainlines. But the capture of judicatories is a terrible problem, since it impacts clergy selection, training and deployment. The problem can reach right into a faithful pulpit when a "pastoral letter" comes down with a command to read it to the people on Sunday. ( I second several of the other comments admiring your humility and thoughtfulness. )
Thanks for this, Loren. Glad you published it. The contrast between faith in Jesus and faith of Jesus is something that invites us to say/ think, "Can't we do (be) both?" But in actual experience the two are often vividly distinct. One element is the operative anthropologist. Faith of Jesus looks upon us as basically decent people who need advice/ reminders to be good. Faith in Jesus understands us as sinners who need help, a Savior, redemption. I tried to address some of this in a recent piece of mine to which I link here.
I think this misses why mainline congregations are struggling in the first place, in a way that will just lead to more empty pews. As a ‘none,’ who left, let me frame it this way:
Mainline congregations lose congregants two ways.
The first is to other congregations, and this is the one they are least comfortable describing, because especially liberal mainline churches basically believe in universal communion and the brotherhood/community of Christ, so it seems unseemly to them to admit they are in competition for congregants with other churches. They want to welcome in worshipers from other congregations, and have a soft touch with congregants who leave in the hope they come back someday.
To be blunt: the evangelicals and megachurches don’t use this playbook; they are actively competing for congregants like franchises of a business conglomerate. Some of that is just the experience of going to one of these churches; they become ‘megachurches’ that are more or less luxury church experiences. Drop the kids off with a well funded Sunday school program, grab a latte in the lobby, attend a church service with high production value, including a high drama sermon from a charismatic leader of the church. Then kick back at brunch fully served in church facilities, where you can network with other congregants. Stay for some extra activities, from church sponsored sports leagues in attached gymnasiums, extra bible study. Come back Tuesdays and Thursdays for more such offerings, particularly if your kid is a preteen for confirmation classes, but also for all the social clubs the Church will arrange. They become one stop shops that can absorb the entire social life of a family, from extracurriculars for the kids, to social clubs for the adults; they will often help with schooling as well, either partnering with a religious private school or offering resources to support home schooling. They finance all this by leaning more heavily on their congregants for donations; they are big on tithing, and then asking for more with donations at every step of this full schedule offering. Their donations go heavily into growing the church itself, in facilities, in growing activity offerings to the congregants. The funds spent on external ministry are a sliver of what they reinvest in serving and growing their own congregations.
But that’s not the only way they compete: they compete on theology too. They are happy to grab onto social wedge issues and amplify them, and this is how they actively compete for congregants with mainline churches. They will bend over backwards to adopt interpretations of scripture that basically accommodate conservative political views, from abortion, to LGBTQ issues, the whole gamut. They are worse than the Catholic Church selling indulgences: at least the indulgences didn’t come with a preacher twisting scripture to tell the people buying indulgences that their activities were actually godly, that actually the people buying indulgence were the ‘real’ Christians living the ministry of Christ.
So they Hoover up mainline congregants with these political wedge issues. Every homophobic dad concerned his kid is a little too friendly with the kid of the gay parents at public school; every mom stressing out over her daughter watching YouTube podcasts from sex positive feminists, and so forth. They leave their mainline churches and go to churches that reaffirm their conservative political beliefs and call them godly.
And then it goes a step further, because it indoctrinates these new families into further conservative dogma, it wraps them up in these full schedule lifestyles within the church; in short they operate as non-denominational cults of personality. Once converted, the new congregants reach out to convert friends from their old congregations, and the mainline church loses more congregants, and more are inducted into the evangelical cults.
Which brings us to the second way mainline congregations are losing congregants: the people who see this happening and are dissatisfied with the mainline response, which is again to seek universal communion and community through Christ. The Evangelicals and the general array of aligned conservative churches— including conservative Catholic parishes— increasingly define being Christian in America (and Canada) as being aligned with conservative political beliefs, as being aligned against gays and women’s rights, as being for capitalism and so on and so forth, right on up to a VP who claims Christians have a hierarchy of love, and must be wary of ‘toxic Empathy.’ And then they go to their mainline churches and the response is this milquetoast hope that they can reconcile with their ‘brothers in Christ’ and find universal communion in the community of Christ. Never mentioned is Jesus’s ministry against the Pharisees, never mentioned is Jesus throwing tables over and whipping the moneychangers out of his father’s house for their blasphemy.
And so they leave, and they become religious nones, or people who only go to Church for Christmas and Easter.
And then for those that get themselves free from these evangelical cults, most of them do not find a home with the mainlines, because again, the mainline response is continually to seek reconciliation. The people escaping religious abuse don’t want reconciliation with the abusers they are escaping, so they become religious nones as well.
What you’re observing is that the churches actively recruiting from mainline congregations are the ones with full pews, they have the bulk the remaining congregants. And very much yes— that is very much connected to ministries that have strictly controlled dogma, harsh interpretations of the bible. This is how they lock those they have recruited from mainline churches into their blasphemous cults. By locking those recruits into dogma that prevents them from returning to mainline worship, they make sure the recruitment pipeline from mainline to Evangelism is one way.
But what you’re missing is that you’re losing more congregants through the second door to the nones, and that generally speaking, the community of Christ is losing more congregants to the nones. The evangelicals have more of what is left, but across Christendom in the US and Canada, there are fewer congregants. It’s the second door that most people leave through.
It’s also a missed opportunity to bring people in, to reverse the flow of nones and bring them back into congregations. If mainliners were willing to stand up for a Christian Left, to denounce the Christian Right as the Pharisees and blasphemers they are, more nones would be amenable to coming back. More of those who escaped the religious trauma of the Christian Right would stay for a Church they could feel safe in.
But here you are, contemplating adapting their methods, because you’re jealous of how many congregants they recruited through that first door.
Yes!! I've been saying this for years! The "Nones" are the Mainliners who don't go to church anymore because the Mainline Churches completely lost the thread of what this was even supposed to be about, and leaned into this bland (I love how you put it - milquetoast!) "love everyone" thing that has absolutely no spine and no deep theological or moral character. It's just a religion of niceness and glossing over real existential issues. Yawn.
I think there is something to this, but I feel like the theology just adapts to the social desire. If you don’t want to follow traditional Christian teachings on chastity, divorce, etc then yeah you’re going to decide that Jesus was just a moral teacher and the bible is a take it or leave it set of suggestions.
It feels like churches these days rise and fall based on whether they help young people get married and have children. The conservative churches are succeeding, the liberal churches are failing.
If the church is where you met your wife and who your kids play with, then it’s not “unnecessary overhead”. But if you’re just a single person who wants to sleep in and get brunch on Sunday, it is.
I realize this isn’t your main point but, just to comment on an underlying assumption—while there’s a practical need for numbers to sustain institutions, i wonder if we should get beyond numbers=success=spiritual correctness. Maybe conservative churches boom for not great reasons (certain, easy answer peddle well; so does tribalism). https://goodfaithmedia.org/have-the-quakers-completed-their-work-rethinking-religious-success/
The biggest issue facing the liberal mainlines is the low fertility rate of their members. Having presented their vision of why god created us, their members are saying “pass” on doing the same.
Of course people with few or no children often stray from the church too, but if every mainline member didn’t leave you’ll still seee a huge drop because they just aren’t having kids.
The question you’re unwilling to ask yourself is, “Is this heresy?”
For a teaching to be considered true, what opposes it must necessarily be false, and the defense of true teachings necessarily involves the denunciation of false ones. You appear reluctant to say, “sorry, but these folks are doing it wrong.” It’s an understandable reluctance; no one wants to see themselves as a self-righteous scold, but a teaching that goes undefended is a teaching that fails to be passed along.
I love this article and appreciate how humbly and generously you approach the assertion that we may be talking two different religions here. I think we are. Not that I am looking for reasons for more schism. I’m a (60 something) postulant for the Episcopal priesthood. After leaving my Baptist roots just after college (I’m also gay), I entered a tradition that prides itself on its big-tent open-mindedness. “You don’t have to hang up your brain when you come inside” is a long-standing refrain. Which I embrace. At the same time, despite the precipitous decline of members in the Episcopal Church nationally, I have consistently attended, in very different parts of the country, congregations that were vigorous and growing. They were inclusive, they were largely politically progressive (though they tried to keep overt political messages out of the liturgy), they were intellectually honest and at times theologically adventurous, and at the same time they strongly believed in the resurrection of Christ and the centrality of the Eucharist and the Real Presence of Jesus at the Table. So, what do you call that? I think we need new words.
I read an essay the other day discussing the difference you are talking about. He saw it this way. Progressive churches think the number one problem in the world is injustice caused by people not living as Christ taught us to live and love and our job is to bring the love of Christ to the world. The other side thinks the biggest problems in the world are sin and lost people going to hell. Their mission is to convert the lost and get their sins forgiven. I guess the former are the ‘faith of Jesus” crowd. If the “faith in Jesus” version causes you to turn away from the poor and oppressed and actively support things that do them harm, count me out. If you only care about what happens to people in the afterlife you can justify all manner of casual cruelty.
I've been reading Machen this month...and I find him lacking. I'm Mainline, on UMC Conference Staff and describe myself as "ontologically conservative." I love this article because I've had a draft about a similar thing in my own notes. You are making me want to finish writing it.
The Episcopal Church’s fracture of the early 2000s was exactly the result of this. Our Progressives who are largely Faith of Jesus forced a series of votes that drove off Faith in Jesus groups. The Anglican Church of North America ACNA is the result. It is growing while TEC is 1/3 the size it was in 2000.
Could say the same for those of us (like my APA) who got out over chicks in the pulpit in the late 70s and early 80s.
Chicks 🐥 in the pulpit sounds like a fowl development 🤔
I deeply appreciate your attempt to write honestly and with vulnerability about hard stuff! I absolutely think it's deeply painful for us in this culture and age to say that there are better ways than other ways -- and that's the main claim of Christianity. I think for me, that's why I believe the center is trusting God. We can trust Him because we see Him so clearly at work in Christ, but He's not excluding anyone who doesn't yet know Christ either. Keep diving into the deep, these hard things to publish, they are some of the best!
Yup. Your instincts seem accurate. And what is so disturbing is that the two sides increasingly can't seem to understand what the other is talking about! Instead of probing into the deep theological issues that you perceive, people simply want to focus on presenting political epiphenomena such as human sexuality.
I read Machen back in the early 80s when I was a college student trying to come to terms with my call to ministry. The university was UM in affiliation, but not Christian in orientation. Sure, there was a chaplain, a chapel, and chapel services once a week. I was in the chapel choir (where people who knew how to sing could drown me out). I had a great experience and grew in my faith in my time on campus, but that growth mostly came from opposition to what was offered there.
Fast forward to today. After over thirty years as a UM Elder, I'm a pastor in the GMC. I saw how the UMC adopted a mission statement that tried to hold those two visions of Christianity together:
1. Make disciples of Jesus Christ
2. For the transformation of the world
One group was all about that making disciples of Jesus. That was their center.
The other group centered on the "for the transformation of the world."
Both are biblical, but torn apart as they too often were, the second could often be reduced to a political ideology helped along by Jesus the cheerleader. Most of those years it looked like a Democratic political ideology. (Now many of us in the GMC have to watch out for adopting the exact same emphasis but with a reduction to Republican political ideology.)
Like you, I know many faithful people who remained UM. The trajectory I saw that brought me to the GMC was what you point out in your piece: Incarnation & Resurrection too often reduced to metaphors (at best).
I was the chair of the Church Council at my UMC during disaffiliation. . It was a horrible PTSD inducing experience. Secular politics play a huge role in our situation. There was one man, who chaired our trustees, who wanted to disaffiliate because he did not like our female pastor, and he wanted to control our church. That one man stirred up so much enmity and division. He pushed lies and hate. After Church Council voted not to take a vote, that one man led a significant group of people to form a GMC congregation. Our UMC congregation is still going. That new church rented a building about one mile from our church campus, and from what I can see on that church’s website, they repeat nearly everything that was done in our congregation, even down to using the same children’s ministry programs and literature.
I have been UMC my entire life. I grew up in the South and lived in the Midwest for over 30 years. I have chosen to remain UMC because of prevenient grace and the open Communion table. I believe in lining up my life with the divine Jesus, God’s Son, who loves us and wants to help us connect ourselves to God. Out of that love Jesus extended to me, I should love and care for others because Jesus loves and cares for me.
The disaffiliation experience reminds me that focusing on imperfect people and imperfect institutions, like churches, is not a good idea.
I am no longer Church Council chair. For now, I remain the delegate to Annual Conference. I am still figuring things out spiritually.
JennSH, I very much affirm what you say here. Thank you for saying it.
I think you are on to something and probably said it better than most...or at least from our mainline vantage point. I've always considered myself an evangelical mainliner but I hesitate to use that first moniker anymore given it's political baggage. Thanks for creating some discussion.
Thank you for saying it, well and with love.
I agree that there are faith in Jesus people throughout the Mainlines. But the capture of judicatories is a terrible problem, since it impacts clergy selection, training and deployment. The problem can reach right into a faithful pulpit when a "pastoral letter" comes down with a command to read it to the people on Sunday. ( I second several of the other comments admiring your humility and thoughtfulness. )
You're not wrong!
Thank you for so clearly and boldly stating some much-needed truth.
Thanks for this, Loren. Glad you published it. The contrast between faith in Jesus and faith of Jesus is something that invites us to say/ think, "Can't we do (be) both?" But in actual experience the two are often vividly distinct. One element is the operative anthropologist. Faith of Jesus looks upon us as basically decent people who need advice/ reminders to be good. Faith in Jesus understands us as sinners who need help, a Savior, redemption. I tried to address some of this in a recent piece of mine to which I link here.
https://anthonybrobinson747.substack.com/p/let-me-be-clear?r=880t9&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
I meant "anthropology" in above comment
Thanks for commenting. I read your stuff often as well.
I think this misses why mainline congregations are struggling in the first place, in a way that will just lead to more empty pews. As a ‘none,’ who left, let me frame it this way:
Mainline congregations lose congregants two ways.
The first is to other congregations, and this is the one they are least comfortable describing, because especially liberal mainline churches basically believe in universal communion and the brotherhood/community of Christ, so it seems unseemly to them to admit they are in competition for congregants with other churches. They want to welcome in worshipers from other congregations, and have a soft touch with congregants who leave in the hope they come back someday.
To be blunt: the evangelicals and megachurches don’t use this playbook; they are actively competing for congregants like franchises of a business conglomerate. Some of that is just the experience of going to one of these churches; they become ‘megachurches’ that are more or less luxury church experiences. Drop the kids off with a well funded Sunday school program, grab a latte in the lobby, attend a church service with high production value, including a high drama sermon from a charismatic leader of the church. Then kick back at brunch fully served in church facilities, where you can network with other congregants. Stay for some extra activities, from church sponsored sports leagues in attached gymnasiums, extra bible study. Come back Tuesdays and Thursdays for more such offerings, particularly if your kid is a preteen for confirmation classes, but also for all the social clubs the Church will arrange. They become one stop shops that can absorb the entire social life of a family, from extracurriculars for the kids, to social clubs for the adults; they will often help with schooling as well, either partnering with a religious private school or offering resources to support home schooling. They finance all this by leaning more heavily on their congregants for donations; they are big on tithing, and then asking for more with donations at every step of this full schedule offering. Their donations go heavily into growing the church itself, in facilities, in growing activity offerings to the congregants. The funds spent on external ministry are a sliver of what they reinvest in serving and growing their own congregations.
But that’s not the only way they compete: they compete on theology too. They are happy to grab onto social wedge issues and amplify them, and this is how they actively compete for congregants with mainline churches. They will bend over backwards to adopt interpretations of scripture that basically accommodate conservative political views, from abortion, to LGBTQ issues, the whole gamut. They are worse than the Catholic Church selling indulgences: at least the indulgences didn’t come with a preacher twisting scripture to tell the people buying indulgences that their activities were actually godly, that actually the people buying indulgence were the ‘real’ Christians living the ministry of Christ.
So they Hoover up mainline congregants with these political wedge issues. Every homophobic dad concerned his kid is a little too friendly with the kid of the gay parents at public school; every mom stressing out over her daughter watching YouTube podcasts from sex positive feminists, and so forth. They leave their mainline churches and go to churches that reaffirm their conservative political beliefs and call them godly.
And then it goes a step further, because it indoctrinates these new families into further conservative dogma, it wraps them up in these full schedule lifestyles within the church; in short they operate as non-denominational cults of personality. Once converted, the new congregants reach out to convert friends from their old congregations, and the mainline church loses more congregants, and more are inducted into the evangelical cults.
Which brings us to the second way mainline congregations are losing congregants: the people who see this happening and are dissatisfied with the mainline response, which is again to seek universal communion and community through Christ. The Evangelicals and the general array of aligned conservative churches— including conservative Catholic parishes— increasingly define being Christian in America (and Canada) as being aligned with conservative political beliefs, as being aligned against gays and women’s rights, as being for capitalism and so on and so forth, right on up to a VP who claims Christians have a hierarchy of love, and must be wary of ‘toxic Empathy.’ And then they go to their mainline churches and the response is this milquetoast hope that they can reconcile with their ‘brothers in Christ’ and find universal communion in the community of Christ. Never mentioned is Jesus’s ministry against the Pharisees, never mentioned is Jesus throwing tables over and whipping the moneychangers out of his father’s house for their blasphemy.
And so they leave, and they become religious nones, or people who only go to Church for Christmas and Easter.
And then for those that get themselves free from these evangelical cults, most of them do not find a home with the mainlines, because again, the mainline response is continually to seek reconciliation. The people escaping religious abuse don’t want reconciliation with the abusers they are escaping, so they become religious nones as well.
What you’re observing is that the churches actively recruiting from mainline congregations are the ones with full pews, they have the bulk the remaining congregants. And very much yes— that is very much connected to ministries that have strictly controlled dogma, harsh interpretations of the bible. This is how they lock those they have recruited from mainline churches into their blasphemous cults. By locking those recruits into dogma that prevents them from returning to mainline worship, they make sure the recruitment pipeline from mainline to Evangelism is one way.
But what you’re missing is that you’re losing more congregants through the second door to the nones, and that generally speaking, the community of Christ is losing more congregants to the nones. The evangelicals have more of what is left, but across Christendom in the US and Canada, there are fewer congregants. It’s the second door that most people leave through.
It’s also a missed opportunity to bring people in, to reverse the flow of nones and bring them back into congregations. If mainliners were willing to stand up for a Christian Left, to denounce the Christian Right as the Pharisees and blasphemers they are, more nones would be amenable to coming back. More of those who escaped the religious trauma of the Christian Right would stay for a Church they could feel safe in.
But here you are, contemplating adapting their methods, because you’re jealous of how many congregants they recruited through that first door.
Yes!! I've been saying this for years! The "Nones" are the Mainliners who don't go to church anymore because the Mainline Churches completely lost the thread of what this was even supposed to be about, and leaned into this bland (I love how you put it - milquetoast!) "love everyone" thing that has absolutely no spine and no deep theological or moral character. It's just a religion of niceness and glossing over real existential issues. Yawn.
I think there is something to this, but I feel like the theology just adapts to the social desire. If you don’t want to follow traditional Christian teachings on chastity, divorce, etc then yeah you’re going to decide that Jesus was just a moral teacher and the bible is a take it or leave it set of suggestions.
It feels like churches these days rise and fall based on whether they help young people get married and have children. The conservative churches are succeeding, the liberal churches are failing.
If the church is where you met your wife and who your kids play with, then it’s not “unnecessary overhead”. But if you’re just a single person who wants to sleep in and get brunch on Sunday, it is.
I realize this isn’t your main point but, just to comment on an underlying assumption—while there’s a practical need for numbers to sustain institutions, i wonder if we should get beyond numbers=success=spiritual correctness. Maybe conservative churches boom for not great reasons (certain, easy answer peddle well; so does tribalism). https://goodfaithmedia.org/have-the-quakers-completed-their-work-rethinking-religious-success/
Yes, you make a good point. I recently heard Ed Stetzer make the comments that “anti-woke is the new seeker sensitive.”
I also hear your point that institutions do need numbers to sustain. Thanks for your comments.
The biggest issue facing the liberal mainlines is the low fertility rate of their members. Having presented their vision of why god created us, their members are saying “pass” on doing the same.
Of course people with few or no children often stray from the church too, but if every mainline member didn’t leave you’ll still seee a huge drop because they just aren’t having kids.
The question you’re unwilling to ask yourself is, “Is this heresy?”
For a teaching to be considered true, what opposes it must necessarily be false, and the defense of true teachings necessarily involves the denunciation of false ones. You appear reluctant to say, “sorry, but these folks are doing it wrong.” It’s an understandable reluctance; no one wants to see themselves as a self-righteous scold, but a teaching that goes undefended is a teaching that fails to be passed along.