The main line churches are all rotting away and waiting to be buried.
They get a little kick from the backlash of evangelical success from time to time, but the only thing that really keeps the United Methodist Church and the like from disappearing tomorrow is the tradition, reputation and the cold cash it inherited.
Modernist churches had a huge crash in membership since the 1960s, but it never bothered them at all. They don’t need ANY members. They have plenty of cash reserves to feed their preachers while they preach to empty seats about Social Progress and Integration and how Marx was actually just like Christ.
If you want to see the future of America’s mainline churches, go to England. There you can sit in a giant cathedral on Sunday with maybe a dozen other people and the preacher, who draws a governmet salary and money from centuries of gifts. He’ll be there next Sunday, and most of them don’t give a rip whether anybody else is there or not.
#1 by Don on 12/12/2004 - 10:00 am
That gives me an idea. Why don’t we sneak in and take over these lifeless denominations with their cash reserves and breath some new life and purpose into them. Our purpose. Their cash reserves. Can you imagine the United Methodists taken over by WOLs? Lordy. We could discuss “Why Johnny Can’t Think” in Sunday School. We could condemn political correctness as a great sin. Anything I’ve missed?
#2 by Roy Smith on 12/12/2004 - 12:18 pm
Considering what the Catholic Church allows it’s priests to do perhaps people staying out of church is just a precautionary measure?
#3 by Richard L. Hardison on 12/15/2004 - 8:30 pm
The Methodist Church used to the largest denomination in the country. The slide started in the 1890s when the editor of the their denominational magazine introduced a few Calvinist doctrines and began watering down the Old Wesleyan doctrines that built the denomination and, for all practical purposes, buried Calvinism in this country. The Calvinist denominations had already gone liberal by the 1890s, Presbyterians particularly, but the cancer had fully metastasized by 1960. All we are watching are the death throws.
I attend a Methodist Church in Pennsville, Ohio, and have found there are a number of very good people in the denomination. But, there has, in the last 10 years, grown a strong movement of evangelicals within the denomination and there is probably going to be a split soon. One Pastor I’ve talked with (shared my truck with him for the last two days, in fact) who is predicting the split will come by 2008. IN the liberal “Calvinist” denominations, most of the solid people have already left to form other groups.
What I am seeing, however, in the evangelical denominations is disturbing. The Southern Baptists have declined in evangelical fervor, and some of the doctrines held by the so called conservatives are simply loony. Penetecostals are more and more going over to charismania, the very stuff they used to preach against 40 years ago. More and more, you have to judge the individual congregations and not the denomination itself. The label simply doesn’t tell you much anymore.
The day of the centrally run denomination has ended. In fact, the entire church in the US isn’t growing anymore. Individual congregations are, but they are doing so at the expense of other congregations, not by evangelism. Some Assemblies of God minsters were voicing concerns on this very thingnot long ago. The Tennessee District, for example, in 1988, with 170 churches, had seen only 7 people saved in the entire year. This was typical for the other pentecostal denominations. The SBC was seeing simlar results (although they counted those who were “saved” but didn’t stay “saved” in their success statistics). The Assemblies of God, however, was growing at a phenominal rate during this period. When the growth was studied to find out why they were growing with so few evangelical results they found the growth tracked almost exactly with the decline of the United Methodist Church.
Anyone familiar with US history should be deeply concerned by the above. Touqueville would be predicting the end of the US because righteousness was no longer thundering from the pulpits and few people in this country have any desire to live righteously. If the country were spirtually healthy neither Kerry or Bush would have been seriously considered for the presidency.