Mainline Decline

There was an interesting study in 1993 that asked the question, "Why are mainline churches declining in numbers?" The answer was quite surprising (to me).

Looking primarily at Methodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, statistics tell us that between 1960 and 1990 these churches lost between 1/5th and 1/3rd of their membership. One reason put forward is simply the secularization of our society. This is problematic because, while secularization is a given, not all churches are declining. It would seem, then, that there was something in these churches peculiar to these churches that caused this decline. What was it?

The first step in finding the answer was to identify the apparent cause. The apparent cause was that young people brought up in these denominations tended to leave. Without a "next generation", it is obvious that the numbers would drop. So the next question was "Why are young people leaving?"

More theories abounded on this question. Was it that young people felt their churches were indifferent to society's suffering? In other words, was the church no longer "relevant"? Another was that young people were getting a higher education which would tend to distance them from religious belief. Perhaps they no longer agreed with the stance of the church on issues like abortion. All of these proved problematic because conservative churches were growing. So the quest for answers continued.

What the study finally concluded was this:

Orthodox Christian belief of one variety or other, which the fundamentalists and other conservatives in our sample espouse, seems to impel people to commit their time and other resources to a distinctively Christian regimen of witness and obedience in the company of other believers. Lay liberalism, on the other hand, is not an empowering system of belief but rather a set of conjectures concerning religious matters.

In other words, churches that embraced orthodoxy tended to grow while churches that espoused relativism were on the decline. The problem for mainline churches is "the weakening of the spiritual conviction". In other words, the churches that are growing answer the question, "What's so special about Christianity?" and the churches that are declining don't. Churches that teach, for example, that Jesus is the only way are growing and churches that preach "many ways to God" have nothing to offer.

To put it another way, it appears that preaching the truth despite its unpopularity tends to empower rather than disable people, and orthodoxy, rather than repelling, becomes attractive. So, tell me again ... why are so many tending to mitigate truth and appeal to "Can't we all just get along?"