There is no more urgent question for American Christians than this: What’s wrong with the American Christian church and how can its witness and ministry be renewed?
Virtually everyone agrees that something is radically wrong with the church. Inside, there’s more polarization and conflict than ever, with all factions agreeing (for different reasons) that the church is in deep trouble. Outside the church, observers including journalists and sociologists either bemoan or celebrate the church’s decline numerically, institutionally, and in influence.
Some don’t see any way forward for the church at all. At one end of the spectrum are those very conservative professing Christians who have denounced most of Christianity as apostate for many years. They’re sure that there’s no way back for the irredeemably corrupt institutional church. At the other end are the most secular, who have high hopes that religion will die out across the world over the next generations. They simply want to “empty the pews.”
Neither outcome is likely—though, as in other cases, social media magnifies and gives the impression that such opinions are more representative and powerful than they are. The global Christian church is growing rapidly (as is Islam) and most demographers and social scientists don’t see either religion in general or Christianity in particular fading away into an inconsequential force, even in the West. If that’s the case, what should be done? How should the Christian church understand what’s wrong and what a path to renewal could look like?
Decline of the Mainline
The best method for understanding the way forward is to begin by recounting the story of the American church’s decline.
The American church after World War II seemed to be strong and flourishing. In 1952, a record 75 percent of Americans said religion was “very important” in their lives. In 1957, over 80 percent said that religion “can answer today’s problems.” Church affiliation during the 1950s jumped from 55 percent to 69 percent. From 1950 to 1960, the U.S. population went from 150 to 180 million, a record growth aided by the post-war baby boom. In the late 1950s, almost half of all Americans were attending church regularly. This was the highest percentage in U.S. history.
Virtually everyone agrees that something is radically wrong with the church.
Another remarkable feature of this religious surge was how ubiquitous it was. Religion flourished, it seemed, in every class, race, region, and denomination. Catholicism seemed to finally be entering the cultural mainstream, no longer just a working-class or ethnic church. Archbishop Fulton Sheen had a large following on radio and television. The African American church stood front and center in the great social changes of the Civil Rights Movement, led by Martin Luther King Jr. Even conservative white Protestants were on the upswing with the wildly successful ministry of Billy Graham, who was himself part of a new alliance of organizations and leaders who sought to distinguish themselves from fundamentalism, calling their movement “evangelicalism.”
Mightiest of all was mainline Protestantism, consisting of the Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopal, Presbyterian, American Baptist, and the United Church of Christ (congregational) denominations. Their buildings were at the center of nearly all historic downtowns, their schools and institutions were of the highest prestige, and their endowment funds were enormous.
Reversing the Trend
Yet this seemingly high watermark led almost immediately to unprecedented church decline that began first with the mainline denominations. From a high of 3.4 million members in the mid-1960s, the Episcopal Church declined to 2.4 million by the early 1990s. In 2019, it recorded 1.6 million members. The mainline Presbyterian Church had 4.25 million members in 1965, but by 2000, they numbered 2.5 million, and in 2020, 1.25 million. Other major denominations have shown similar precipitous declines. By the mid-1970s, it had become clear that something was afoot that had never happened before:
For the first time in [the] nation’s history most of the major church groups stopped growing and begun to shrink. . . . Most of these denominations had been growing uninterruptedly since colonial times. . . . Now they have begun to diminish, reversing a trend of two centuries.
Those words were written by Dean Kelley in his bombshell 1972 book, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing. Kelley was a legal scholar who worked for the National Council of Churches—the council of mainline Protestantism. He was not a conservative; he lobbied against prayer in public schools and served on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Yet Kelley’s criticism of the mainline church was searing.
In those early years of decline, Kelley heard mainliners complain that “people are just not as religious anymore,” and he responded in his book:
Not all religious bodies are shrinking. While most of the mainline Protestant denominations are trying to survive what they hope will be but a temporary adversity, other denominations are overflowing with vitality, such as the Southern Baptist Convention, the Assemblies of God, the Churches of God, the Pentecostal and Holiness groups, the Evangelicals, the Mormons, . . . Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists, Black Muslims, and many smaller groups.
Kelley’s Sociological Critique
So what was the problem? The appeal of religion, Kelley wrote, was that it provided “largest-scale meanings.” These aren’t the genuine but small-scale meanings such as helping others in the neighborhood or volunteering for a good cause. Rather, largest-scale meanings enable people to face suffering and death with confidence and hope and to seek the long-term common good, making sacrifices for it, all because they know they’re part of a “cosmic purpose.” The only “largest-scale meanings that seem suitable to produce such results [are] those offered and validated by religion.”
Kelley argued that conservative churches continued to focus mainly on spiritual needs and supernatural largest-scale cosmic meanings—the reality of God, the truth of Jesus’s resurrection, the power of the Holy Spirit for inward change, the efficacy of Jesus’s death for the forgiveness of sins, the eventual arrival of the kingdom of God.
Liberal mainline churches, on the other hand, had adapted heavily to modern secular thought. They rejected the concept of miracles, of being born again by the Spirit, of Jesus’s bodily resurrection, of a trustworthy Bible. They adopted, in Kelley’s words, “relativism, . . . lukewarmness [and] individualism,” all of which he identified as “evidences of social weakness”—that is, marks of a weakening community that cannot coalesce powerfully around a life of shared faith, meaning, forgiveness, love, and spiritual growth in God. The mainline churches adopted the therapeutic view of the self and dropped traditional Christian ethical strictures around the use of sex and money. Kelley responded with what he called the “Minimal Maxims” for a strong religious body:
Those who are serious about their faith:
1. Do not confuse it with other beliefs/loyalties/practices, or mingle them together indiscriminately, or pretend they are alike, of equal merit, or mutually compatible if they are not.
2. Make high demands of those admitted to the organization . . . and do not include or allow to continue within it those who are not fully committed to it.
3. Do not consent to, encourage, or indulge any violations of its standards or belief or behavior by its professed adherents.
4. Do not keep silent about it, apologize for it, or let it be treated as though it made no difference, or should make no difference, in their behavior.
So what was the “mission” now of the mainline churches? Kelley said these denominations had come to concentrate almost completely on political causes rather than on leading people to faith and then building them up in their faith. They also moved beyond the simple call (that the church had expressed for centuries) for Christians to be “salt and light” in the world, caring for their neighbors, working for a more just society, and helping the poor. Instead, the mainline churches identified themselves—and therefore Christianity—with particular political parties and social policies. The unique things that only the church could do had been abandoned and things that were better done by the liberal political parties were now seen as the main job of the modern denominations.
These denominations concentrated almost completely on political causes rather than on leading people to faith and then building them up in their faith.
Kelley, though himself a political and theological liberal, predicted churches that continued to turn themselves into political organizations would see continued decline. And, in hindsight, there was a warning to conservative churches not to do the same thing with the Republican Party that the mainline had done with the Democratic Party. Kelley has been almost completely ignored on all fronts. He received heavy criticism from the left and, after a little enjoyable schadenfreude, conservative Christians failed to take his warnings seriously. That’s why most of the readers of this article may not have heard of him.
Machen’s Theological Critique
Fifty years before Kelley wrote, a completely different kind of critique against the mainline church was published. In 1923, J. Gresham Machen published Christianity and Liberalism with a major New York publisher (Macmillan). A professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, Machen wrote when there wasn’t yet numerical or institutional decline. There was no diminishment or loss to be analyzed yet from a sociological viewpoint the way Kelley did 50 years later. Yet Machen took aim at the Protestant mainline because he saw it shedding its historic religious beliefs and faith in an effort to become acceptable to the modern world. He argued,
The great redemptive religion which has always been known as Christianity is battling against a totally diverse type of religious belief, which is only the more destructive . . . because it makes use of traditional Christian terminology. . . . Manifold as are the forms in which the movement appears, the root of the movement . . . is naturalism—that is, in the denial of any entrance of the creative power of God (as distinguished from the ordinary course of nature) in connection with the origin of Christianity.
Protestantism knew that modern science would object to Christian “particularities”—all the main doctrines of the Christian faith as historically held, such as the virgin birth of Christ, the pre-existence and incarnation of Christ, the atonement on the cross, and the bodily resurrection. In response, Machen observed, “The liberal theologian seeks to rescue certain of the general principles of religion, of which these ‘particularities’ are thought to be mere temporary symbols, and these general principles he regards as constituting ‘the essence of Christianity.’”
Machen’s assessment was even more searing than Kelley’s. He argued that liberalism’s attempt to create a de-supernaturalized Christianity “has really relinquished everything distinctive of Christianity, so that what remains is in essentials only that same indefinite type of religious aspiration which was in the world before Christianity came upon the scene.” The changes were no mere tweaks or updates. They altered Christianity at the most fundamental level, turning it into something that was not Christianity at all.
There have always been religions in the world that aspired to a higher form of living, providing various sorts of inspiring stories that encouraged a higher-toned life. All of these religions were forms of self-salvation through various ethical practices, religious observances, and transformations of consciousness. But Christianity was and is wholly different. It insists that we’re saved not by what we do but by what God in Christ has done for us in history—in his incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension. Machen understood that if one loses a belief in the historical reality of these events, then whatever Christianity is left is now remade into just another religion of works-righteousness. And that removes the main thing that differentiates Christianity from all other faiths. In his chapter on salvation, he writes,
If Christian faith is based upon truth [of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus], then it is not the faith which saves the Christian but the object of the faith. . . . To have faith in Christ means to cease trying to win God’s favor by one’s own character; the man who believes in Christ simply accepts the sacrifice which Christ offered on Calvary. The result of such faith is a new life and all good works; but the salvation itself is an absolutely free gift of God. . . . Very different is the conception of faith which prevails in the liberal church. According to modern liberalism . . . salvation is thought to be obtained by our own obedience to the commands of Christ. Such teaching is just a sublimated form of legalism. Not the sacrifice of Christ but our own obedience to God’s law is the ground . . . of acceptance with God.
As we have noted, Machen wrote when there were no signs yet of numerical or institutional decline. And his critique didn’t include a prediction of such decline—Machen believed that the changes were lethal to the actual life and mission of the Christian church, whether or not this led to changes in attendance and giving.
It’s impossible not to see how Kelley’s analysis of mainline decline in many ways (despite the sharp difference in viewpoints) agreed with Machen’s. Machen said the church was abandoning the main things that were unique to the Christian faith. Kelley agreed. Kelley, speaking sociologically, wrote of connecting people to “largest-scale meanings” while Machen, speaking theologically, wrote of connecting people vitally to God.
Instead, the church was becoming a social service agency and political lobbying bloc, performing functions that could be done far better by secular organizations. No wonder it was in decline. The mainline church was increasingly offering people nothing that the secular culture and its institutions could not offer. If I want to work for inclusion and justice, there are lots of ways to do it. Why do I have to get up early on Sunday morning or connect to a Christian church with all its baggage in order to do that?
Marsden’s Cultural Critique
There was, however, a final reason for mainline decline that wasn’t apparent until decades later. The historian George Marsden argues in The Twilight of the American Enlightenment that the Protestant mainline had allied itself to a secular moral consensus that was inherently unstable. When it began to give way, mainline Protestantism began to slide as well.
The mainline church was increasingly offering people nothing that the secular culture and its institutions could not offer.
After World War II, America emerged as the world’s military and economic power. Our population was growing rapidly, as were our incomes and bank accounts. It all seemed to be a triumph of “American values.” There seemed to be unity in our shared moral standards. There was nothing like the “culture wars” of the present—morality was seen as obvious and as a given.
But Marsden chronicles how the seemingly unified and optimistic 1950s contained a strong undercurrent of doubt, hinting that something was profoundly wrong with us. Leading intellectuals claimed that materialism and popular culture were turning Americans into conformists, cogs in a great machine. The answer, said many public intellectuals of the time, was to assert one’s individual freedom and become authentic, self-determining, and self-fulfilled persons.
However, freedom was increasingly being defined as “autonomy,” a word that meant literally to be a law unto oneself. Historically, human fulfillment and meaning were understood to be found not in a quest to find our own singular happiness but rather in seeking the happiness of families and communities through relationships and roles in which the group’s common good was made more important than one’s individual self-interest.
But by the late 1950s and early 1960s, a steady stream of best-selling books, such as David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, called Americans to be more authentic and self-determining, to not allow family or any local “subcommunities” to dictate their values and purposes. We become full persons, it was said, only as we leave the moral prescriptions of others and discover our own. The term “freedom” was becoming an almost wholly negative term—a freedom only from. However, Marsden asked, “Once one was free from restrictive traditions or expectations, what was going to replace them as a basis for determining what was good for human flourishing?”
Virtually the only major cultural figure to sound an alarm in the U.S. was the eminent writer and journalist Walter Lippmann. Lippmann was a nonreligious Jew who was at the center of the secular liberal establishment. But in 1955 he wrote his last book, Essays in the Public Philosophy, which dismayed his peers. “His heresy,” as Marsden writes, “was to say that his liberal colleagues were trying to build a public consensus based on inherited principles, even after they had dynamited the foundations on which those principles had first been established.”
He charged that our liberal American values (whether fully executed or not)—equal dignity of all people; freedom of conscience, thought, and speech; government by consent; trust in science and reason—were not the deliverances of science. Originally, these American ideas were based on transcendent moral standards, a higher “universal order” that we could all recognize as the truth.
Lippmann was no theist, and so he was speaking more in the tradition of Aristotle. But he insisted that unless a society could recognize an objective moral order, a set of standards that weren’t merely produced by culture or our private feelings, there was no grounding for a public, shared social order: “If what is good, what is right, what is true, is only what the individual ‘chooses’ to ‘invent,’ then we are outside the traditions of civility.” He meant that no one had ever tried to create a social common life on such a basis. Who is to say that one particular law is just and another unjust? Do we do it by majority vote? Then what do we say to Germany, whose majority thought it was right to persecute and even destroy minorities?
Lippmann was right that our original “American values” originated in an agreement between Christians who believed these were the teachings of the Bible and Enlightenment thinkers who believed as the ancients in “natural law”—a transcendent, moral order in the universe that was discernible through human reason and reflection. But in 1955, the American modern liberal establishment was aghast at Lippmann. They reviewed his book negatively and pushed back, saying that returning to belief in God or natural law was dangerous and completely unnecessary. A “nondogmatic, relativistic, pragmatic” way of testing beliefs was the best. Our values are just things “we all know” that will benefit human beings best and will make most people happy. They’re not rooted in God or in a cosmic order.
Interestingly, the leading public intellectual of mainline Christianity, Reinhold Niebuhr, also rejected Lippmann’s book.
Niebuhr, just as Machen had predicted, had adapted the faith to secular science. He wrote that “we” modern Protestant believers “do not believe in the virgin birth and we have difficulty with the physical resurrection of Christ. We do not believe . . . that revelatory events validate themselves by a divine break-through in the natural order.”
There were things in the Bible that modern secular people could not accept, and liberal Protestants therefore rejected them too. The standard of truth, in other words, was not supernatural revelation but instead secular practical reason. The Bible didn’t determine what was right and wrong in the secular modern view—the secular modern view determined what was right or wrong in the Bible. So Niebuhr agreed with other critics that Lippmann’s call to return to religion or natural law was wrong and unnecessary. All rational persons could just agree that a commitment to democracy, human rights, and individual freedom was simply reasonable.
However, as Marsden asks (and as Machen had argued decades before), what need then was there for the church at all?
The grand irony of that strategy was that, while Niebuhr himself used it effectively as a way to preserve a public role for the Christian heritage, its subjective qualities made the faith wholly optional and dispensable. . . . One could simply bypass the theology and adopt the profound insights into human limitation that Niebuhr offered.
End of America’s Cultural Unity
Lippmann was right. Even as a relativistic, secular worldview had taken the place of the Christian/Enlightenment view, the older consensus on moral values was still maintained temporarily because of enormous common enemies—a Great Depression and two world wars. These crises required self-sacrifice for one’s family and community merely to survive and necessarily muted the culture’s therapeutic and individualizing underpinnings. There was still great agreement across the political spectrum on what a good, moral life looked like. Love of country, sexual chastity, faithfulness, thrift and generosity, modesty and respect for authority, sacrificial loyalty to one’s family and relationships—nearly everyone believed in all of these even if there were plenty of deviations in actual behavior.
But by the late 1960s, such survival challenges were just memories, and as people followed the culture’s direction to discover truth within themselves, they began to come to radically different conclusions about what was right and wrong. American society began to splinter and has been doing so ever since.
The original Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. had pointed (as Lippmann had counseled) to a higher moral law. “What gave such widely compelling force to King’s leadership and oratory,” Marsden writes, “was his bedrock conviction that moral law was built into the universe.” But by the time King was assassinated in 1968, very different forces were already at work. All the coming “rights” movements for women, gay people, and other minorities modeled themselves in some ways on King’s movement (e.g., the protests and activism), but the philosophical framework was completely different.
Identity politics grounded claims for justice not in an objective moral order but in their own group’s unique perceptions and experiences. Individualism eroded traditional values such as love of country, loyalty to family bonds, and respect for authority. And many of these groups, especially those demanding sexual rights, had beliefs about morality at sharp variance with traditional Western, Protestant ethics. The country began to break up into warring factions.
Why? No leading cultural figures could point, as Lippmann and King did, to a higher law or to the Bible. The Protestant establishment had given up its ability to do that. Everyone had assumed that secular, pragmatic, commonsense reasoning would come to an agreement on social mores. When that failed, there was no court of appeal or rationale available in any discussion of moral values. If someone called out injustice by saying, “What you’re doing is wrong—because I feel it’s wrong,” there was no answer for the rejoinder “But I don’t feel it’s wrong—why then should your feelings about this be privileged over mine? What right do you have to impose your views on me?” Since our society had discarded any shared basis for moral values—religion and natural law—there was nothing left to unite us at all, no basis for a debate. As Lippmann argued, no society had ever sought to do this before, and he doubted it could be done.
Identity politics grounded claims for justice not in an objective moral order but in their own group’s unique perceptions and experiences. The country began to break up into warring factions.
And as the country began to break apart, mainline Protestantism began to slide. First, it began to lose those who were coming to less straight-line, politically liberal conclusions. It lost political conservatives, but that was just the start. Later it continued to decline because even the children of liberal Christians, as Kelley and Machen had pointed out, failed to see any real usefulness to the Christian church.
Ironically, Niebuhr saw that increasing secularism put the longtime American impulse toward rampant individualism on steroids. As religion declined and secularism grew, selfishness grew apace. He spoke of the “self-glorification” encouraged by modern culture, which was leading people to use wealth and sexuality not just as good gifts but as ways to create an identity. He spoke of the idolatries of secular liberalism (that deified human reason), fascism (that deified race and soil), and socialism (that deified the state).
But as Marsden adds, Niebuhr’s “chastening words regarding the human condition could be welcomed, but his generalized Christianity offered little to challenge most of the secularizing trends that he himself identified.” Mainline Protestantism was no longer about radical conversion, about an encounter with a transcendent God and the reordering of the loves of the heart. It was about ethics and politics, and it had adopted too many of secularism’s assumptions to be any real challenge to it.
Mainline Not the Way Forward
All the mid-20th century figures who assured us that pragmatic common sense and scientific reason could bring about a unified moral consensus have been proved terribly wrong. The polarization in our society has become severe and the disagreements are about the most basic ideas of what human nature is and what human flourishing looks like. There is no longer any common set of “American values” or a unifying “American story.”
And the decline of mainline Protestantism, once the unofficial religion of America, was both a cause and a result of this breakdown in American society. It paved the way to the secularization of culture (rather than resisting it) and then became the victim of the same wave it had facilitated.
In light of the rightful critiques of Kelley, Machen, and Marsden, I believe that progressive mainline Protestantism cannot be the way forward for the American church. This is not to dismiss all the leaders and people who labor with genuine faith in the mainline congregations. But the overall project of mainline Protestantism has failed.
Today, in light of the discrediting failures within Catholicism and evangelicalism, many are resurrecting the idea that progressive Christianity—which is simply an extension of the mainline—is the best alternative. But the fundamental assumptions of mainline Christianity remain intact. It overadapted to Western secular culture 100 years ago and it’s still doing so today. And as such, it can’t offer our society an alternative or counterpoint, nor can it be the path to renewal for the American church.
Decline of Evangelicalism
I’m privileged to serve with Redeemer City to City, a ministry that helps national leaders plant churches and reach their countries’ greatest global cities. That means many of the leaders I work with are non-Western Christians. And there’s one question I’ve heard repeatedly over the past three years from these brothers and sisters: “Have U.S. evangelicals lost their minds?”
If you’re distressed about the condition of the church in America, consider how we must look to our brothers and sisters in Christ abroad!
No one thinks the current state of our American churches is a good one. Let’s now consider the factors that have led to the decline of evangelicalism, and later I’ll lay out some ideas for renewal and a way forward.
Concerning Trends
As we’ve just explored, the most culturally dominant religious bodies in the U.S. for centuries—those of mainline Protestantism—went into a sharp decline in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A generation ago, mainline Protestantism was the largest religious category and the most culturally dominant, followed by Roman Catholicism and then evangelicalism.
But in the last quarter of the 20th century, mainline Protestantism essentially switched places with evangelicalism. After distancing itself from fundamentalism in the 1940s and 1950s, evangelicalism grew. The liberal theology and politics of the mainline alienated the more conservative U.S. population. Millions left the mainline and gravitated toward evangelical churches. By the first decade of the 21st century, about 30 percent of Americans identified as “born-again” evangelicals.
Since 2007, however, evangelicalism has begun its own decline. All indications are that in the coming years an unprecedented number of younger Americans will be leaving churches and institutional religion of all kinds behind. But why?
Why Is Faith in General in Decline?
Background: the secularization of the elites.
A process called “secularization” has been going on in Western societies for several centuries, mainly among highly educated elites, though it gathered steam among the general population after World War II in Europe and after the 1960s in North America. The bloody European wars of religion in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries led many to search for a basis for a society that didn’t require a common church or set of religious beliefs. The “Enlightenment Project” was an attempt to explain the human situation and arrive at moral values using only neutral, objective human logic and science, not religion. Secularization has two basic features.
All indications are that in the coming years an unprecedented number of younger Americans will be leaving churches and institutional religion of all kinds behind.
Enforced privatization of religion. Science and technology are considered the only ways to understand and solve human problems. Beliefs and values based in religion are never to be invoked in serious public discourse (except in the most general “In God We Trust” references). This has made religion seem irrelevant to society.
Radical individualism. The move from religion to the use of one’s reason was accompanied by a move from communities to individuals as the main building block of society. The West developed a view of the emancipated self that must be free to determine its own moral choices. This automatically makes religious norms look like a threat to selfhood.
Foreground: the secularization of the masses.
The therapeutic view of the self now guiding our culture creates a transactional, cost-benefit individualism that applies the concepts of the marketplace to all relationships. Yuval Levin says increasing social distrust undermines not only religion but all institutions, political leaders, the military, colleges and universities, and the family itself. This in turn has accelerated the erosion of religion. Ross Douthat has explored several factors at play in this erosion.
The political polarization of culture and church. People look for religion substitutes such as politics. The two U.S. political parties have changed into almost uniform left-wing and right-wing groupings. The mainline church aligned tightly with the left and evangelicals with the right, weakening the church’s credibility in the broader culture. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam explains and argues this well.
The sexual revolution. This cultural tide came from the belief that sexual expression is central to an authentic identity. Thus the Christian sexual ethic became successfully branded as unreasonable (an ideal no one can live up to) as well as psychologically unhealthy and oppressive.
The growth in higher education and social media. In 1940, only 4 percent of the population had a bachelor’s degree; today, it’s over 33 percent. Secularization originated in the intellectual classes, and the academy now exercises greater influence in society.
Failure of the Enlightenment Project
The result of the individualism of the Enlightenment has been the decline of all human communities—institutions, neighborhoods, and families—leading to greater isolation, loneliness, anomie, anxiety, and depression. This didn’t happen all at once. The “cultural capital” of Christianity continued to provide unity in Western culture for centuries, since the vast majority of the population went to church even if the “elites” were largely secular. Even today the main values of Western secularism are those derived from Christianity.
But as the percentage of the population going to church declined, and as the radical individualism of the West became more pervasive, the original Enlightenment vision of a society based on secular human reason alone came largely to pass. But it hasn’t led to unity at all. Western society in general and U.S. society in particular are polarized, fragmented, and ungovernable as everyone adopts their own meaning in life and moral values.
What Is Evangelicalism?
In the past few years, an enormous amount of attention has been given to the influence of evangelicalism. One reason for this is it remains the largest category of religious Americans. Another reason is that 80 percent or more of white, self-identified evangelicals supported Donald Trump in 2016 and, accordingly, a new right-wing populism and nationalism. Arguably, they were the main reason for his ascendency.
Despite some conflicting data readings, most agree that evangelicalism is declining in the U.S. Meanwhile, within evangelicalism there are a number of factions seemingly battling to the death over control of the movement, even as academics and social scientists argue about the actual definition of an evangelical.
All this creates confusion. What is evangelicalism? What crises does it actually face? And are there any reasons for hope for it? Answering these questions isn’t as easy as it might seem.
Theology of Evangelicalism
On the one hand, a person or group can be classified as “evangelical” if they meet the theological criteria listed by David Bebbington (now called the Bebbington Four or Quadrilateral). The four marks of evangelicalism are a belief in (1) the full authority of the Bible as the sole and supreme rule of faith and practice, (2) the necessity of the new birth by the Holy Spirit, (3) reconciliation with God through the atoning work of Christ, not our good works, and (4) the responsibility to share the gospel in word and deed. These distinguish evangelicals from mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians. Beneath these four marks, however, evangelicals share with all other Christians a belief in the Trinity, the deity of Christ, and other basics of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.
Sociology of Evangelicalism
However, in addition to having these doctrinal or theological convictions, all denominations have a sociological “location” as well, which means they’re the product of certain historical events. The Awakenings of the 18th and early 19th centuries, the Civil War and the controversy over slavery, the ejection of evangelicals from the mainline denominations, the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century, and the rise of the Christian right in the late 20th century all have produced among many U.S. Christians a number of social characteristics—cultural attitudes and practices—that aren’t shared by evangelicals in other countries who, while holding to identical evangelical theology, live in different social contexts.
Recognizing these “two addresses” of evangelicalism (theological and sociological) helps us discern something important. Within the framework of the four theological marks, what I’ll call the six social marks of evangelicalism can be stronger or weaker. The term “fundamentalism” was one way used in the past to describe those who hold these social traits very strongly:
Moralism vs. gracious engagement: Strict conformity to behavioral codes. Secondary doctrines made primary with resulting self-righteousness. Everything is either wholly good or wholly evil, leading to withdrawal from society. A spirit of condemnation. Separatism and sectarianism. No ability to engage opposing views with patience, humility, hope, and tolerance.
Individualism vs. social reform: Belief that we are wholly the result of our personal choices. Little understanding of how culture forms us or of evil systemic or institutional forces.
Dualism vs. a vision for all of life: A pitting of biblical beliefs against culture. Either we seek a hostile takeover or we seal off Christian beliefs from our work and life in society. No thought for how faith shapes the way we work in the secular spheres and how it can serve society.
Anti-intellectualism vs. scholarship: A distrust of experts, reverse snobbism against education, and distrust of any result of scholarship or research that isn’t believed as “common sense” to most people. Skepticism of science. A refusal to show other viewpoints any respect. A shallow commonsense approach to biblical interpretation that ignores the biblical author’s intended meaning in the original context and the scholarship that helps us discern it.
Anti-institutionalism vs. accountability: A distrust of traditional institutions. The use of celebrity-driven, brand-driven platforms and networks that lead to fast growth but low accountability. A tendency toward authoritarianism.
Enculturation vs. cultural reflection: A wedding of Christianity to popular, traditional U.S. culture. Three features: (1) Gender exaggeration: due to fundamentalism’s tendency to “baptize” American culture, there’s a legalistic tendency toward nonbiblical gender stereotypes (especially those of the 1950s), a denigration of women, and coverup of abuse; (2) Nationalism: a “God and Country” ethos that rejects reflection on the dark sides of U.S. history and society and expresses fear of a multiethnic future; (3) Racism: often overt, but at the very least a racial and cultural insensitivity and cluelessness.
Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism
Historically, there has been a distinction between fundamentalism and evangelicalism. George Marsden has written important volumes on this history.
During the 1930s to 1950s, a “neo-evangelical movement” (led by Carl Henry and Billy Graham) sought to bring serious Bible scholarship, deeper intellectual thinking, and social responsibility back to northern white evangelicals. They sought to establish a movement that was true to historic, orthodox Protestant beliefs but that shed the anti-intellectualism, the marriage to American culture, the sectarianism, the legalism and emphasis on secondary and tertiary doctrines, and the pietism and individualism that rejected the need for social reform or cultural engagement. This evangelicalism flourished for about a generation, from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s. After that, fundamentalism began to make a comeback, particularly with the rise of the Moral Majority, a political organization established in 1979.
Fundamentalism is not identical to all conservative Protestantism. There are many churches and believers who are solidly orthodox in the theological marks, even in somewhat more conservative versions of the marks (e.g., penal substitutionary atonement, forensic justification by faith) and yet who largely lack the social marks of moralism, anti-intellectualism, individualism, and so on.
Distinctions need to be made here that aren’t being made in the media or public consciousness. There are many churches that deliberately work to escape the gravitational pull of the history and social traits we’ve outlined. Some of these are historically confessional churches such as Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians, and others. Some are led by evangelical leaders simply opposed to the obscurantism, harsh rhetoric, individualism, legalism, and separatism of fundamentalism.
The emphasis on the Bebbington Four theological marks and a reluctance to use the pejorative word “fundamentalist” have led to a loss of distinction between conservative Protestants who are not fundamentalist and those who are. Stressing the Bebbington Four as the exclusive way to define evangelicalism or conservative Protestantism tends to flatten and hide significant differences. Kristin Kobes Du Mez rightly argues that American evangelicals prefer to define themselves by their doctrine, ignoring the sociological marks and history. When they do so, evangelicalism looks very large—it “manifests as a racially diverse and global movement.”
But, Du Mez adds, while white American evangelicals do share their theological marks with other groups, their sociology affects the way these theological marks are emphasized and expressed. Will the Bible’s military metaphors be stressed to the exclusion of those that call for sacrificial service? Are all the turning points of redemptive history—creation, fall, redemption, restoration—equally grasped and taught? So an exclusive use of theological markers for definition and discernment can mask many important differences within conservative Protestantism.
Yet the word “fundamentalism” can also be used to mask differences. It’s typical in dictionaries to define religious fundamentalists as those who interpret the Scriptures “literally.” J. I. Packer has deftly shown how this definition subtly eliminates the historic evangelical approach to Scripture. It’s true that there’s a fundamentalist mindset that interprets even apocalyptic prophetic literature in literal ways and that ignores efforts to discern historical and cultural context.
But saying “we don’t take the Bible literally” allows the speaker to take biblical teaching about the resurrection of Jesus, for example, as merely symbolic, even when it’s clear the Gospel writers intended to teach us that Jesus literally and physically rose from the dead. Packer shows that evangelicals seek the natural sense of a text—what the authors intended to say in their original context. We must not impose a literal meaning or a symbolic meaning on the text but rather seek to listen to the authors of the Scripture itself.
Defining fundamentalism as “biblical literalism,” then, is a way that mainline liberal Christians can paint all conservative Protestants as fundamentalists.
Making a distinction between fundamentalism and evangelicalism within conservative Protestantism is something that neither fundamentalists nor progressives want to allow. Both the right and the left have tried to paint the distinction I’m making here (between fundamentalists and conservative Protestants) as one between ordinary evangelical believers and “elite” evangelicals. This is, of course, a way of discrediting the “elitists.” However, the blue-collar church I pastored—along with many working-class churches I’ve seen—is theologically evangelical and doctrinally conservative but not sociologically fundamentalist.
Defining fundamentalism as ‘biblical literalism’ is a way that mainline liberal Christians can paint all conservative Protestants as fundamentalists.
A recent podcast series, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, traced out the implosion of a major evangelical megachurch. In online commentary, conservative listeners complained that the critique was too “liberal,” that the flaws that led to the blow-up were largely failures of leadership. They ignore the social markers of fundamentalism that Mars Hill exhibited, which led to the authoritarianism that destroyed it.
At the other end of the spectrum, progressives looking at the Mars Hill case study argued that any church with the theological marks of biblical authority and the necessity of faith in Christ for salvation would unavoidably become a cult-like body. But progressives often ignore the fact that the social traits that hurt Mars Hill came from history more than theology. Evangelicals with the same theology in other countries and cultures (and many in the U.S.) don’t manifest the same social traits, because they have different histories or because they use the truths of Scripture to help them overcome their social histories.
In summary,
Progressive Christians see the social traits as the normal and necessary result of the theological beliefs and so all conservative Protestants not like progressives are or will become fundamentalists.
Fundamentalist Christians see the social traits as the normal and necessary result of the theological beliefs and so all conservative Protestants not like fundamentalists are or will become progressives.
So while conservatives tend to ignore the social marks, progressives try to merge the theological and social. Either way, the very idea of an evangelicalism or conservative Protestantism that is not fundamentalism disappears.
How then shall we speak of these important distinctions? I’m not going to propose a whole new set of terms for all to use. But in order to describe these categories in this article, I’ll say that the Bebbington Four describes conservative Protestantism, and within it are fundamentalism and evangelicalism on a spectrum. Fundamentalists are those in which the six social traits are strong. Evangelicals (and other conservative Protestants who don’t accept that label) are those in which the social traits are weaker. I recognize that there’s no clear line separating these groups. Nevertheless, to understand the condition of the church and its future, the differences are important to bear in mind.
In order to move forward, I think the proper way to think about this is to see the primacy but insufficiency of the theological marks for defining evangelicalism. I’ve worked with evangelical Christians around the world, and it’s the shared theological marks that enable us to embrace and cooperate as family. They’re basic! An experience of grace and conversion, the realization of the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice, the knowledge of the power of the living Word of the Scripture—these all bind us together across the cultural and social differences.
And yet, once we begin to seek to work together, we find that our social-cultural differences aren’t insignificant, that they often intrude and disrupt our work. But we labor to overcome the cultural differences because we perceive them as less fundamental to who we are as Christians.
What Caused the Decline?
Now we’re in a position to see why white American conservative religion has followed other religious groups into decline. Fundamentalism and evangelicalism are so intertwined in social research that it’s impossible to know whether it’s primarily fundamentalist churches that are declining more or if the decline is across the board of conservative Protestantism. I suspect the second option is the more accurate one. Let’s consider some of the reasons this is happening.
1. The U.S. is slowly running out of traditionally minded Americans to be converted, and conservative Protestants on the whole are unwilling or unable to reach the highly secular and culturally different. Traditionally, American cultural institutions produced people who—whether they professed Christianity or not—had beliefs in a personal God, an afterlife, and moral absolutes. Virtually all Christian strategies for evangelism and church growth are geared toward people with these traditional “background beliefs.” But such people are fewer and older, and, in general, conservative Protestantism doesn’t know how to evangelize and win secular people.
2. In both fundamentalism and evangelicalism there have been many churches and leaders guilty of spiritual and sexual abuse. Evangelicals are historically prone to steer toward celebrity-driven platforms and loose networks. The lack of accountability has led to many high-profile evangelical pastor and church meltdowns. And the #ChurchToo movement has produced revelations of widespread sexual misconduct by ministers and church leaders toward women. Both complementarian and egalitarian church leaders have been guilty.
3. Notably, conservative church politicization has turned off half the country. In a polarized environment, white evangelicals’ strong identification with one party and one presidential candidate has produced deep and hostile reactions from the 50 percent of the country opposed to this political platform. And, in general, the half it has alienated is younger and more multiethnic. Many fundamentalists consider this a victory rather than a defeat. My informal perception is that many conservative Protestants voted for Donald Trump but did so with far less enthusiasm or approval than fundamentalist Christians. In any case, the identification of conservative religion with the political right is now very strong in the public mind, and it’s a turnoff to a large percentage of the populace.
4. Conservative churches, both fundamentalist and evangelical, continue to have a race problem. Conservative white evangelicals in the past (1) originally supported slavery, (2) were silent during the Jim Crow era, (3) largely rejected the Civil Rights Movement of the time, and (4) were slowest to integrate their schools and seminaries. Today the majority of white evangelicals and fundamentalists are responding to the excesses of progressivism by largely denying structural injustice or systemic racism, though such concepts are biblical.
5. Fundamentalism is an anti-intellectual movement, and even nonfundamentalist evangelicals tend toward pragmatism. Catholicism is a popular religion for the masses and yet has nurtured a robust intellectual class. Fundamentalism’s largely anti-intellectual stance has only grown among conservative Christians who are alarmed by the progressive excesses of today’s universities. However, this leaves conservative Protestantism in general with little ability to reach the college-educated and little ability to reflect theologically on our U.S. culture. The cultural “captivity” of evangelicals—the inability to see the difference between biblical beliefs and American culture—is largely due to a lack of evangelical scholarship.
The cultural ‘captivity’ of evangelicals—the inability to see the difference between biblical beliefs and American culture—is largely due to a lack of evangelical scholarship.
6. Conservative Protestants lack a model for relating to a secular culture. Evangelicalism has been a prominent part of a “Christendom” culture—one in which Christian beliefs and practices were dominant and assumed. Now that this has changed, evangelicals struggle to find a “public theology”—one that defines how they relate to the larger society. Many fundamentalists want to reestablish Christendom through government action. Others want to withdraw from culture altogether and just build up the church. This issue divides evangelicals and other conservative Protestants from fundamentalists today more than any other.
Why the Decline Can Be Reversed
Later in this article, I’ll sketch out a plan for church renewal. But first, it’s natural to ask, “How much hope is there?” The obstacles are formidable. What reasons are there for any confidence that it’s possible? Briefly, here are some reasons to have hope for renewal.
1. The limits of secularism. Despite many signs of its strength and growth in the U.S., secularism as a philosophy has shown severe limitations in its ability to form community and give individuals meaning, identity, contentment, and the ability to face suffering. My prediction: in the future, it may not seem as compelling an alternative to religion as it is now.
2. The strength of global Christianity. Outside of the West, Christianity is growing rapidly and most of it is evangelical and Pentecostal. The future leaders and theologians of Christianity will be multiethnic, and this will give the faith more credence with secular people who in the past had thought of evangelicalism as mainly a white phenomenon.
3. The demographics of religion. In general, the more religious people are, the more children they have, and this social fact holds across cultures and classes. This is why some social scientists say the world’s secular population will “top out” sometime in the mid-21st century and then begin to shrink.
4. The subversive fulfillment of chosen religion. Mainline Protestantism, Catholicism, and other religions are inherited—you are literally born into them and then adhere to them because your family does. These churches decline more rapidly in modernity because young people don’t want to follow a path they haven’t chosen for themselves. Evangelical faith is better adapted to modern culture in this way, because it is indeed a chosen religion—one that requires conversion. Yet it pushes back on the individualism of culture too. When we freely choose to follow Christ, we also choose to give up living according to our own wisdom—bowing instead to his glad and wise authority.
5. The translatability of faith. Christianity, unlike orthodox Islam and Judaism, has no book of Leviticus in the New Testament. Detailed regulations for food and dress and other daily activities are not prescribed—allowing Christians to be fully integrated into the surrounding society. Andrew Walls puts it like this:
Cultural diversity was built into the Christian faith. . . . Acts 15 [declared] that the new gentile Christians didn’t have to enter Jewish culture. . . . The converts had to work out . . . a Hellenistic way of being a Christian. . . . [So] nobody owns the Christian faith. . . . There is no “Christian culture” the way that there is an “Islamic culture,” which you can recognize from Pakistan to Tunisia to Morocco.
In short, Christianity is highly “translatable” into new cultures and new situations and has the resources to remain a significant force in a fast-changing world.
6. The promise of Jesus. In G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, there’s a chapter on “The Five Deaths of the Faith.” He does a brief overview of times when orthodox Christianity was challenged profoundly—Arius and the controversy over the divinity of Christ in the third century, Voltaire and the rise of skepticism in Europe during the Enlightenment, Darwin and the rise of scientism, and so on—but in each case emerged strong and growing. With a typical Chesterton twist, he concludes, “At least five times . . . the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases it was the dog that died.”
Jesus said, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18). That is a promise—and there’s no reason to believe this promise has an expiration date.
Path to Renewal
We’ve seen that there’s something wrong with the American church—evangelicalism is in decline. How can we find a way forward to renewal and new growth? We need a revival that only God can provide and a new movement to capture the fruit of that revival for the renewal of the American church.
Revivals
Revivals are periods of great spiritual awakening and growth. In revivals, “sleepy” and lukewarm Christians wake up, nominal Christians get converted, and many skeptical nonbelievers are drawn to faith. In Europe and North America there were significant revivals in the 1740s, 1830s, and late 1850s.
The 1857 revival began in lower New York City and is often called the Fulton Street Revival. By one account, during a period of about two years, approximately 10 percent of the population of Manhattan was converted and joined the city’s churches. In the Welsh revival of 1904, an estimated 150,000 people, or 7.5 percent of the nation’s population, were converted and came into Protestant churches.
Looking back further for revivals, historians point to the monastic movements that transformed Europe and the Lutheran Pietist and Moravian movements. More recently there have also been major revivals in East Africa and Korea as well as many more localized revivals.
Movements
Notice the terms “revival” and “movement” are often used almost interchangeably to describe these times of church renewal. It would be more accurate to say that revivals—times of spiritual refreshing, reality in prayer, and awakening—lead to movements. A movement is a self-propagating body of men and women, united by a common vision for a new future and committed to specific changes. For Christians, this could be a major change in the church, society, or both.
Looking back in history, we see how revivals provided the spiritual momentum on which movements were built. One of the most well documented, the Wesleyan Revival, led to the establishment of a major new world denomination—Methodism—which itself was originally built on the at-home small group system of the earliest awakening. That revival also led to a major awakening in the Church of England: the evangelical Anglicans. And out of those evangelical awakenings in Britain in the mid-18th century came many reforms in society, such as the passing of laws against child labor by Lord Shaftesbury and the abolitionist movement led by William Wilberforce.
The purpose of a revival is always supremely to please, enjoy, honor, and glorify God. It’s to become the church God wants us to be. And when that happens even to a small degree, there’s always an effect on nonbelievers and society. William Blair was an American missionary in Korea in the early years of the 20th century. He was present at the great revival that broke out at the Bible conference meeting in Pyongyang in January 1907. He describes the aftermath:
The Christians returned to their homes, taking the Pentecostal fire with them. It spread to practically every church. Schools canceled classes for days while students wept out their wrong doings together. We had our hearts torn again and again by the return of little articles and money that had been taken from us over the years. All through the city people were going from house to house, confessing wrongs, returning stolen property, not only to Christians but to non-believers. A Chinese merchant was astounded to have a Christian walk in and pay him a large sum of money he had obtained unjustly years before. The whole city was stirred. The cry went out over the city.
How Revival Happens
So great church movements start with spiritual revival, but what can we do to bring it about? Many say, “Nothing—it’s up to God,” and they have a point. Only God can send revival. Psalms 80, 85, and 126—well-known prayers for revival—recognize that the power for spiritual renewal resides wholly in God. This perspective says human beings have little to do to bring about revivals. It’s all God. However, there are those who have fallen into the opposite error, who have taught that revivals can and will happen whenever the church performs its ministry in prescribed, proper ways.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones and others take a balanced view. The revival prayers of the psalms themselves exhibit heart attitudes and practices on the part of believers that invite and invoke God’s invigorating power. Lloyd-Jones, a strong Calvinist, in his lectures on revival said,
The way to revival is not just to say, “Let’s pray about it.” Of course we must pray, and I hope to emphasize that . . . strongly. But there are preliminary conditions attached.
Christians must recognize they do have things to do to prepare for renewal, but that ultimately it’s God’s wise sovereignty that will determine whether and how the church is renewed. Many see a metaphor for this concept of renewal in Elijah’s confrontation with the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel in 1 Kings 18. The prophet builds an altar, but it’s only God whose fire can ignite it. Christians looking for revival, then, are “building the altar,” praying that God will use their efforts to bring a fire of revival with a movement of his Spirit.
The purpose of a revival is always supremely to please, enjoy, honor, and glorify God.
The Holy Spirit is the ultimate cause of revivals, but there are three instrumental means (or secondary causes) that the Spirit ordinarily uses.
First, there’s always a recovery of the gospel. The default mode of the human heart is self-salvation and works righteousness, whether of a conservative or a liberal variety. Christians theoretically believe “Jesus accepts me, therefore I want to live a good life,” but their hearts reverse that, and in practice they function on a different principle: “I live a good life, therefore Jesus will accept me.” The results of this reversal include pride, defensiveness, a critical spirit, racial prejudice and cultural ethnocentricity, an allergy to change, and other forms of spiritual deadness. Revival always proceeds around a rediscovery of the wonder of grace and the radical nature of Christ’s accomplishment of salvation on our behalf, leading to a joyful repentance, a sense of being so loved that we can finally admit the flaws and sins we’ve denied or hidden.
Second, there’s always corporate prayer—extraordinary, kingdom-centered, prevailing prayer. This is prayer beyond the normal daily devotions and worship services. As much as possible, it should be united prayer, bringing together people who don’t usually pray with each other. Prayer that accompanies renewal has both a more outward and a more inward focus: (1) Inward: asking for grace to confess sins and humble ourselves, and to know God—to see his face, to see his glory, to experience his love and high assurance; (2) Outward: asking for compassion and zeal to reach the lost, to see the church flourish and grow with new converts. See prayers for revival and what they led to in Acts 4, Exodus 33, and Nehemiah 1.
Third, however, there’s always creativity. No revival is just like the last one. For example, the Wesleyan revivals were based on the innovation of itinerant preaching, including open-air meetings. The 1857 revival, however, was based on prayer meetings led by laypeople. In each generation, new methods arise for lifting up the gospel in ways that fit the cultural moment.
The best Christian movements are those that arise out of spiritual awakenings, and that’s as necessary today as ever. One of the features of our time is that churches are dividing over politics because people are far more passionate and moved by political and social issues than they are by the truths of our faith, and especially the centrality of the gospel of Christ. They become most exercised and emotional not in worship but over flashpoint political and cultural issues. That’s a sign of a spiritual vacuum, an emptiness, in Christians’ lives.
One of the marks of spiritual renewal is an extraordinary sense of God’s presence, of increased communion with God (1 John 1:3), of “joy unspeakable and full of glory” (1 Pet. 1:8, KJV). In place of intellectual assent to the abstract idea that God loves us, the Spirit of God strengthens our “inner being” with power in order to “comprehend . . . what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ” (Eph. 3:16–19). This is not to simply know about God’s love but to know it. We’re granted an intuitive assurance that we are God’s loved children (Rom. 8:15–16).
Spiritual experience can be strong as a tidal wave (Acts 4:31). Other times, it’s like a gentle rain softening and loosening our fear. But a renewed Christian relates to God as Father rather than merely a boss, or worse—a tyrant or distant power.
How Movements Happen
But how do movements happen? A new Christian movement thrives and grows when:
1. The need for it is acute and clear.
2. A specific, compelling vision is cast for a better future.
3. There are overlapping networks of people with different abilities, assets, and resources, united and working sacrificially for a common purpose and with common values.
4. The changes and goals achieved first naturally trigger and empower other changes.
5. New institutions are begun that can sustain the movement for longer periods of time.
6. The movement responds to opposition wisely and lovingly.
7. It maintains and fosters its roots in spiritual renewal.
Need for a New Movement
Christian churches in the U.S. haven’t been able to avoid being drawn down into the same maelstrom of forces tearing our society apart. Liberal mainline churches have allowed the progressive-liberal political agenda of the Democrats to virtually replace its ministry of evangelism and formation. This has led to a deadly, precipitous decline spanning decades. And the evangelical church has made much the same move with conservative Republican politics. (There are similar divisions in the Catholic Church and within Judaism.) Religious bodies are increasingly being reduced to voting blocs for political parties.
Religious bodies are increasingly being reduced to voting blocs for political parties.
There’s a place in society for a new Christian movement that practices love and justice, that answers the great questions—of purpose, meaning, hope, happiness, guilt and forgiveness, identity—that the secular culture has given up on. But it must avoid the abuses of power and the mistakes of religious regimes of the past.
For reasons I’ve already touched on, there’s no existing religious body, no single institution, and no one branch of the Christian church that has all it takes to lead the way to renewal for the American church. It will take a newly assembled movement of ministers, scholars, and lay leaders who will coalesce around a vision for renewal and a number of strategic initiatives that create a movement.
The leadership will come from the evangelical church, the black church, many conservative confessional bodies (Lutheran, Anglican, Reformed, Methodist, Anabaptist), and the wonderful, dizzyingly diverse body of newer ethnic and immigrant churches. And there’ll also be those who don’t hail from any of the expected places but nevertheless share the fundamental theology and future vision of the movement.
A movement has an inner energy that comes from a compelling vision, moral suasion, strong personal friendships, and innovative thinking that is not the result of any one person or organization’s command and control structure.
How do movements develop? Groups can hope to ignite a movement, but they cannot ultimately determine whether it will capture imaginations and attract people naturally and organically. When that does happen, however, the initial organization of the movement sparks the creation of other initiatives and organizations that serve the same basic future vision and moral ideals.
Establishment of a New Movement
What should this new movement look like?
1. A new movement will unite around historic Protestant theology.
There’s nothing more basic and necessary for a cohesive and dynamic Christian movement than passionately shared theological beliefs. The primary reason for maintaining historic Protestant theology is that it contains the basic beliefs on which the gospel of grace alone, by faith alone—not of works—is based. And as we’ve seen, the recovery and use of the gospel in our hearts and lives is the key to spiritual renewal.
The body of core theological truths that define and defend an orthodox understanding of the gospel includes, first, those expressed in the ecumenical creeds: the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Chalcedonian Creed, and the Athanasian Creed. These creeds establish:
The doctrine of the triune God: there is one God who exists eternally in three equal persons who know and love one another.
The doctrine of creation: God is the sole Creator and sustainer of all things, and the physical creation—including our bodies—is both real and good.
The full deity and humanity of Jesus Christ, united in one person forever.
Second, the common core of the various Protestant confessions and catechisms—consisting of the “five solas (alones)”—also defines and defends an orthodox understanding of the gospel. The solas declare that salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, according to Scripture alone, through the work of Christ alone, for the glory of God alone. So the Protestant confessional statements establish:
The necessity, sufficiency, clarity, authority, and infallibility of the Bible.
The doctrine of sin: human beings are wholly unable to will or achieve their salvation without the free grace and intervention of God.
The doctrine of atonement: Christ received the penalty we deserved in our place.
The necessity of the new birth through the Holy Spirit, the blessings of justification, union with Christ, adoption, and sanctification.
The indispensability of the church and its ministry of the Word, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper for the formation of Christians into disciples.
The personal return of Jesus Christ to earth to judge the world and establish a new heavens and new earth.
2. A new movement will require repentance and seeking the Lord.
There’s no spiritual revival without repentance. There’s no reconciliation between individuals or groups without repentance. There’s no reformation or change without repentance. Unless we can name fully and truthfully what we’ve done wrong—without excusing, minimizing, or blame-shifting, instead asking God and others for forgiveness, for help toward genuine change, and for the restoration of relationship—there is no hope for the church.
There are a few common factors in every Christian revival—a reemphasis on the gospel of grace, extraordinary prayer, repentance, vibrant corporate worship, a sense of God’s immediate presence, and singular new leaders. But in many ways, every renewal is different than the last in shape, methods, and measures.
God is sovereign because he is a God of grace. You can’t cause or merit a revival any more than you can merit your salvation. Yet I’ve seen over the years that when we earnestly seek God for his own sake (not for our reputation or success) and seek to be mini cases of personal revival ourselves, positive spiritual dynamics begin to work in the church around us. God has many more revivals in his plan for the world before the final, ultimate revival, the ultimate spring after winter, when even the trees of the wood will sing for joy (Ps. 96:12).
3. A new movement will divide, but with tears and grace.
Something like the evangelical-fundamentalist split of the 1940s may need to happen (or is already happening) again. One of the best accounts of that story is in George Marsden’s Reforming Fundamentalism.
In the 1940s, a group sought to “get rid of [certain] . . . aspects of fundamentalism”—separatism, radical individualism, anti-intellectualism, legalism, political extremism—and yet “retain its essential evangelical orthodoxy” as well as its rightful pushback against secularism. These leaders came to describe their movement as “the New Evangelicalism.” Carl Henry described the vision of the new movement when he wrote an article titled “The Vigor of the New Evangelicalism” in 1948. He asks three rhetorical questions, the first directed to liberalism and the second directed to fundamentalism:
Is it too late for Christianity to reintroduce . . . depths of meaning . . . which can be found only in the message of a supernatural salvation? Is evangelicalism’s only message today the proclamation of individual rescue from a fore-doomed generation? Or has this evangel implications also for the most pressing social problems of our day?
The new evangelical movement thrived for 40 years, but beginning in the 1980s and 1990s new versions of fundamentalism asserted themselves. A sad, similar kind of alienation is again happening between friends who formerly thought of themselves being on the same side, promoting biblical orthodoxy against unbelief.
A sad kind of alienation is again happening between friends who formerly thought of themselves being on the same side, promoting biblical orthodoxy against unbelief.
The division can be seen in one important aspect of modern U.S. evangelicalism: the major conference circuit. Speakers who once shared the same platforms have been disinvited—or have disinvited themselves—sometimes informally, sometimes formally. A second place to see the division is in the way the formerly united donor bases of evangelical institutions are now splitting over critical race theory, gender ideology, and social justice. This puts enormous pressure on those colleges and agencies to choose a side and adjust their language to reflect the tribe they’ve chosen. The division is having an effect—some more and some less—on conservative denominations that may or may not lead to formal divisions into new denominations.
Many flashpoint issues of 80 years ago were unique. Fundamentalists and the New Evangelicals differed on whether to separate from the “apostate” mainline denominations on the use of alcohol and tobacco and modern entertainments such as the cinema and on dispensationalism—a complex way to read Old Testament prophecy that resulted in a profoundly pessimistic view of any social involvement or cultural engagement.
Yet other flashpoints of that time resonate today. The New Evangelicals didn’t just evangelize individual souls but tackled social problems. Fundamentalists complained this was the “liberal social gospel.” Evangelicals also engaged the modern university. Fundamentalists complained this was compromising with unbelief, and they took a strongly anti-intellectual stance.
In this article, I’ve continued to use “fundamentalist” and “evangelical” to describe the two sides of the divide. However, for most of the American public, there’s now no real difference between the two terms. And so I leave it up to others to propose new terms, names, and descriptors.
In any case, whoever responds to this division with truth, tears, and grace will be the one more reflective of the Savior and more likely to be effective in winning nonbelievers and sanctifying believers. The side that behaves the most graciously will flourish the most in the aftermath. That means we should forgive if we’ve been wronged. Forgiveness was so crucial to Jesus that he died forgiving his enemies (Luke 23:34). When he was insulted and scorned, he never responded in kind (1 Pet. 2:23). How much more, then, should we be gracious and forgiving to other brothers and sisters in Christ that oppose us?
It also means we should evangelize and edify more than we engage in polemic. The divisions in our culture and in our churches are fueled by those on the left and the right. Both sides want to co-opt as much of the church as possible for their political agenda. Both sides insist they have the moral high ground and are fighting on the side of truth and justice. Both sides produce enormous numbers of attack videos, memes, and articles targeting church leaders and others who aren’t aligning with them.
Polemics are sometimes necessary—but they’re medicine, not food. You can’t live on medicine. In the long run, constant polemics are exhausting and they don’t build us up spiritually. The movement that will succeed is the one that becomes the most famous for preaching and writing and teaching and pastoring that’s astonishingly good and that spiritually nourishes and changes the readers or listeners right in their seats.
4. A new movement will develop a “Protestant social teaching,” especially around the issues of injustice, sexuality, and politics.
No Christian can engage in society without a working theory of how biblical doctrine and ethical principles relate to social issues. Besides providing direct answers to a set of contemporary social and political issues, Protestant social thought will need three things:
First, to offer a kind of Christian “high theory” that critiques modern secular culture in general, exposing its deep structural failures. Catholics have done much more work in this area than Protestants (e.g., Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor).
Second, to give guidance on “cultural engagement” in general, addressing the divisions over the “Christ and Culture” models. The excesses of each model must be avoided:
The transforming danger. This approach sees the culture as in terrible decline and seeks political power to rectify it. Its danger is in taking power (even with the best of motives) rather than transforming it as Jesus the servant did, and therefore in becoming conformed too much to the world.
The assimilating danger. This approach sees the culture more positively, as history moving toward greater justice and inclusion, and wants the church to join in with liberationist movements. Its danger is in being conformed too much to the world, typically the liberal rather than the conservative world.
The withdrawing danger. This approach is as negative in its view of culture as the “transforming” approach, but it believes that by retreating into sheltered communities it can avoid pollution. Its danger is in blindness to how much the culture has already influenced them. There’s no way to prevent cultural engagement.
The ignoring danger. This approach says the world is doing fine and doesn’t need the church’s cultural engagement. We should just build up the church and win people to Jesus. Its danger is similar to that of withdrawing: it’s blind to how much the culture is influencing them.
Third, to give guidance on political involvement in general. Christians live in two “cities” or social orders at once. On the one hand, they’re citizens of the heavenly City of God (Phil. 3:20–21). On the other hand, they also reside in the City of Man, where social orders are based not on love and self-sacrifice (“my life to serve you”) but on power and self-interest (“your life to serve mine”).
Christians must never identify the City of God with any particular social or political agenda. Any earthly political movement or party will contain both virtue and complicity with sin. Christians involved in political parties should be good team members but also critics of their parties. All secular or non-Christian views of the good will make idols out of something. For example, the left will be overtrusting of government and the right will be overtrusting of the market or of their own race’s goodness. This mixture of outcomes and of method is even true of Christian organizations and movements seeking to do good.
5. A new movement will seek influence, but with a Christian understanding of power.
There’s no way to form a growing new movement in a particular social sphere except through competition with other groups, organizations, and individuals for money and donors, numbers of adherents, public attention, audiences, and influence over the broader culture.
We shouldn’t be blinded by inspirational terms like “being a new movement” and promoting “spiritual renewal.” The moment we begin, we’ll unavoidably be in a competition for power. We’ll leverage our social capital to reach a wider audience. We’ll present ourselves as being better able to address the culture’s questions and objections than other religious communities. We’ll make strong efforts to define ourselves and not let others “name” us, but that means describing ourselves in contrast to—and over against—other groups. There’s no use in protesting that we’ll be above competition. We’ll unavoidably enter a competitive social field in which the rules of the game are quite opposed to these words of Jesus:
You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. (Mark 10:42–44)
We must be driven by Jesus’s teaching and not the world’s. The real question is how we’ll do this. Will we “compete” through our use of the Bible, through making decisive, compelling arguments based on exegesis? Will we represent the views of opponents in ways that recognize and affirm? Or will we be driven by the way of the world, creating caricatures that are easy to knock down, seeking to accrue capital through stoking fear and anger, engaging in ad hominem arguments while imputing motives and charging all opponents with bad character? Will we just shame, antagonize, or “own” opponents rather than trying to persuade them? The answer to all these questions had better be a resounding no.
6. A new movement will conduct seven mission projects.
James Hunter argues for the effectiveness of “overlapping strategic networks of capital.” That is, when scholars, business people, religious leaders, artists, scientists, journalists, and politicians, among others, unite and direct their symbolic, social, economic, and political capital “toward shared ends, the world, indeed, changes.” And so our church renewal movement must bring together the kinds of people with resources appropriate for each particular mission project.
Will we just shame, antagonize, or ‘own’ opponents rather than trying to persuade them?
There should be at least, I believe, these seven projects: (1) church planting and renewal, (2) “counter-catechesis” discipleship, (3) post-Christian evangelism, (4) a justice network, (5) a faith-work network, (6) the “Christian mind” project, and (7) a new leadership pipeline. Behind all seven projects is an eighth “metaproject”: Christian philanthropy. I’ll expand on all these projects later in this article.
Ultimately all the projects stand or fall together—they mutually support and energize one another. There will be no full achievement of any one without achieving them all.
7. A new movement will articulate a future vision and the nonnegotiable values for the movement.
Any effective movement must be able to paint a picture of the future it aims to bring about. This can in some part form the various practical outcomes of the ministry projects. But beyond that, there must be a portrait of the kind of church we’re called to be. We are committed to:
Protestant doctrinal orthodoxy, yet in a broad tent of denominations. We will each love our own denominations and traditions but respect and appreciate the others.
Salvation by free grace, yet unto holiness. We will avoid the typical and twin pitfalls of moralism and relativism.
Unity with the global and non-Western church. We will find ways as a movement of listening to and staying in close touch with non-Western Christian leaders.
A multiethnic American church and leadership. We will be a movement led by a multiethnic team that truly empowers nonwhite leaders throughout the church.
The integration of Word and deed ministry. We will unite evangelism and teaching with doing justice and mercy.
Spiritual revival, but also building institutions. We will neglect neither individual spiritual experience nor the importance of the local church and new institutions.
Protestant social teaching that resists secular versions of left or right politics. (We treated this above.)
Apostolic yet servant leadership. We will encourage dynamic, entrepreneurial “apostolic” leaders yet require that such leaders work in a stance of servanthood.
Worldview yet common grace. We stress the antithesis between the fundamental beliefs of Christianity and other worldviews yet recognize common grace and wisdom in nonbelievers.
The original Christian “social project.” We will be committed to (a) multiethnicity, (b) concern for the poor, (c) forgiveness and reconciliation, (d) the pro-life cause, and (e) sex only within marriage between the two genders that God created.
Theological retrieval and the production of new studies in dogmatics. We will be true to the orthodoxy of the past yet work to relate orthodoxy to modern issues.
Extraordinary prayer. We will be people of prayer.
On this final subject of prayer, consider this passage from Martyn Lloyd-Jones’s talks on spiritual renewal and revival:
I commend to you the reading of biographies of those who have been used by God in the church throughout the centuries, especially in revival. And you will find this same holy boldness, this arguing, this reasoning, this putting the case to God, pleading his own promises. Oh, that is the whole secret of prayer, I sometimes think. Thomas Goodwin uses a wonderful term. He says, “Sue him for it, sue him for it.” Do not leave him alone. Pester him, as it were, with his own promise. Quote the Scripture to him. And, you know, God delights to hear us doing it, as a father likes to see this element in his own child who has obviously been listening to what his father has been saying.
Strategy for Renewal
Before we consider a more detailed strategy for pursuing renewal in our churches, let’s tackle the question of why. How could we outline a case for why we need renewal?
Case for Renewal
I see three main reasons for why the American church needs renewal.
1. The church needs it.
The American Protestant church is in deep need of spiritual and institutional renewal. The mainline-liberal church has been in precipitous decline for 50 years and only its historically accumulated assets of endowments and real estate have kept it from disappearing altogether.
Now the conservative-evangelical church is also in decline and faces an enormous exodus, especially of its young people. The black church is facing many highly complex generational, theological, and institutional challenges.
Never in American history has the church been weaker or has the American population been more disconnected from religion. Never have all the various branches of U.S. Christendom been so weak all at once. Even the Catholic church is facing crises of shrinking parishes and shrinking numbers of clergy.
2. The country needs it.
While many secular voices see this unprecedented deterioration of the church an unmixed blessing, a number of analysts and social theorists point out that religion bring things into a society that cannot be supplied from other sources—consensus of moral intuitions, strong community ties, meaning in life beyond material circumstances, and a powerful hope for the future.
To name only one such thinker, consider the thesis of Robert Bellah in his classic book Habits of the Heart. Bellah shows that the social history of the U.S. makes it perhaps the most individualistic culture in the world. No culture more than American culture elevates the interests of the individual over those of family, community, and nation. No culture more attributes one’s character, identity, and life conditions strictly to individual decisions and choices. In other words: if you’re poor or marginalized, it’s always your fault—you could have avoided that if you made better choices and took more initiative.
Yet for two centuries the religious nature of the American population counterbalanced this individualism with denunciations of self-centeredness and calls to love your neighbor. The church demanded charity and compassion for the needy; it encouraged spouses to stick to their vows and to confine sexual expression to inside marriage. Now, as religion declines, the guardrails are gone and we see more social breakdown. Bellah makes the case that American individualism, now largely freed from the resistance of religion, is headed for social fragmentation, economic inequality, family breakdown, and many other dysfunctions.
In another recent example, Professor Carolyn Chen of Berkeley, in a New York Times article (“When Your Job Fills In For Your Faith, That’s a Problem”) shows that when religion recedes, people look for a God or faith substitute, essentially deifying something else. When people find their significance, security, and meaning in life in their work, it leads not only to workaholism and anxiety but also to ethical compromises, a lack of community and civic engagement, and a more dog-eat-dog, inhumane economy. Chen’s conclusion is that when religion recedes and we make career and work into a new religion, we all suffer. She found that very religious people were able to avoid these problems. In this article, we see an individual case study of what Bellah saw writ large across the face of our fracturing culture.
3. The love of God requires it.
The decline of the church in the U.S. should concern everyone. But Christians seek spiritual renewal of the church not because they see religion as having social utility, nor because they just want to shore up their own institutions. Rather, we believe Christianity is relevant to society because it’s true—it’s not true because it’s relevant.
We believe Christianity is relevant to society because it’s true—it’s not true because it’s relevant.
Christians don’t believe in and promote the faith because it brings so much hope (though it does) or because it fills you with joy (though it will) or because it creates deep and strong community (though it can) or because it can heal our society of many ills (though it might). Rather, Christians seek renewal of the church as a way to love and serve the One who saved us.
Jesus instructed us, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them . . . [and] teaching them” (Matt. 28:19–20). America is one of the nations—there are no exceptions. We know church renewal is what Jesus wants, because he said, “I will build my church,” and we have this confidence that “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18). Christians seek the renewal of the church for the love of God as well as for the love of their neighbor. Therefore it’s an absolute imperative.
Vision for Renewal
Our vision cannot be simply for a restoration of churches and Christian institutions to their former states of strength. That is to mistake means for ends. Our vision should be that the astonishing biblical possibilities for the church as the community of the Spirit would be realized in U.S. society in ways they never have before.
The church has been given divine power to radiate the infinite glory and goodness of God in our lives and relationships (2 Pet. 1:3–8). It has the capacity to be a new humanity—a community of surpassing beauty (Eph. 2:14–18; 4:15–16). Under the leadership of Christ’s Spirit, churches have the ability to make their surrounding communities far better places to live (Matt. 5:13–16; Luke 10:25–37; Gal. 6:10) so that many are drawn to God’s beautiful glory (1 Pet. 2:11–12; cf. Deut. 4:5–8).
What could this look like?
1. Cities become filled with flourishing neighborhoods that point to the churches within them as a crucial source of their life and strength.
2. Every U.S. community is honeycombed with home fellowship groups and house churches that build up the Christians within them, welcome nonbelievers, and serve their neighbors.
3. New churches are being planted twice as fast as churches are closing, and two-thirds of the people in the new churches are formerly unchurched and nonbelievers.
4. The Protestant church, which holds to the historic, orthodox faith, begins to grow faster than the U.S. population.
5. Large percentages of Christians become able to speak about their faith in their daily relationships in ways that aren’t perceived by most of the recipients as offensive or even awkward but instead are received as helpful and positive.
6. The movement of the young out of the churches is completely reversed. Children and youth in the church are equipped to see not only the beauty of the historic faith but also the deep inadequacy of alternative identities, narratives, and answers provided by the culture.
7. Christians become famous for being the ones who show up in force first to help victims whenever there’s any disaster.
8. Christian churches are known as the most racially and culturally diverse institutions in society. The face of the renewed Christian church toward society—its leading voices—are highly diverse ethnically, and the American church is tightly connected to the global church.
9. The Protestant gospel of salvation by grace alone through faith alone is lifted up prominently and beautifully across many denominations, escaping the creeping moralism endemic to the church over the ages; yet this is done in a way that encourages deep life change into Christlike holiness.
10. Many denominations and traditions flourish, each grateful and confident in its distinctiveness and yet highly cooperative and collaborative across denominational lines, without doctrinal dilution or compromise.
11. The church becomes publicly recognized as a refuge for sufferers, known for its ability to help people through grief, pain, and loss.
12. An increasing number of Christian artists—working out both the realism of the Christian worldview about sin and the confident expectation of restorative grace—produce high-quality stories, music, and visual art, all so that (a) more people see the beauty and intuitive plausibility of Christianity and (b) people across our society grow in hope.
13. There’s a robust, respected, and growing community of intellectuals and scholars that hold unashamedly to historic Christian doctrine who are (a) active in every academic field of inquiry, producing scholarship that contributes to and alters the field, (b) a growing presence in universities, and (c) an entire alternate intellectual economy of study centers, think tanks, academies, periodicals, and publishing.
14. The church becomes a visible, respected “sexual counter-culture”:
It’s a community in which sexuality is not a consumer good conducted on a selfish, cost-benefit basis but rather a means of self-donation inside a covenant.
It’s a community in which the health and durability of marriages and families is obvious.
It’s a community for singles, and especially for women, of far greater emotional safety and clearer expectations in romantic relationships. It’s a place that’s known to reject modern superficiality in spouse-seeking—for instance, far less emphasis on looks and money.
It’s a community in which Christian men and women who describe themselves as attracted to the same sex but who wish to live according to the biblical vision and ethic for sex are nurtured and respected.
15. Christians are known for their just use of power:
In business, Christians are known to be less selfish and ruthless and more generous to peers, employees, and customers.
In social entrepreneurship, Christians are known to be fueling an explosion of creative and effective nonprofits that target every social problem, leading to a measurable decrease in the poverty rate and improvements in other statistics of social well-being. Christians are famous for being those most given to charitable giving and volunteering their time for those in need.
In politics and government, Christians are known for seeking the common good rather than their own electoral interests and for being cognizant of the importance of government policies for a just society.
There’s a growth in church planting and church renewal among the poor, supported nonpaternalistically by the broader church and led by the poor themselves. This would be seen by society and credited with improvements in social indicators.
All of these changes would lead to a more just distribution of money and power, and people in general would have more control over their neighborhoods and their lives.
16. Christians are known for their uncompromising stand for truth and their critique of false beliefs and narratives, and at the same time they’re known for their civility and for their commitment to creating a truly pluralistic society in which all are free to voice and practice their worldviews and faith. They lead the way to a growing civility in society, based on an attitude of mutual respect, welcome, and kindness toward those with whom you deeply disagree in moral convictions and beliefs. And Christians are known for being the strongest promoters of warm dialogue and intelligent debate, and of defense of freedom of speech and conscience.
Escapes of Renewal
There are many pitfalls for would-be renewal movements. These dangers must be recognized and avoided. The path to church renewal must avoid mistakes that both liberal and conservative denominations and institutions have been making and continue to make.
For several decades, the mainline church’s shrinkage corresponded with the growth of evangelicalism. In the eyes of many, the lesson was simple—liberalism didn’t work in religion but conservative orthodoxy did. However, this narrative is no longer plausible now the evangelical church is also in decline. Over the last three years, the Southern Baptist Convention lost over 1 million members.
To use the well-known metaphor from Greek mythology, there are monsters on either side. Sailors couldn’t sail so far away from Scylla that they fell into the clutches of Charybdis. Today for the U.S. church there are several competing “monsters” that must be carefully avoided.
Avoiding “Scylla”
I previously showed the many reasons why liberal/progressive Christianity is no way forward and must be avoided by any church renewal project. Liberal Christianity rejects historic Christian doctrines that have been universally believed across all centuries and cultures. Many believed this redefinition of Christianity was the only way for it to survive in a modern, scientific age, but that was a mistake. Liberal Protestantism ended up being so identical to modern liberal secularism—with essentially the same beliefs about reality, the same level of uncertainty about God’s nature and ways, and the same moral values—that it offered to secular people nothing distinctive that modern culture didn’t already provide.
The path to church renewal must avoid mistakes that both liberal and conservative denominations and institutions have been making.
Yet today many ex-evangelicals, rightly indignant over the egregious failures of the conservative church, are seeking to avoid the Charybdis of evangelicalism by sailing, as it were, right into the arms of Scylla. Those that don’t “deconvert” completely head for mainline Protestant churches because of the doctrinal freedom (or fuzziness, depending on your perspective) and the progressive political agenda. This tight alignment of the mainline church with politics isn’t the only factor that led to its decline, but it’s also one of the reasons for the decline of the evangelical church as well.
Avoiding “Charybdis”
Earlier, I showed that the evangelical decline has many roots. Since the early 19th century, American evangelicalism has had a strongly anti-intellectual, anti-elitist bias, greatly distrusting higher education, scholarship, and science. And all conservative religion is naturally prone toward legalism and self-righteousness—to “dead orthodoxy.” These tendencies have led to three serious, discrediting mistakes in the eyes of the public.
First, a significant and highly visible number of evangelicals have wed Christian faith to the specific political agenda of right-wing American populism. Many younger adults—and especially nonwhites—see evangelicals as reducing Christianity to a mere power bloc.
Second, evangelicals have adopted a shrill, harsh tone toward modern culture that shows no desire to attract or evangelize. It has put out a “not welcome” sign to more than half of the country—the liberal and secular half. It can only appeal to the shrinking number of traditionally minded, less secularized Americans. It has failed to recognize any need to adapt ministry methods to a new stage in history—a post-Christian society. Evangelicals have made few strides toward engaging and persuading people who don’t share their beliefs in God, sin, moral absolutes, and the afterlife.
Finally, in their resistance to the excessive ideological claims of the progressive left regarding race and gender, many evangelicals claim racial injustice isn’t a problem. And for decades they’ve taken a tragically mistaken and defensive stance toward women who accused churches and ministers of sexual abuse. Many evangelical leaders and churches saw female complainants as following a “feminist agenda” and used appeals for forgiveness and reconciliation to silence women and keep sexual offenders in power. All this has been devastating to evangelical credibility in the eyes of the public.
Avoiding “the Middle”
We must now leave behind our metaphor—the image of the two mythical sea monsters on opposite sides. In theory, one could navigate through them without death or damage if you sailed perfectly in the very middle of the waterway, just beyond the reach of each one. And indeed there are people who counsel that the way forward for church renewal is to be not too conservative or too liberal, to take the “middle path.”
At the most basic level that is bad advice. Should we hold fewer historic, orthodox Protestant doctrines than conservatives but not as few as the liberal mainline? Should we be a little concerned for racial and economic justice, but not too much? Do we want to only do a moderate critique of the idols and power structures of our culture? Do we want to be only moderately committed to the authority of the Bible? Will our church members be either all “centrists” on political issues or completely “apolitical”?
Not at all. The renewed church must be completely orthodox in its historic doctrine, yet contemporary. There are many ways to provide genuine alternatives and to avoid the mistakes of each end of a spectrum without merely “splitting the difference” or by accepting a little bit of both.
In its beliefs, ethics, spirituality, and practices, the renewed church will chart its own path.
1. The renewed church will seek to have more intellectual integrity and a commitment to thoughtful scholarship. This will bring about greater commitment to the common good and to public justice than the mainline, but at the same time it will seek to be more fastidiously true to Scripture; more characterized by the most thoughtful, painstaking exegesis; and more committed to the defense and propagation of historic Christian doctrine than conservative Protestants.
2. In ethics, the renewed church will look like a strange (to outside eyes) union of “liberal” views on race and poverty with “conservative” views on abortion, sexuality, family, and gender. Yet there will be a common thread between them—that of the individual following Christ by disadvantaging himself or herself for the good of the community.
It will unite a commitment to social reform, listening to marginalized people and doing sacrificial ministry to the poor with a deep commitment to evangelism, new church planting, apologetics, and sharp critiques of modern culture. It will combine a concern to contextualize the gospel to new cultures and bring theology into dialogue with modern thought with an emphasis on theological retrieval and faithfulness to historic doctrines and traditions. It will combine the emphasis on historic doctrine (of the orthodox confessional denominations such as Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed) with that of spiritual experience (emphasized by Pentecostals and other revivalist traditions) and social reform (emphasized by the mainline).
3. The renewed church may find a way to speak about race and justice that reflects neither the radical individualism of so many white Americans with regard to justice nor the secular ideologies that drive much of the progressive left. It will need to listen carefully to what the Bible says about justice and to what nonwhite people in the U.S. say about their experience. There are some writers and thinkers pointing a way forward that’s not really left, right, or moderate-middle.
4. The renewed church may find a way to speak about sexuality and gender that reflects neither the radical individualism of secular people nor merely negative prohibitions. By using the culture’s own narratives of body positivity, consent, diversity, freedom, safety, and love, the church may find ways to present the biblical vision for sexuality in compelling terms that ground Christian sex ethics in a larger framework that attracts rather than repels.
5. The renewed church may find a better way to speak about politics and the state. The new populist right and socialist left that have emerged in the last 10 years have moved away from the older “liberal” view of the state.
On the right, a growing number of conservatives are attracted to the use of state power to stifle liberal and progressive points of view and promote Christianity (e.g., the fascination of Tucker Carlson with Viktor Orbán of Hungary). On the other hand, most younger adults are progressive and their view of the state is that it should redistribute wealth, power, and status from the privileged groups to disadvantaged groups, especially racial and sexual minorities and women. In their view, this justifies restrictions on the freedom and equal treatment of members of advantaged groups—and on free speech.
Many Christians today are splitting from one another over these warring views of the role of the state and the role of the church in politics. A renewed church cannot ignore this debate. It must listen hard and long to all sides—and even to those who say it’s wrong to listen to all sides because not all sides have equal power. It cannot live completely or mainly in any one of the current media “bubbles.” It will need to weigh promising proposals privileging a distinct worldview and adopt one that seeks to be more neutral, promoting the thriving and participation of multiple religions and worldviews in the public sphere.
Leadership for Renewal
A key to any effective movement is leadership. The leadership should have the following qualities.
1. Multiethnic. As said before, the renewed church must from the beginning be multiethnic. The initial assembly is crucial. It will not do, for example, for a few older white men to initially plan things and then invite in younger, multiethnic leaders. That allows the initiators to have and maintain the greatest power.
2. Multidenominational. This must include leaders across denominations and traditions. If dominated too much by one tradition, it will lose credibility and be seen as “mainly a Baptist thing” or “mainly a Presbyterian thing.” There are a number of groups—Lutherans, Pentecostals, and the traditional black church—that will not be involved without patient listening and effort.
3. Multinodal. A “node” is a point of intersection in a network. Christian leaders don’t only live in formal denominations but also in many informal, though often powerful, networks of individuals, churches, and ministries that are themselves movements. The renewal leaders should be well networked.
The leadership will also be varied in two main ways.
First, they should be varied in spiritual gifts, aptitudes, talents, and outlooks. No broad, deep, and lasting movement can be led by a single dominant figure or even by those who are all of the same prophetic, artistic, managerial, or scholarly temperament. Even in thinking out the variety of the leaders, the ways of categorizing the leaders should vary! Here are three ways of categorizing.
Use Alan Hirsch’s “APEST” list based on Ephesians 4. There are apostolic, prophetic, evangelistic, shepherding, and teaching gifts and orientations.
Look for the four kinds of leaders that are often sought for boards—(1) visionaries or “idea people,” (2) financial people who understand budgets, fundraising, and business models, (3) strategists who understand how to turn visions into reality, and (4) subject matter experts who know a great deal about the actual product of the organization.
Seek leadership that’s varied in its vocational makeup. Obviously, ministers and theologians are crucial for a Christian renewal movement, but to be clergy-dominated will lead to tunnel vision. And furthermore, it’s not Protestant! The lay leaders need to be scholars, businesspeople, artists, scientists, journalists and media persons, politicians and lawyers—and more.
Second, they should be varied in forms of “capital.” There’s economic capital (such as wealth) and social capital (such as relational connections), as well as symbolic and cultural capital and other subdivisions. As James Hunter has written, when leaders of overlapping capital and diverse gifts work together for shared ends, “the world, indeed, changes.”
But they will not be varied in spiritual maturity. An extremely common but deadly mistake made by new movements is that in order to get all the various forms of capital and connection they need, they elevate to leadership a man or woman who lacks the spiritual maturity for it. Immediately it must be said that among growing, solid Christians there are various levels of maturity and spiritual experience. But it’s a tragic mistake to bring into leadership persons who are stuck in repeated patterns of pride and self-centeredness or of anger and harshness.
Once established, the leadership should have three goals.
It’s a tragic mistake to bring into leadership persons who are stuck in repeated patterns of pride and self-centeredness or of anger and harshness.
First, they must become a real community. Leaders working for renewal should become genuine friends and form vital Christian community, otherwise their diversity of gifts and capital will only artificially be combined. What we want instead is to have the diverse viewpoints and knowledge of our friends to sink into and enrich us. This will make us wiser, give us a less narrow perspective, and ultimately make us both more creative and more trusting of one another.
A classic example of this is the Clapham Group of England in the 18th to 19th centuries. It was an inner circle of friends with diverse gifts who became a literal community, moving to the village of Clapham in suburban London. Their shared purpose was to reform British society with Christian/biblical values, but they focused especially on the abolition of slavery. Out of the Clapham Group came the Eclectic Society, a group of clergy who invited others from outside Clapham into a discussion group taking place every other week. Out of the Eclectic Society was born the Church Missionary Society and the Christian Observer, a crucial evangelical newspaper.
Second, they should avoid moving too quickly. The Clapham example illustrates how deep and lasting changes can’t happen quickly or all at once. Some successful projects may only be possible if other more foundational projects are accomplished first. A common theological foundation needs to be forged. Repentance and extraordinary prayer must be done together. A vision for the future and specific goals should be dreamed and brainstormed. And a “Protestant Social Teaching” to guide our social and political work must be developed. All of these can help build a common mind and unity of vision.
Third, they need to determine specific initiatives and projects to do and recruit new people into leadership teams that can steward each of the projects long term.
Projects of Renewal
Earlier in this article, I suggested seven projects (and one metaproject) to pursue renewal. Let’s consider them in more detail now. This list of suggested projects is not final—God will guide the leaders to his will for them.
1. Church planting and renewal. We need to double the number of new church plants in the U.S. from the current 3,000–4,000 to 6,000–8,000 annually. Current models of church planting need to be changed. First, because they’re both too underresourced among poor and working-class populations and done too expensively in the more advantaged populations. Church planters, in general, will need (a) far more coaching and support, (b) far more training and education delivered to them as they minister, and (c) more institutional support for an evangelistic model that grows through conversion rather than a marketing model that grows through marketing and transfer.
2. “Counter-catechesis” discipleship. Christian education, in general, needs to be massively redone. We must not merely explain Christian doctrine to children, youth, and adults but use Christian doctrine to subvert the baseline cultural narratives to which believers are exposed in powerful ways every day. We should distribute this material widely to all, disrupting existing channels and flooding society, as it were, with the material as well as directly incorporating it into local churches.
3. Post-Christian evangelism. The Christian church in the West faces the first post-Christian, deeply secular culture in history. It hasn’t yet developed a way to do evangelism with the secular and the “nones” that really gains traction and sees many people regularly coming to faith. This project is to develop both the content and means for such evangelism. The means will entail a mobilization of laypeople in evangelism, as in the early church. The content will show how to demonstrate to deeply skeptical people that Christianity is respectable, desirable, and believable (see Blaise Pascal’s Pensées).
4. A justice network. We must create a network—at least one transdenominational ministry or maybe a network of networks—that organizes Christians and churches in communities to both help various needy populations and also to work for a more just and fair social order at the local level. Only relatively large congregations can mount effective ministries to address social problems. A network will provide any church and every church in a locale multiple avenues to be involved in visible-to-the-world ways and the means for tackling the most acute and chronic injustices and social issues in a community or region.
A common theological foundation needs to be forged. Repentance and extraordinary prayer must be done together.
5. A faith-work network. We must create a network (or, again, a network of new and existing ministries) that organizes and equips Christians for “faithful presence” in their vocations, to help them serve the common good through integrating their faith with their work. The network will help churches disciple people for their public life so Christians neither seal their faith off from their work nor infiltrate vocational fields for domination.
6. The “Christian mind” project. Evangelicalism has a strongly anti-intellectual cast to it that must be overcome without losing its appeal to the majority of the population. The goals include increasing the number of Christians on faculties, forging a robust intellectual culture for orthodox Protestantism, and increasing the number of Christian public intellectuals. This will entail promoting believers into the existing intellectual and cultural economy of largely progressive universities and largely conservative think tanks. It will also mean creating some kind of alternate cultural economy for scholarship and intellectual work.
7. A new leadership pipeline. We must not only renew, re-create, expand, and greatly strengthen youth ministry and campus ministries across the country, but we must link these (more tightly than in the past) with local churches and denominations, ministry/theological training centers, colleges, and seminaries—forming coherent yet highly diverse and flexible pathways for leadership development (e.g., conversion, then student leadership, then internships, then staff positions and other leadership positions). The purpose is to produce increasing numbers of well-equipped Christian leaders.
Behind all these seven projects is an eighth metaproject. Call it Christian philanthropy. We cannot renew the church or be of any help to society without strong financial undergirding. That will require a change in how Christians give and steward their wealth, such that it will release far more money for ministry than has been available.
Jesus started the greatest movement in the history of the world neither with any seed money nor with an organization or institutions. He didn’t leave behind a book or even a vision, mission, and values statement! Instead, he left behind a group of friends who had become a community through common bond with himself but also through shared common experience together. “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see” (Luke 10:23).
It will take a community of friends who ask God to open their eyes to see the same things, to bless them with those truths and aspirations, and to help them renew the church that he purchased with his own blood (Acts 20:28).
The Gospel Coalition