A plea for communion in the face of loss
In one generation, traditional Protestantism in America may no longer exist.
This claim might come as a surprise. After all, it is common knowledge that traditional liturgy is making a comeback among Protestants. The faults of the seeker-sensitive movement that dominated Protestant churches of yesteryear have become all too clear. The younger generations, tired of consumer Christianity, are planting deeper roots in the life of confessions, sacraments, and community.
Except these points of common knowledge aren’t really true, except among the readers of journals like this one. These trends all belong to the modest world of the Christian intellectual. And intellectuals, Christian or not, have the bad habit of thinking the larger world reflects the small one they inhabit. In the larger world, statistical trends show that traditional Protestantism is in decline. And so, I suspect that traditional Protestants will be faced with a choice in the next generation: Join sides with the Catholic Church or the Non-Denom Church.
Before I get ahead of myself, let me define my terms.
By “traditional Protestantism” I mean Protestantism that cares about the creeds and confessions, the liturgy, sacraments, and doctrine, in both content and form. It includes Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican denominations. It also includes Baptist, Presbyterian, and even Restorationist churches that maintain their respective traditions of doctrine and liturgy.
These groups are not “Catholic-lite.” Their differences, both between each other and Catholicism, matter. But they all respect—and care to maintain—their traditions. Their worship is directed primarily to God rather than to individual feeling. Their institutional life is bound by creed and confession, not outreach strategy. They rely on a regular church order whose ecclesiology is born from theology, not growth modeling or convenience. This holds true even for mainline churches with progressive theology. Whatever else you may hear, in every Episcopal service you will always hear the Word of God spoken from the Old Testament, a Psalm, the New Testament, and the Gospel. And you will always say the Apostles or Nicene Creed.
The denominations of this no-longer-so-big tent of traditional Protestantism are quickly dying. The fall of the progressive mainline denominations is well known—some are declining at a rate of almost four percent each year. The Episcopal Church may not exist in fifty years.
Conservative Protestants are not discussing, unfortunately, the apparent failure of the confessional split-offs from the mainline to recoup lost ground. The Anglican Church in North America has reached its peak, for now, at around 128,000 members. Compare that to the remaining 1.4 million in the Episcopal Church. The North American Lutheran Church, likewise, has around 140,000 members, while the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America still has 2.2 million. The Presbyterian Church in America is continuing to grow but slowing down, currently with a membership just under 400,000. Meanwhile, the Presbyterian Church USA has one million. Only time will tell how the Global Methodists will fare, but going by these trends, they may capture perhaps twenty or thirty percent of former United Methodists, even as that denomination continues its decline.
Despite the impression some excited seminarians may give, there are many gray hairs in these conservative mainline split-offs. And few children, young families, or twenty-somethings—and few who come from no Christian background at all.
Cast theological disagreements aside for the moment, and you will see the future looks bleak for traditional Protestant churches, no matter whether they stayed in the mainlines or formed new institutions.
But isn’t there some growth, somewhere? Haven’t I omitted the second largest denomination in the United States—the Southern Baptist Convention? And don’t I underestimate the persistent growth of the PCA?
These questions lead to my second broad category: the Non-Denom Church. The Non-Denom Church is difficult to define. But here, the aesthetic matters most: large auditorium over cruciform chapel, pop music over hymns, skinny jeans over clerical gowns. Critically, these are not only matters of taste. They point to deeper positions on ecclesiology, sacramentology, even anthropology, which eventually add up to make for a distinct theological tradition of its own.
Here are some deeper distinctives:
The sacraments (or ordinances) are works of personal edification. There’s no magic to (or in) them. Baptism is for profession of faith—and sometimes repeated. The Lord’s Supper is just a symbol, not a means of grace but an important reminder, done a few times a year.
Worship music must use the best of current technology to make for a compelling worship experience: Smoke, video screens, synthesizers, and sound crews all work together to inspire an encounter between the churchgoer and God. The point is this experience—not only worship of God in the old-fashioned sense (though it might include it), but the individual, emotional experience of God.
The pastor and leadership are there, foremost, for church growth and missions. Doctrine serves expansion, not the reverse. Leaders will read more books on business growth and mass communication than theology. Like worship, the sermon exists for the sake of relationship with Jesus, not proclaiming doctrine. And the point is to spread, spread, and spread this relationship.
Add all these up, and you have a Non-Denom Church. This way of being a church has become stable and consistent enough to make for its own tradition. Networks of pan-denominational churches and organizations—some just as large as entire denominations—now own the space of church-planting: the Association of Related Churches, Bethel, Antioch, etc. These networks are more allied to each other than to whichever denominations or theological traditions their member churches may or may not belong. Doctrinal influence coming into the Non-Denom Church is more likely to be from the Pentecostal rather than Reformed orbit. Pastors at megachurches or aspiring megachurches are more likely to get their sermons and Bible study materials from organizations like the Gospel Coalition than from their denominational press. Entire industries of sermon writers, graphic designers, and growth planners are booming, and these churches are happy to use their services. This leads to further blending.
My point is not to criticize these industries or the culture of the Non-Denom Church. Nor do I claim traditional Protestants privilege stuffy doctrines over believers’ relationship with Jesus. I only stress the great sociological and theological gap between these very different ways of being a Christian. Although the Non-Denom owes its origin to Protestantism—indeed, the distinction between the two has long been intramural—this historic bond has weakened considerably. It is time to recognize the Non-Denom Church as its own cultural and institutional force. It is likely to endure into the future as its own branch of Christianity, with much of its Protestantism left behind.
Further proving the cultural power of Non-Denom Church and its distance from traditional Protestantism is the fact that many evangelical Christians today do not even identify themselves as Protestant, as Ryan Burge has shown.
There is another obvious fact that few denominational Protestants in the SBC or PCA seem willing to admit: The growth in these ostensibly traditional denominations stems almost entirely from the work of the Non-Denom churches. As already mentioned, pan- or pseudo-denominational organizations now own the church planting space. All church plants, to a great extent, utilize the methods and mores of Non-Denom Church. Most no longer even have their host denomination in their names. Therefore, I wager that whatever growth exists in the SBC and PCA is almost entirely the result of the Non-Denom churches growing within the husk of the world of traditional Protestantism.
This leaves traditional Protestantism with a most uncertain future.
Begin with the declining traditional denominations that aren’t utilizing the culture of Non-Denom Church—whether the progressive United Churches of Christ or the conservative Orthodox Presbyterian Church. No doubt, many particular churches in these denominations will remain for ages to come. But the institutional structures around them—the state synods, the national church hierarchies, the publishing houses, the seminaries—may well fall away in fifty years.
The remnant will be a loose network of largely independent churches. These churches will have become, in effect, aesthetically traditional Non-Denom churches. Indeed, there are already hints of growing pan-denominational cooperation between traditional Protestant churches, such as among NALC and ACNA churches, or between politically right-wing churches, pastors, and organizations under the umbrella of American Reformer. Whatever virtues and vices such cooperation has, it looks more like Acts 29 than the Synod or the Episcopate. In such a setting, it seems that the focus has already shifted from the particular tradition to the Christian’s personal experience with Jesus—only the experience on offer has hymns, creeds, incense, or political ideology instead of electric guitars, projector screens, and t-shirts.
But what about the denominations that are still growing or those that still have large numbers? I predict they will eventually be grafted into the Non-Denom tradition. The PCA will likely have a greater focus on doctrine than the SBC. But both will be populated mostly by large churches—even megachurches—that wear their denominational affiliations loosely. It is an open secret that the largest churches in the SBC don’t raise their voices at the yearly conventions. The megachurches are doing fine on their own, thank you very much. Increasingly, many of them care less about attending conventions with the smaller churches who care—and who sometimes kick out megachurches. Either the megachurches will leave and the SBC will decline with its smaller traditional churches, or the former will survive the death of the latter, and then the megachurches will have the denominations as their prize
Therefore, I suspect traditional Protestants will be faced with the choice to join the Non-Denom Church—whether they want to or not. Their denominations will either fail or become so small as to count as little more than versions of the networks formed by Non-Denom churches. Traditional churches will have lost their denominations and become Non-Denom churches by default. Or the remaining denominations will be populated only by surviving megachurches, which effectively will have changed each denomination’s culture into Non-Denom Church.
Allow me to illustrate. I recently met a professor who preaches for two small congregations that broke off from the United Methodist Church. They asked him to preach because they had never hired a pastor before. Instead, the denomination always gave them one. And yet, he explained, “they’re tired of bishops,” and they won’t join a new denomination. Besides, they had stopped baptizing infants over twenty years ago and now held to believer’s baptism. These had been Methodist churches in name only. They have now embraced their true identity as Non-Denom churches.
What can traditional Protestants do about this fate? Perhaps it isn’t such a bad end for Protestant ecclesiology. For the Church exists wherever the Word of God is preached and the sacraments are administered. The gospel has always been fundamental, while denominations are a historical contingency. The large, unified mainline denominations were formed in the twentieth century after many mergers of smaller denominations. Perhaps that experiment has failed, and it’s time to go back. Maybe there is even something genuinely theological about the non-Denom shift toward individual striving for the sacred, which Protestants should take on as the next phase of church history.
Or perhaps the small traditional Protestant churches must simply maintain fidelity in a time of drastic culling—keep reciting the creeds and confessions, keep administering the sacraments, even without prospects for a future like the past they once had.
But large questions about this shift await answers. Apostolic succession is the most glaring one, at least for high church Protestants, along with ordination and theological education. Sacraments are another grave matter.
Perhaps, once they join the fold, the traditional Protestants may leaven Non-Denom Church culture with reminders of the importance of all these issues. But even so, I wonder if any of the orthodox Reformers would have embraced so total a collapse of the larger structures of the Church—be they episcopal, presbyterian, or synodal—leaving only a very loose network of autonomous, voluntarily cooperating congregations in their wake. How well can traditional Protestantism adapt to this modern way of being a church and still claim the mantle of tradition?
If traditional Protestants do not want to join the Non-Denom Church or become it by force or gravity, they are left with the choice of reckoning with the Roman Catholic Church. (I leave aside Eastern Orthodoxy, which plays on the late-modern sociological field as another Protestant denomination.) After all, if the Church exists wherever the Word of God is preached and the sacraments are administered, the Roman Church may have just as good prospects for inclusion as the Non-Denom Church. And sometimes better—at least it always administers the sacraments.
But I am not optimistic about the Catholic Church in America. Despite articles in the Gray Lady calling it New York’s “hottest nightclub,” few statistics about American Catholicism provoke joy. There is a priest shortage. Churches are closing. Those raised Catholic are leaving church once they leave home. For every anecdote of an evangelical kid converting to Catholicism, I can give you three of my students who report being “raised in the Catholic religion” before finding Christianity, usually in the Non-Denom Church.
Still, the Catholic Church has some things going for it. First, it has survived two thousand years. I doubt it will die in the next fifty. It is still the largest denomination in America, and though it is suffering just as great a decline today as the traditional Protestant churches, its sheer size will protect it from total collapse. Unlike, say, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Catholic Church has institutional power to enforce its doctrine and put teaching and liturgy over the elements of Non-Denom culture. Whereas the SBC may just morph into the Non-Denom Church, the Catholic Church will never give up the Eucharist, the Creeds, or the calendar, and certainly not apostolic succession. And since Vatican II, its respect for the authority of Scripture has only increased, at least on paper. The same goes for the doctrine of justification. Protestants and Catholics alike underestimate how powerful a document the 1998 Joint Declaration on Justification was—or at least could be, if churches ever catch up to it.
For all these reasons, many traditional Protestants may well recognize in Catholicism a greater resemblance to their own faith than in the Non-Denom Church.
Which Church shall win over more traditional Protestants—the Catholic or the Non-Denom? Which one should?
I don’t know.
I do not write any of this out of joy. I am neither Roman Catholic nor Non-Denom. I write this, first and foremost, as a lament. I think the fall of the mainline Protestant churches and old Protestant piety in the U.S. is the key story of twentieth-century America, and it has proven a disaster for church and country. I wish we could be revived by a mainline of Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Lutherans. America would have a greater measure of dignity, modesty, moderation, and respect for God’s majesty in that case. But as of now, it seems, my wish will not be granted.
I write this, finally, as a call for traditional Protestants to do more ecumenical work, both among themselves and, ultimately, with Roman Catholics. Ecumenism reached its peak with the Joint Declaration and has since stopped. It is time to get climbing again. It would demand humility for the Protestants, especially on social matters. But it would involve humility on the Catholic side as well. Indeed, the Catholic Church would have to address such matters as a female diaconate and clerical celibacy, and the theological questions surrounding transubstantiation and justification. What remaining distance is there between the doctrines of real and spiritual presence and that of transubstantiation? What would a reunified Church do about, for example, ordained women, whether priests, pastors, or deaconesses? Can sacraments and orders be rendered valid or invalid, even after they had been declared the contrary? And all this, while remaining faithful to the Gospel—that is, traditional in the best sense of that word?
These are difficult questions. They must be answered by each respective Protestant denomination in dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church. But even as resolutions to them may seem impossible, these matters are no less grave than several of the disagreements facing Catholic-Orthodox relations. Some even coincide—a Greek Orthodox church in Africa recently ordained a female deacon for the first time in centuries. And yet lately the Catholic Church has proven generous in its dealings with the Orthodox Churches led by the Greek Patriarch Bartholomew, and some of the most effective ecumenical work in recent years has happened on this front.
For Catholics, why not just hope for traditional Protestants to go extinct? Why should they care? Well, because caring is the right thing to do.
And Catholic fortunes will fare no better in the coming storm. Catholics too will need more hands on deck. And thanks to several conversions from Protestantism, some quite prominent, they have gained strength. As pleased as Catholics might feel about such conversions, they should remember that a good many probably wouldn’t have happened but for faithful upbringings in Protestant churches, or the reforms of the American Catholic Church with Vatican II, or the radically biblical postures taken by both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. For dialogue to continue and unity to be possible in the future, there can be no resting on these laurels.
Of course, nothing of what I fear may come true. God, in His great majesty, sometimes uses extraordinary means to achieve His purposes in history. And, as I pray, He may yet use them to revive a traditional Protestantism. What I have described only follows the ordinary patterns of Providence.
But this is precisely why we must admit that the ordinary path will likely be for traditional Protestantism to go the way of all the earth. That leaves traditional Protestants today facing the dire questions of how, and whether, they will remain traditional—and Protestant.
Casey Spinks writes from Waco, Texas, where he is a postdoctoral fellow at Baylor University and teaches religion and philosophy. He is a contributing editor to Front Porch Republic.