The New York Times recently ran a story about the Riverside Church, the congregation that serves as a national cathedral for liberal Protestantism, and its search for a new minister.
Riverside’s past ministers have included renowned leaders such as Harry Emerson Fosdick and William Sloan Coffin, making the current task a daunting one. The Times referred to Riverside as “the capital of a theological movement that has been slowly deteriorating,” citing mainstream Protestantism’s “decades-long pattern of losing members, vitality, and influence” as a challenge to finding a new pastor. A photograph illustrated the story: two men looking down from the church’s balcony over forty parishioners huddled in the back pews of a mostly-empty building.
Last October, I preached at Riverside’s Fosdick Convocation—a five-day teaching event celebrating liberal Protestantism—to a crowd of approximately 800 people. The building was not empty. More than three-dozen leaders, theologians, and writers preached, offered workshops, and led worship with large audiences in attendance. That conference was energetic, intelligent, and, frankly, emotional—testifying to a renewed spiritual vitality among mainstream Protestants.
Mainline Protestant vitality (denominations including the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) is probably the most under-reported religion story in America today. While these denominations face undeniable challenges of leadership and attendance, many local congregations are experiencing new growth—in terms of both numbers and theological depth.
In the last five years, Scottsdale Congregational Church (UCC) in Scottsdale, Arizona, has nearly doubled in Sunday attendance. Two things have brought about the change: an innovative arts-worship service and the congregation’s deepened understanding of its progressive theology. In Olathe, Kansas, St. Andrew’s Christian Church, a Disciples of Christ congregation, has brought in from forty to eighty new members a year by emphasizing its commitment to justice and diversity. Trinity Episcopal Church, a congregation in Santa Barbara, California, with an out-gay priest and a passion for prophetic ministry, has a successful evangelism program to university students.
Viewed separately, such congregations might appear as anecdotal successes in a morass of failure. However, in recent months, three academic studies have suggested that liberal renewal might be at the edge of a trend: Ian Markam’s “Why Liberal Churches Are Growing,” Hal Taussig’s “A New Spiritual Home: Progressive Christianity at the Grass Roots,” and my own, “Christianity for the Rest of Us.” Together, these books explore the characteristics of liberal congregational growth, renewal in progressive communities, and patterns of vitality in mainstream churches based in research involving thousands of congregations.
No study has yet attempted to count how many mainline churches are experiencing new vibrancy, but something is clearly happening in some quarters of liberal Protestantism. And that something will have, as the renewal of evangelicalism has had, important political and social consequences in the future.
It is time to stop talking of “mainline decline,” as if it were one of the Ten Commandments. The liberal Protestant tradition adapts to changing times in faithful engagement with the culture. As American culture changes, liberalism has faced many challenges, yet it may well be birthing itself anew. Perhaps the crisis of liberal churches has been a precursor—not to its demise but to surprising new life.
Diana Butler Bass holds a doctorate in religious studies from Duke University and is the author of "Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith" (Harper San Francisco, 2006). She is one of the speakers for the three-day conference "Church for the 21st Century: A Gathering to Envision, Encourage, & Energize Renewing Congregations" that begins today at the Washington National Cathedral. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia.
