Hilton Head Island, SC – June 19, 2016
The Chapel Without Walls
Ezekiel 37:1-10; II Timothy 4:1-8
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings. – II Tim. 4:3 (RSV)
What Has Happened to Mainline Protestantism?
You know how, when you try a new medication or you buy a new electrical gizmo, the label tells you the potential dangers involved in using the medication or apparatus improperly? You are warned that you could acquire these or those complications, or, if you tried hard enough, you could actually kill yourself by using this particular product. Well, I feel compelled to warn you that I hope this sermon will be very instructive, and you will learn things that you haven’t thought about before, but you many not find it very inspirational. In fact, if we both are not careful, it could be downright depressing. With that caveat having been “caveated,” we press on.
Mainline Protestantism consists primarily of the denominations which came out of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century through particular others that came into being by the middle of the 18th century. Those groups are the Lutherans, the Anglicans or Episcopalians, the Presbyterian and Reformed Churches of various sorts, the Baptists, the Congregationalists (or the United Church of Christ), and the Methodists. There are some other much smaller denominations which considered themselves Mainliners, but the large denominations I mentioned are the primary ones in that conglomeration of Christians known as Mainline Protestants.
The zenith of denominational membership for almost all Mainline denominations was attained in the late 1950s and into the 1960s. Since then, almost all major Protestant denominations have lost membership, even while the population of the nation has virtually doubled since that time. So while the number of Americans has been steadily rising since the Sixties, the number of Mainlliners has been steadily falling. I shall briefly cite some examples.
I was ordained as a minister in the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (by far the largest Presbyterian denomination in the country) in late 1964. Ever since then the total membership of the Presbyterians has declined every year. (I do want you to know that I choose to believe the first factor has no direct correlation to the second factor.) In 1964 there were nearly four million Presbyterians in the UPCUSA, and that did not include the million people in the Southern Presbyterian Church (the Presbyterian Church in the United States) who later merged with the northern bunch in 1983. Thus in 1983 there were well over four million Mainline Presbyterians. Now there are a little more than a million-and-a-half. That is fully a loss of two-thirds of the active membership, while the national population increased by 100%.
Three Lutheran denominations merged in 1988 to form the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Since that merger, the ELC has lost 23% of its members. The Southern Baptist Church was formed in 1845, largely because it supported slavery and the northern Baptists did not. Other denominations split apart prior to or during the Civil War because of slavery, but the Baptists never came back together. The Southern Baptist Convention has been the largest Protestant denomination for many decades. Some of its members and member congregations are essentially Mainline Protestant in their orientation, but a majority are considerably more conservative or fundamentalist. Up until 2003, the Southern Baptist Convention had gained members every year for many decades. Since 2003, however, they have lost members every year: a total of 800,000 in the past dozen years. That is only 5%, but it is still 5%, and it is still a loss.
American Mainline Protestantism (indeed worldwide Mainline Protestantism), however anyone defines or describes it, has been on a numerical slide for the last half-century. Millions have dropped out of church altogether, and now are completely secularized. It is as though Christianity had never touched their lives at all. And do you want to know what is one of the major causes is for that decline? Our children and grandchildren, yours and mine. There are dozens or scores of adult children and grandchildren represented today by people here this morning who do not attend church, any church, and who have not done so for a long time. The parents or grandparents attend, but the children and grandchildren don’t. They are among the legions of those who are “spiritual, but not religious.” Have you noticed the number of obituaries in The Island Packet where there is no mention of any religious memorial service?
American Christianity has changed dramatically in our lifetime. There is a tidal wave of anti-institutionalism. It is directed against religion, government, business, and many other kinds of social institutions. The number and percentage of active Catholics has also dropped as much or more than that of Mainline Protestants. Many churches, some of them evangelical churches, are filled mainly with relatively old people. The only groups in general that are increasing are those identified as Evangelicals, Pentecostals, or fundamentalists. But even many of those denominations or congregations also are losing members. American Christianity is in a major crisis, although many American Christians are almost totally oblivious to that fact.
Intra-denominational disputes over certain issues have damaged denominational viability. Is the Bible inerrant or not? Should it be understood literally or not? Should or should not openly practicing gay or lesbian members be welcomed into church membership? Should they be ordained as clergy or lay officers in any church? Should same-sex marriage be allowed in The Church or in a church? Should the clergy be allowed to officiate at same-sex marriages? The Lutheran, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, American Baptist, and United Methodist Churches have lost hundreds of thousands of members over attempts to resolve those differences one way or the other, and they are still not resolved to the satisfaction of all. These and other issues have caused a large majority of Episcopal churches in South Carolina to leave the American Protestant Episcopal Church and to form their own diocese of more conservative churches.
The Congregational and Baptist branches of Mainline Protestantism have always governed themselves at the congregational level, and each congregation owns its own property. All other major Protestant groups have operated on the principle that the regional or national Church owns all local church property, and those levels of church government alone can arbitrate all theological or ecclesiastical disputes in all congregations. Nevertheless, in the past thirty or forty years an increasing number of very large congregations have either pulled out of their denominations to become independent congregations with no denominational affiliation or else they have essentially pulled out, giving little or no financial support to the national Church. Thus they really function as congregational entities, not as denominationally-affiliated entities.
The prophet Ezekiel was prophetically active for about thirty years, from 593 to 563 BCE. Ezekiel was in Jerusalem in 587 BCE when the Babylonians came and destroyed the city, taking its leading citizens with them as captives back to Babylon (which on today’s map is Iraq). Ezekiel was one of those Israelites who was taken in chains to the Mesopotamian capital.
The destruction of the Jewish kingdom in the 6th century Before the Common Era was the worst episode in Jewish history until the Holocaust in the middle of the 20th century of the Common Era. The people of Israel could not believe that God would allow this enormous national catastrophe to engulf them. When it happened, many of them assumed God had abandoned them, and that therefore they might as well abandon God.
By no means did Ezekiel see it that way. Although calamity had befallen the Jews, they had every reason to believe that God would rescue them, which He did in 532 BCE. At least that is how Ezekiel and Second Isaiah interpreted the victory of Cyrus the Mede over the Babylonians, after which Cyrus freed the Jews and allowed them to return to their homeland.
Ezekiel gave one of the most imaginative portraits of that reality of any section of the Bible. There are two Negro spirituals associated with the prophecy of Ezekiel: “Ezekiel saw duh wheel/ ‘Way up in de middle ob de air” and “Dem bones, dem bones, dem-uh dry bones/ Now heah de word ob de Lawd!” It is to the content of the latter spiritual that we now turn.
In the 37th chapter of Ezekiel, the prophet tells us that he had a vision. In his vision, God set him down in the midst of a valley filled with thousands of dry bones. God said to Ezekiel, “Son of man, can these bones live?” (The prophets Ezekiel, Daniel, and Jesus of Nazareth are all referred to as the “Son of man.” Hundreds of doctoral theses and thousands of sermons have been written about that three-word expression, but in this sermon we shall only note it and keep on moving right along, because we have several other homiletic fish to fry.) When Ezekiel told God he didn’t know whether the dry bones would live again, God said to him, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord: …Behold, I will cause breath to enter you and you shall live. I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and you shall know that I am the Lord” (Ch. 37, vs. 3-6). And bone came together with bone, and bodies were resurrected, and in Ezekiel’s vision Israel, God’s people Israel, lived again!
Christian people, Mainline Protestants: our tradition within American Christianity has gone through a very difficult time, and it is by no means finished. But God will not abandon His people, any of His people, ever! Mainliners, Catholics, conservatives, evangelicals, fundamentalists, Jews, Muslims, everyone: God is always with all of us in all of our exigencies, and He will never forsake us! Emaciated though we may be, and a mere shadow of our former selves, we shall rise once again --- IF we maintain our faith and trust in God, rather than merely in ourselves. For far too many years we have been in retreat, in retrenchment, in retrograde status. But if we remain faithful to God, God shall surely remain faithful to us. I doubt that Mainline Protestantism shall strongly bounce back again during the rest of our lifetimes, but it will bounce back. After all, Mainline Protestantism, like every other branch of Christendom, is like centipede grass or poison ivy; we can’t kill it, as much as we and our kind may have unintentionally tried to kill it. It will re-sprout, because it and we belong to God, and not to ourselves. God will not leave Himself without a witness. You can count on that.
In the last quarter or half a century, what kind of churches have done well? Evangelical churches, we are told. Churches with what is known as “contemporary worship,” we are told. We suppose it is true, and we believe it is a new phenomenon. But it isn’t. In the Medieval Period, the masses of people were poorly educated; most were illiterate. So the nobility put up the money to build magnificent Gothic churches and cathedrals. The very architecture pointed to God, and the beautiful and intricately designed stained glass windows told biblical stories to the biblically illiterate, stories the people could not read for themselves because they could not read. The churches were the places where morality plays were staged, and ordinary people could see Christian truths enacted so that they might more easily perceive them.
In recent times, many of the fastest-growing churches mimicked morality plays with gigantic pageants or with large-sound popular music. They set religious words to secular-sounding music, and they projected the words for very simple tunes onto large screens overhead: six or eight or nine words, sung in unison because too few are still trained to sing in harmony. There were alternating rhythms and incantations, repeated over and over again, for five or ten minutes at a time. There were large orchestras, with electric guitars and violins, and booming drums and singers with hand-held microphones. It was what Americans call “contemporary” worship and the Brits call “happy-clappy” worship. It was fun. It was entertaining. And it was the Middle Ages all over again in another guise, reaching down to where the people are instead of trying to lift the people up to where perhaps they might and should be.
A mega-church is defined by many ecclesiastical sociologists as a congregation which has at least two thousand people in worship every Sunday, whether in one service or many. Such a church must have a very large auditorium to accommodate such numbers. The room doesn’t usually point up vertically; it points out horizontally. Congregations become anonymous masses, people who cannot know or touch or feel everyone because there are so many of them. Nevertheless, individually they personally feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the mass experience. It is claimed that there are 2000 mega-churches in the USA, and that on any given Sunday 15% of everyone in worship that day is in a mega-church. That is an astonishing figure. There are many hundreds of thousands of congregations of all varieties all over the country, and many of them have been numerically declining. In the meantime, only two thousand of those congregations account for 15% of all the Christians in worship in all those hundreds of thousands of churches. And many, but not all, mega-churches are increasing in size.
Timothy was one of the apostle Paul’s colleagues on several of his missionary journeys. Perhaps the last letter Paul wrote to anybody before he was executed in Rome was his second letter to Timothy. Paul foresaw that a hard time was coming for the nascent Christian Church of Jesus Christ. So Paul ended his epistle by telling his friend to keep at it, no matter what happened. Then he warned Timothy, “For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths” (II Tim. 4:3-4).
Did Mainline Protestantism acquire itching ears at some point in the last half-century? Did Roman Catholics? Did Evangelicals or Pentecostals or fundamentalists? What constitutes truth in the 21st century? Do we recognize it when we see it? Are we like Paul, “already on the point of departure”? Has the time of our departure come, either as individuals or as Mainline Protestants? Have we fought the good fight, finished the race, and kept the faith? Or are we still at it, regardless of our age, trying to live Christian lives as best we perceive them?
Mainline Protestantism is still one of the primary places where the whole Gospel of Jesus Christ is proclaimed. The Chapel Without Walls is made up of people most of whom have been Mainliners at some point. “All things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose,” said Paul (Romans 8:28). We hope against hope that we are among those who seek to love and serve God, and have been called by Him to do so. Mainline Protestantism has had a great history, it has a great history, and it shall have a great history. To maintain that history requires hard work and effort. It is to that effort we are all called.