General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Ed Schultz EXPOSES Cause Of Racism In The South [View all]Mosby
(16,317 posts)When people leave mainline churches they go somewhere else. As Rodney Stark, a sociologist at Baylor University in Waco, Texas describes it, they are not leaving religion so much as they are looking for religion. About 44 percent of Americans say they have a religious affiliation that is different from the religion in which they were raised, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life's "U.S. Religious Landscape Survey."
"Everybody knows that the so-called 'mainline' is now the sideline. The United Church of Christ, Presbyterians, Methodists and the Episcopalians have been shrinking at a rather prodigious rate. But that isn't because people left church, it is because people left THOSE churches," says Stark. "Groups like the Assemblies of God have doubled and redoubled in size in the same period of time."
The flight from mainline churches, Stark says, has been going on since the 1800s. It wasn't really noticed until the 1960s because overall population growth made it look like mainline churches were growing, while all along their percentage of the population was dropping.
-snip-
As denominations are less linked to identity, it opens churches up to greater competition. Timothy Dalrymple, associate director of content at Patheos.com and an evangelical columnist, says "American Christianity is a vital open marketplace of religious ideas in churches. These non-denominational churches can try 100 things and find a model that works."
Often that model includes a well-defined conservative expression of Christianity that contrasts with mainline churches' more moderate theology. Dalrymple thinks this "dissipation" of mainline churches' theology is part of the reason why people are leaving. "They became less committed to traditional Christian teaching regarding the authority of scripture, regarding salvation in Christ alone, and so forth."
Cannon Nestler doesn't think this conservative trend is a good thing particularly the danger of defining things in inflexible ways, regardless of how appealing they might be. "The developments of theologies that say 'we are the only right way' have had a profoundly detrimental effect on our culture," she says. "We are called to live here in toleration of each other. The scariest part of the religious right is the voicing of the idea that 'It's not part of the American culture that we are called to live with other religious expressions.' That scares the heck out of me."
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700113490/The-rise-of-the-nons-Why-nondenominational-churches-are-winning-over-mainline-churches.html?pg=all