This was such a wonderful essay. My own uniting church in Australia has similar struggles, and a great deal of anxiety about the church dying, yet many leaders can’t answer the question “do you think people should become Christians?” with a heartfelt “yes!” I wish I could make everyone read this essay
Thank you! As a right-winger, my honest reaction is this: Reading a perspective like this one (Crosby's), I can engage with it and reflect upon it, because we are both Christian and we are both starting from Christ.
Whereas reading the Smith perspective, my reaction is to just throw up my hands. How can I even engage with that? There's just nothing there that I can even respond to. So I thank the present author for taking the trouble to engage with such arguments, for which many of us do not have the patience or tact so to do. Blessings!
One aspect of decline that is frequently overlooked is the impact of the ANiC split. If we combined the two churches the total membership would be signifantly impacted in a postive direction. Given that ANiC parishes lean conservative/evangelical, the pace of decline is not as pronounced in their expereince.
I barely get done thinking an essay of yours is "my favorite Ben Crosby piece" before you send out another one that supersedes it. This is a superb essay offering foundational gems of thought and incisive observations. In our conversation one of the last questions I asked you was for your thoughts on the "state of the provinces," and this is a meaty complement to the reflection you gave me. I especially appreciate the "Anglican character" in your writing offsetting the histrionics of the essays you're reacting to. You find the reasonable mean, one that values needed reformation while insisting that the Church's Gospel has not become out-of-date. I too do not think "progressivism" as some bland abstraction is at fault; rather, I would diagnose us as having an endemic failure to believe. We spend too much time being ashamed of preaching eternal truths, fearful of condemnation from the world for being out of touch. But the Gospel has always been foolishness to the Gentiles. Faithfulness, not relevance, will bring revival to our fledgling parishes.
I've been saying for awhile that preaching "inclusion" and "radical welcome" rings hollow if, when people get inside, they find there's little left to be included into. Inclusion should mean included into a living Body, one with a future. Of course, the Church is an act of God, and its future is secure in the providential arms. But that doesn't excuse us from recognizing that our labors today will reap fruit -- for good or ill -- twenty years from now. We need to stop being so half-hearted in our belief and learn how to believe again, in a way that changes lives, ours and others.
Any time someone's conclusion is "We're declining because of LGBTQ inclusion and gender equity, I kind of stop listening. As you pointed out, conservative denominations are also declining. A recent article I read talked about the decline at Mother Bethel AME in Philly, the AME's flagship parish. Having grown up inthe Black Church, I agree with Raphael Warnock's take in "The Divided Mind of the Black Church" that Afrocan American Christians are conservative on almost every issue other than racial justice. And yet, the Black Church is also starting to decline. I continue to feel the real reason for decline is hypocrisy: the failure of Christians to live up to the teachings of Christ in thought, word, or deed. Many young adults have read the Bible and think Jesus was pretty based. But the fact that Christians often do the exact opposite of what Jesus taught makes them think, 'well why bother joining if Christians don't practice what they preach?'
Also Ben, I think your assertion that the Church shouldn't be a driving force in charitable efforts is a little Euro-centric -- and I mean that respectfully. As Warnock also points out in the aforementioned book, the Black Church made efforts of charity, solidarity, and social action central to its mission out of necessity; for much of American history, no one else was going to help African Americans if the Church didn't. White theologians like Washington then asserted that the Black Church was just a social activism organization with a veneer of Christianity. James Cone rebutted this by saying the Black Church was the Remnant Church and White mainline Christians had abandoned the core mission of the Church and message of Jesus. To some extent, I agree.
Thanks so much for the engagement! I really appreciate it. A few thoughts:
(1) It is true that many conservative denominations are declining, but it is also true that more progressive ones are declining significantly faster. It is worth asking why that is, I think. As I wrote, I tend to think that it isn't actually because of positions on women's ordination or lgbtq inclusion themselves, but that those positions do tend to be associated with the idea that evangelism is unimportant or even that it doesn't matter whether people are Christians.
(2) We actually have some quite interesting research on why it is that people leave church. Hypocrisy turns out to be significantly less important than I would have thought. If you haven't already read it, The Great Dechurching is worth your time on this subject, imo. I'm not disputing that people do sometimes leave for that reason, but the best research we have shows that the pictures is a bit more complicated.
(3) I certainly hear you that the Black Church in the US functioned in a sociologically quite distinct way than most white churches, as one of the few institutions under Black control and thus a vital sphere for political and social activism. Absolutely! I'll note, though, that my piece was written explicitly for the mainline, where the sociological function of churches qua institutions is different. And while, as I said, I do think that involvement in social action should flow from our proclamation, I do maintain that it is ultimately secondary to that proclamation itself. I continue to think that, in general, on matters of social justice, churches like the ACC or the Episcopal Church do much better when they provide spiritual sustenance for people's justice work than when they try to take the lead themselves. They just aren't very good at it. If I thought that my primary vocation in the world was working for social justice, I would still be a union organizer -- because in purely this-worldly terms, I would do a lot more good there than as a priest.
I was right about to comment something to this effect--that although conservatism is no silver bullet, the contrast is real. In the US (I'm American), the numbers are just undeniable.
Amongst Lutherans, the mainline ELCA has shed 45% of its members since 2000; the more conservative LCMS has lost 30%; and the slightly more conservative WELS has lost 15%. In Presbyterian world, the mainline PCUSA has been in precipitous decline while the conservative PCA has been steady or growing slightly. (The OPC has also done well but is tiny by comparison; the EPC has been much more sporadic with numbers.) https://lakemichiganbookshelf.substack.com/p/tuesdata-presbydata-2024-edition And it's too early to run Methodist numbers because their seminal split *just* happened.
With Catholicism, which you flag as struggling mightily, there are reasons to group them as mainline, or at least having important similarities--even though on paper their social stances are more "traditional" than virtually any Protestant would hold, in practice American Catholics poll on social questions in ways that are identical to the mainlines:
Yes, absolutely. I think that for a variety of reasons -- largely the lack of any substantial evangelical wing -- the numbers between 'mainline' and 'evangelical' are a little closer in Canada than in the States, but the difference is absolutely real.
This was such a wonderful essay. My own uniting church in Australia has similar struggles, and a great deal of anxiety about the church dying, yet many leaders can’t answer the question “do you think people should become Christians?” with a heartfelt “yes!” I wish I could make everyone read this essay
Thank you! As a right-winger, my honest reaction is this: Reading a perspective like this one (Crosby's), I can engage with it and reflect upon it, because we are both Christian and we are both starting from Christ.
Whereas reading the Smith perspective, my reaction is to just throw up my hands. How can I even engage with that? There's just nothing there that I can even respond to. So I thank the present author for taking the trouble to engage with such arguments, for which many of us do not have the patience or tact so to do. Blessings!
One aspect of decline that is frequently overlooked is the impact of the ANiC split. If we combined the two churches the total membership would be signifantly impacted in a postive direction. Given that ANiC parishes lean conservative/evangelical, the pace of decline is not as pronounced in their expereince.
I barely get done thinking an essay of yours is "my favorite Ben Crosby piece" before you send out another one that supersedes it. This is a superb essay offering foundational gems of thought and incisive observations. In our conversation one of the last questions I asked you was for your thoughts on the "state of the provinces," and this is a meaty complement to the reflection you gave me. I especially appreciate the "Anglican character" in your writing offsetting the histrionics of the essays you're reacting to. You find the reasonable mean, one that values needed reformation while insisting that the Church's Gospel has not become out-of-date. I too do not think "progressivism" as some bland abstraction is at fault; rather, I would diagnose us as having an endemic failure to believe. We spend too much time being ashamed of preaching eternal truths, fearful of condemnation from the world for being out of touch. But the Gospel has always been foolishness to the Gentiles. Faithfulness, not relevance, will bring revival to our fledgling parishes.
I've been saying for awhile that preaching "inclusion" and "radical welcome" rings hollow if, when people get inside, they find there's little left to be included into. Inclusion should mean included into a living Body, one with a future. Of course, the Church is an act of God, and its future is secure in the providential arms. But that doesn't excuse us from recognizing that our labors today will reap fruit -- for good or ill -- twenty years from now. We need to stop being so half-hearted in our belief and learn how to believe again, in a way that changes lives, ours and others.
Any time someone's conclusion is "We're declining because of LGBTQ inclusion and gender equity, I kind of stop listening. As you pointed out, conservative denominations are also declining. A recent article I read talked about the decline at Mother Bethel AME in Philly, the AME's flagship parish. Having grown up inthe Black Church, I agree with Raphael Warnock's take in "The Divided Mind of the Black Church" that Afrocan American Christians are conservative on almost every issue other than racial justice. And yet, the Black Church is also starting to decline. I continue to feel the real reason for decline is hypocrisy: the failure of Christians to live up to the teachings of Christ in thought, word, or deed. Many young adults have read the Bible and think Jesus was pretty based. But the fact that Christians often do the exact opposite of what Jesus taught makes them think, 'well why bother joining if Christians don't practice what they preach?'
Also Ben, I think your assertion that the Church shouldn't be a driving force in charitable efforts is a little Euro-centric -- and I mean that respectfully. As Warnock also points out in the aforementioned book, the Black Church made efforts of charity, solidarity, and social action central to its mission out of necessity; for much of American history, no one else was going to help African Americans if the Church didn't. White theologians like Washington then asserted that the Black Church was just a social activism organization with a veneer of Christianity. James Cone rebutted this by saying the Black Church was the Remnant Church and White mainline Christians had abandoned the core mission of the Church and message of Jesus. To some extent, I agree.
Thanks so much for the engagement! I really appreciate it. A few thoughts:
(1) It is true that many conservative denominations are declining, but it is also true that more progressive ones are declining significantly faster. It is worth asking why that is, I think. As I wrote, I tend to think that it isn't actually because of positions on women's ordination or lgbtq inclusion themselves, but that those positions do tend to be associated with the idea that evangelism is unimportant or even that it doesn't matter whether people are Christians.
(2) We actually have some quite interesting research on why it is that people leave church. Hypocrisy turns out to be significantly less important than I would have thought. If you haven't already read it, The Great Dechurching is worth your time on this subject, imo. I'm not disputing that people do sometimes leave for that reason, but the best research we have shows that the pictures is a bit more complicated.
(3) I certainly hear you that the Black Church in the US functioned in a sociologically quite distinct way than most white churches, as one of the few institutions under Black control and thus a vital sphere for political and social activism. Absolutely! I'll note, though, that my piece was written explicitly for the mainline, where the sociological function of churches qua institutions is different. And while, as I said, I do think that involvement in social action should flow from our proclamation, I do maintain that it is ultimately secondary to that proclamation itself. I continue to think that, in general, on matters of social justice, churches like the ACC or the Episcopal Church do much better when they provide spiritual sustenance for people's justice work than when they try to take the lead themselves. They just aren't very good at it. If I thought that my primary vocation in the world was working for social justice, I would still be a union organizer -- because in purely this-worldly terms, I would do a lot more good there than as a priest.
I was right about to comment something to this effect--that although conservatism is no silver bullet, the contrast is real. In the US (I'm American), the numbers are just undeniable.
Amongst Lutherans, the mainline ELCA has shed 45% of its members since 2000; the more conservative LCMS has lost 30%; and the slightly more conservative WELS has lost 15%. In Presbyterian world, the mainline PCUSA has been in precipitous decline while the conservative PCA has been steady or growing slightly. (The OPC has also done well but is tiny by comparison; the EPC has been much more sporadic with numbers.) https://lakemichiganbookshelf.substack.com/p/tuesdata-presbydata-2024-edition And it's too early to run Methodist numbers because their seminal split *just* happened.
With Catholicism, which you flag as struggling mightily, there are reasons to group them as mainline, or at least having important similarities--even though on paper their social stances are more "traditional" than virtually any Protestant would hold, in practice American Catholics poll on social questions in ways that are identical to the mainlines:
https://x.com/ryanburge/status/1869097520351281522
https://x.com/ryanburge/status/1868058406004900337
Yes, absolutely. I think that for a variety of reasons -- largely the lack of any substantial evangelical wing -- the numbers between 'mainline' and 'evangelical' are a little closer in Canada than in the States, but the difference is absolutely real.