Yes, Virginia, there is a mainline discipleship crisis

Shortly after finishing undergrad, I took a position running the confirmation program at a mainline church in the Northeastern United States. The church was (and is, praise God!) a healthy one: growing, committed to a generous orthodoxy, with a faithful pastor skilled at preaching and teaching. Brimming with enthusiasm for the Christian vocation for justice-seeking in the world, I was so excited to build a confirmation experience that connected the basics of Christian doctrine and practice (which of course the students would already have) to the urgent needs of the world. And then I actually began running the program. I soon discovered that before we could talk about what following Jesus meant for thinking about race or class, we had to talk about who Jesus was and why in the world anyone would follow him in the first place. My students were confused by the notion of the divinity of Jesus, didn’t know the Lord’s Prayer, had precious little exposure to the stories of the Bible, and seemed to think that Christianity was mostly about trying to be a good person. And these were students who had been fairly-regular churchgoers their whole lives, with parents who were professed Christians! Now, I ended up having great fun getting to dig in on the basics of the Christian faith with these students. And, yes, I was able to connect the basics to the question of Christian witness in the world upon which I originally intended to focus; it was truly a tremendous privilege to see Jesus and Christianity start to click for some of them. But it remains the case that a lifetime in the church and in Christian families simply had not been particularly effective at forming them to be disciples of Jesus.

I found myself thinking about this experience in the last day or so, when we had a rather spirited discussion on Twitter about an article in the Times in which the author rather bluntly asserts that God has never been the main thing about Anglicanism - which seems rather to be, in his construal, about providing pleasant aesthetic experiences for nostalgic agnostics. During this conversation, those of us who were both aghast at the article and felt that it identified a real problem in mainline Anglicanism found ourselves accused of a sort of doomerism about the spiritual state of our tradition, one which lent credence to evangelical critiques of the mainline, when in fact the state of our churches was one of general spiritual health. Now, if this were just a one-off instance of people sniping at each other on Twitter, I certainly wouldn’t think it worth reflecting on in this format. Twitter contretemps are, in general, best thought about as little as possible. But in this case, the accusation reflects a much more common assertion I’ve heard: that criticism of the state of Christian belief and practice in mainline Christianity comes from bad-faith actors looking to condemn us as not truly Christian, and that in fact we have a healthy and fulsome way, if one different from that of evangelicalism, of forming mature Christians. I think this is a prevalent narrative among many mainline leaders. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s true.

Don’t get me wrong: it is certainly the case that there are enemies of our denominations who make a great deal of hay about supposed mainline apostasy. There’s a small cottage industry of publications that post gleeful updates every time the Episcopal Church or another mainline body publishes records of another year’s membership decline. There are bloggers who seem to devote their entire lives to finding examples of wackiness (or, indeed, outright heresy) in mainline churches and using them to discredit the entire enterprise. There are plenty of evangelical pastors and theologians who tell their congregants that the mainline is spiritually dead, no longer Christian, and thus that they cannot leave the world of evangelicalism without risking their souls. And in response to all this, a certain defensiveness, a determination to argue that we’re in fact doing fine, makes sense. I feel it myself sometimes.

But we have to be able to hold multiple true things in our heads at once. It can both be the case that much criticism of mainline apostasy comes from highly biased sources, and that there is a genuine crisis of Christian faith and practice in our churches. And indeed, it brings me no joy to say it, but I am quite convinced that both these things are true - and it was precisely my experience leading confirmation that helped me to see this.

Now, you might protest what I’m talking about is an anecdote, not data. You might tell me about wonderful experiences you’ve had (praise God!) of mainliners on fire for God. And I’d happily nod along. I’ve had wonderful experiences of my own of mainliners on fire for God. Without them I wouldn’t be here, in this church, and quite probably not in ordained leadership anywhere. It’s important to remember those stories, and lift them up! And you might add that my initial confirmation plan would have been incredible naïve for any group of young Christians, that in really any church context, young people at that age really do continue to need basic catechesis. And yes, this too is true — and as Luther puts it, none of us really outgrow the need for basic catechesis!

But let’s turn from anecdote to data. When we do that, examining the most robust evidence we have about Christian faith and practice by denomination, we find, both relative to other expressions of Christianity and in absolute terms, what I am continuing to call (at the risk of repetitiveness) a crisis in Christian faith and practice in our churches. In what follows, I’m going to focus on the United States church body in which I am canonically resident, the Episcopal Church, but the results are similar for other mainline denominations, and I daresay for Canadian mainline Christianity as well.

Let’s look, for example, at Pew’s 2014 Religious Landscape Survey. For those who identified as Episcopalians in that survey, less than half - 49% - described religion as very important in their life; 79% of evangelical Protestants described religion as very important. And this difference is not just, I think just one of words: this difference reflects a real difference in religious practice, a difference which is not a matter of different forms of faithfulness but of being more and less faithful.

Let’s look, for example, at worship attendance. Given our emphasis on the Eucharist and the importance of common worship, one might expect that in contrast to traditions which have more anemic sacramentology or ecclesiology, we’d be quite faithful even if we lag in other measures. But this isn’t what the data says. Only 29% of Episcopalians say they attend worship at least weekly, despite their canonical requirement (II:1) for doing so; the number of evangelicals who say they do the same is 58%.

But perhaps Episcopalians, even if they stay away from public worship, make up for it by greater fidelity in individual devotional practices. Well, no. Only 51% of Episcopalians say that they pray at least daily; over a quarter say that they pray monthly, seldom, or never. This is worth highlighting: over a quarter of Episcopalians say that they pray to God once a month or less. But at least we’re better at praying than we are at reading the Bible. Just over half of Episcopalians (51%) say that they seldom or never read Scripture, and only 23% say that they read the Bible at least once a week — this, in the church whose signature liturgical achievement is making the ordered, prayerful reading of Scripture in the daily office accessible to the laity! But of course, this is perhaps small surprise, when nearly half (47%) of Episcopalians explicitly deny that the Bible is the Word of God. And this despite the fact that, for all the ways that the Episcopal Church is criticized for being doctrinally fuzzy, the position that the Scriptures are the Word of God is the clear and unambiguous position of our church, affirmed by every minister at ordination. And in all this, we lag far behind evangelicals and members of historically black Protestants churches. Indeed, some 80% of the latter group say they pray at least daily and 61% say that they read the Bible weekly or more, numbers roughly the same as those for evangelicals.

Perhaps, though, you want to say here that this is question-begging, that measuring depth of Christian commitment by attendance at public worship or practices of prayer and Scripture-reading shows a sort of evangelical bias. Perhaps you might say that the church exists to form people who live Christlike lives, a contention in the mainline that often means something like engagement in social justice undergirded by Christian values. I’m skeptical, but even if I were to grant that for the sake of argument, we don’t come out looking so hot. Only 18% of Episcopalians say that they take their guidance on moral questions from religion, compared to 54% who take it from common sense. Episcopalians don’t seem to think they’re getting guidance on key questions of our individual and collective lives from religion. Perhaps that common sense has been robustly formed by Christianity, so deeply that it people don’t even know it, but…well, the burden of doubt is decidedly on that side of the argument. On political questions, moreover, Episcopalians are hardly social justice fanatics; in the Pew study, more Episcopalians identify as conservative (31%) than liberal (29%). I would love to see some statistic analysis but would bet that the predictive value of Episcopalianism for a given political position is rather small once class and educational attainment are disaggregated from it. And of course, I do remain convinced that pitting personal piety against justice work is an error; the testimony of historically black Protestant denominations makes it clear that high levels of belief and practice in things like Bible-reading, prayer, worship attendance, etc. need not crowd out attention to justice!

And alas, this Pew survey isn’t an outlier; surveys of religious practice and belief among youth (like this one and this one) show similar results. While I cannot pretend to be an expert on the study of contemporary American religion, I know of no reputable survey of American religious life that doesn’t tell us the same thing: relative to more conservative religious groups like evangelicals, and historically black denominations, mainline Christians are much less likely to value Christianity’s importance and engage in the practices constitutive of it.

So, what are we to make of this?

Let me first be clear on what I am not arguing.

Clergy and lay leaders, I’m not suggesting that this is somehow individually your fault, although I do think it is our responsibility (with God’s help).

I’m also not suggesting that there was a golden age when every Episcopalian prayed her office and knew her Bible inside and out and made Christianity the most important thing in her life. In fact, it’s probably true that some amount of laxity is baked into who we are: we are heirs to an ecclesiology which is rightly nervous about any attempt to form a pure church of only the elect. We have been willing to comprehend the doubters and the half-believers as well as the devout, trusting that the job of separating the wheat from the tares is up to God, not us. This is, I think, a good thing even if it does come with potential pitfalls. And, frankly, on a less theological and more sociological level, for many years we were able to count on reproducing ourselves through biological reproduction and cultural pressure around churchgoing, hardly a promising mix for forming good disciples.

Nor am I suggesting that the answer is to give up on the mainline project, to become American evangelicals. American evangelicalism’s discipleship record is, to say the least, mixed; one need only look at the increasingly-enthusiastic embrace of Trumpism to note that higher levels of prayer, Bible-reading, worship attendance, and so on do not necessarily produce Christian faithfulness in all areas of life. What’s more, trying to ape evangelical methods at the same time as American evangelicalism is undergoing a reckoning around race and gender and facing diminishing growth if not outright decline is hardly a recipe for success, especially insofar as I’m not convinced that we could pull it off. But more to the point, I’m a committed mainliner, writing what I do out of love for the mainline tradition. I am not sure if I would have flourished in the faith without mainline churches, and there is much about how we worship, about how we understand the church, sacraments, and salvation which both resonates deeply with me and is I think, deeply faithful to the testimony of Scripture and the practice of the early church. This is not to say that there aren’t things we can and should learn from evangelicals - and indeed I hope that there will be a stronger evangelical presence in the mainline than we find at present! But I just want to be clear that I’m not saying we need to or should give up everything we are.

And finally, if it needs to be said, in no sense do I want each of you to go out and harangue everyone in your church about not being faithful enough. While I do believe there is a place for the preaching of the Law, browbeating is not a particularly good path to deeper fidelity or more expansive piety. The long, hard work of loving one’s people towards conformity to Christ and allowing them to do the same to you is, I suspect, more fruitful in the long run than telling people that they Aren’t Doing Enough.

But - here’s the rub - none of these caveats and qualifications, none of these statements of what I’m not arguing, mean that the current spiritual state of our church is good. And I don’t think it helps anyone to prevaricate or dissemble about it for fear of giving ammunition to the evangelicals. We desperately need revival, to be delivered from our profound lukewarmness towards the things of God. We need a Christianity which does not content itself with the image of godliness, ignoring its power. We need a Christianity that eagerly seeks the spiritual gifts, that runs the race set before it, that strives to pursue every form of holiness — all this not in order to earn God’s favor but in thankful, Spirit-empowered response to God’s saving acts for us in Christ Jesus. If Christianity really is, as we’re so fond of saying, life abundant not just in the hereafter but now as well, it’s a profound tragedy that so many of our people seem not to be experiencing it.

Let me be crystal clear: I don’t have the answers for how to make it so. I have some ideas about how we can cooperate in this work - but of course this work is ultimately that of God, not us! I think of Martin Thornton’s call to focus on the ‘remnant,’ those few within a given congregation who really are hungry for the things of God, and trust that pastoring them will have a ripple effect on the parish writ large. I think that our clergy, in general (not necessarily you specifically, dear reader!) could stand to be less concerned about certain forms of approachability and more willing to model a devout life - or at the very least not openly dismiss the importance of Christian piety. I think our Christian education offerings could, in general, stand to better focus on the basics of Christian life and practice, remembering with Luther that we never outgrow the creed and catechism. I think new forms of associational life are necessary to help support people in pursuing holiness; this is what the Society of St Mary Magdalene is all about. Lifting up those congregations and ministries of our church that are healthy and learning from them seems too to be part of the puzzle here.

And more to the point, while I can’t promise any solutions - and think the solution is up to God in the final estimation anyway - I am pretty confident that repentant honesty about our state and prayer for change is an important start. After all, nothing can so choke the revivifying work of the Spirit as the belief that we are actually doing okay on our own. This is precisely why Luther believes we need the Law to smash our self-image; only after realizing that we in ourselves are not doing alright can we turn to God, the source of all good, and be healed. And so, it seems to me, we should not be so afraid of appearing weak before the evangelicals or indeed of appearing prescriptive in our congregations that we are unwilling to apply the Law for the sake of the Gospel, confessing our collective lukewarmness and praying for God’s transformation.

As we move into Advent and ask God in the beautiful prayerbook collect for the grace to cast away the works of darkness and put the armor of light, let’s be honest with ourselves and with our people about our neediness, our poverty, our lack (even when it’s uncomfortable or politically disadvantageous to do so), pray for deliverance, and trust that our God is a God who raises the dead.