Amish for the Win!

The mainline is in decline!

Over the years, we’ve told the story that the mainline is in decline due to their liberal theology. Once you lose your core and solid foundation, you are heading to irrelevance and dramatic loss of membership.

On the other side of this is the ascendancy of evangelicals. Evangelicals stick to the gospel and the teaching of God and are conservative in dealing with morals, so they are growing. And by the way, growth in numbers and our prosperity show God’s hand of favor is on us.

But what if the story isn’t true?

What if the real story is something like this? (Ideas from Religion for Realists Samuel Perry)

• Both the mainline and evangelical have about the same rate of evangelism growth.
• The difference is not in evangelism but in babies. Evangelicals have more babies (or at least they did) than mainline folks (the mainline became richer earlier and so saw a decrease in birth rates), so they grew significantly.
• Recently, as evangelicals have become more wealthy, their birth rates have declined and, like the mainline, will shrink because of it.

A second part of the story is that as the mainline became more acclimated to the culture, their children saw different ways of living and pursued those ways. The same is now happening in evangelical circles.

Compare this to the Amish, who have

• very high birth rates (6+ children in almost every family) and very closed communities.

This level of birth and closed communities that keep the outside out means generations stay in the Amish way. The Amish are growing gangbusters — one person even wrote a tongue-in-cheek article entitled, “Will we all be Amish?”

Deep in the heart of U.S. evangelicalism is the belief that if we did a better job at apologetics, a better job of showing that our way was superior, people would follow Jesus. But this is not how it works.

Consider the decline of religious affiliation and practice in the United States and Western Europe. Is this primarily the result of people abandoning religious “worldviews,” switching from one set of ideas to another? If that were the case, then religious people could take stock of what competing ideas took hold of such populations, and figure out what they could do to make religious faith more appealing intellectually and emotionally. They could get organized, build relationships, take apologetics courses, and develop reputations as loving neighbors and citizens. But in reality, these long-term trends toward secularism are downstream of a variety of structural factors related to economics, politics, and family life.

(Samuel Perry Religion for Realists)

The central challenge before us is not better ideas or better persuasion (although that does work for some, cf. the Podcast “The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God”), but creating structures that invite people into the faith community and sustain the faith in our children.

What does this look like?

1. Belonging First: We need wide open doors that invite people to belong before they even imagine believing. Active hospitality must be a mark of our churches.
2. Showing First: We must take seriously our calling to be a picture, foretaste, and ambassador of shalom. In all we do before the world, people need to see the ways of a different King and a different kingdom.
3. Culture First: Jamie Smith reminds us of the importance of traditions, embodied practices, shared spaces, etc. We must create a culture that reflects our deeply held beliefs and embodies that culture in what we do.
4. Critical Thinking First: Rather than saying to our kids, “God said it, that settles it,” we need to help our kids think deeply, act out their faith, and actively question their faith. When they are raised in shalom and encouraged to question the faith, they have a good foundation for whatever comes their way.
5. Relationships First: Studies show it takes five adult relationships to embed a child into a lifelong commitment to the church.
6. Jesus and the Gospel First: Jesus calls us to be witnesses in all the world to the reality that he is King and his kingdom (the new creation) began at his resurrection (see the gospel of John). Jesus and the good news of the kingdom must shape all other “firsts.” The challenge is to ensure that our church’s culture has not been co-opted by what makes us comfortable and pleased. Think about it like this:
   • In The Social Sources of Denominationalism, H. Richard Niebuhr argued in 1929 that religious schisms are primarily about social group concerns like nationality, race, and class; theological disagreements are largely just the pretext.

The church continues to face realities that we never imagined. Can we address these realities with a new imagination while leaving behind old paradigms?