You don’t need a crystal ball to see the future of the American Protestant denominations—and the future does not look good. At the end of his article on Karl Barth’s christology as a theological resource for a “Reformed kenoticism” (IJST 8:3), Bruce McCormack writes the following:
The situation in which Christian theology is done in the United States today is shaped most dramatically by the slow death of the Protestant churches. I have heard it said – and I have no reason to question it – that if current rates of decline in membership continue, all that will be left by mid-century will be Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and non-denominational evangelical churches (the last named of which will include those denominations, like the Southern Baptists, which are non-confessional in doctrinal matters and congregationalist in their polity). The churches of the Reformation will have passed from the scene – and with their demise, there will be no obvious institutional bearers of the message of the Reformation.McCormack writes about this ecclesial crisis from the perspective of theology (e.g., who will pass along the theology of the Reformation?), but I wish to discuss this crisis from the perspective of worship and tradition (e.g., who will pass along the traditions of our ancestors?). Obviously, these two questions are related—the lex credendi and the lex orandi depend upon each other—but they are also distinct. The theological scene is indeed dire, and most people seem to recognize the problem. But I have not heard people discuss the problem facing evangelicals and tradition in the 21st century, which is the more perplexing one, in my opinion.
The question before us is deceptively simple: How do Christians inculcate an ecclesial tradition or family? Historically, this was accomplished through a formal liturgy that was common to all the churches—the Catholic Mass in the West and the Divine Liturgy in the East, both of which (as McCormack points out) will, quite likely, long outlive the Protestant denominations. With the Reformation, Luther and Calvin turned to catechisms to train people in the Protestant faith. After a while, catechetical training faded away as children were reared in Protestant churches and the faith was passed along from generation to another. As with the Orthodox and Catholic churches, a distinctly Protestant family was inculcated through a common form of worship, and this unique form was the hymn. For churches with a lower sacramentology, hymns were their liturgy and hymnals were their Book of Common Prayer. For many decades, the hymnal was the definitive means by which congregationalist Protestants passed on the traditions of their ancestors. American Protestants, in particular, tended to replace theology with apologetics, the sacraments with expositions of the Word, and an established liturgy with established hymns. As a result, the hymnal was—at least up until my parents’ generation—the cornerstone of the church family, the basic building block of evangelical tradition. Evangelical churches rooted in the Reformation were united by a few basic theological axioms and the hymnic tradition, and since theology is generally ignored or confused in most local congregations, hymns were almost all that concretely connected evangelicals together.
But how will Protestants continue to inculcate a tradition in the absence of (most) denominations and in the wake of the hymn’s marginalization? Or, from another perspective, how can Protestant evangelicals inculcate a church “family” when children do not remain in the churches of their parents—something which is difficult today (because children tend to move someplace very far from where they grew up) and which may one day be impossible (with the demise of denominations altogether)? What will form the backbone for an ecclesial culture which continues beyond a single generation? Or will Christians simply reinvent the wheel with each successive generation?
Case in point: We are seeing many young (post-)evangelical churches—sometimes called “emerging” churches—pop up around the country. Many of these non-denominational, non-confessional congregations write their own music and appeal to a particular generation. Here we see the embodiment of this crisis: a church without a hymnic or sacramental or confessional or catechetical tradition. The only remaining link is, of course, the reading and preaching from Holy Scripture, but this is done apart from any theological-exegetical tradition of reading. Each church is its own “interpretive community,” to use Stanley Fish’s terminology. (More needs to be said about this, but it will have to wait.)
A quick note about worship and music today. Certainly, contemporary Christian worship songs are, in many respects, the modern equivalent of the hymn. But whereas the classical hymns combined serious theology with music that has lasted for generations—even though C. S. Lewis once described hymns as fifth-rate poetry and sixth-rate music—contemporary songs are almost devoid of theological reflection, the music is generally forgettable, and, unlike with many classic hymns, not reusable. Contemporary Christian worship songs are thus ill-suited for the lofty task of inculcating a Protestant tradition. These songs are like fashion fads: they appear seemingly out of nowhere, dominate the scene for a short period of time, and then fade into oblivion with only a few left still using them, seemingly unaware that they are now out of style.
Though the “emerging” church phenomenon will, like any fashionable trend, fade away at some point in the near future, it nevertheless represents a problem that is unlikely to disappear anytime soon—viz. the de-catholicization of the church. By the “de-catholicization of the church,” I mean a re-conception of the church that sees each individual community as an autonomous enculturation of the Christian gospel. The “catholicity” of the church unites both locality and universality in the person of Jesus Christ, preventing the collapse of the church into either an isolated concretion or an abstract conception. And while many independent evangelical churches have a catholic self-identity, this seems to be subservient to the more important self-identity as a concrete, local enculturation of the gospel. The notion of enculturation, found in many recent works in missiology (see the works of Andrew Walls, for example), understands the church as a kind of “incarnation” analogous to Christ’s own incarnation as a Jew from Nazareth. Andrew Walls calls this the “incarnation principle.” The obvious problems with christology aside, this kind of ecclesiology tends to emphasize ecclesial “relevance” to the local culture as the central factor shaping each local community. While the notion of enculturation is itself unproblematic, the problem becomes acute when enculturation becomes so central that the cultural diversity of the church displaces the catholic unity of the church.
I recently told a person that I am uncomfortable with the way these young independent evangelical churches seem to be reinventing the wheel with each new generation, as if there were no Christian church before this particular community. My interlocutor responded by saying that each generation is its own culture, and thus the church needs to be newly enculturated within that generation in order to remain relevant. I am uncomfortable with this sentiment for many reasons, but I responded by employing the metaphor of a family. If the church is a family, then we are seeing the rise of a family in which the birth of each child results in the death of the parents, and each child raises itself as an orphan. Each child—each young ecclesial community—has no historical consciousness, no concrete connection to the living history of the Christian church, no parents or grandparents, so to speak. Moreover, with the passing of that particular generation or “culture,” the corresponding church must either reconstitute itself or pass away with it. For this reason, the “emerging” church movement has no future—precisely because it has no past.
In conclusion, the demise of the Protestant denominations and the loss of traditions rooted in the history of the church presents Christians in the 21st century with a future full of unknowns. The evangelical de-catholicization of the church is a problem that threatens to continue the modern individualization and privatization of the ecclesial community. Moreover, the marginalization or localization of the sacraments, liturgies, catechisms, confessions, and hymns has resulted in communities that are incapable of passing on the faith from one generation to another. As a result, young independent churches today are orphans without parents; their existence is always locked in the fleeting and intangible present, rather than rooted in the past and living out of the future. In the end, the one remaining foundation for the church continues to be and always will be Jesus Christ. He alone is the basis for the church’s identity: he grounds the enculturation of the community while maintaining its catholicity; he establishes its diversity while ensuring its universality. Because of Jesus Christ, the church of the 21st century need not fear the future, for he “is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8).
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