Analysis: Church renewal on the roll

WASHINGTON, Oct. 29 (UPI) -- It is an ancient axiom of Christianity that the Church is in constant need of reform (ecclesia semper reformanda). After decades of decline -- both in numbers and in faith -- mainline Protestantism is experiencing a robust renewal from within.

A buoyant atmosphere marked the first national gathering of confessing movements from 12 mainline denominations in Indianapolis. The term, confessing, in this context has been taken from Protestantism's powerful statements of faith since the 16th-century Reformation.

"This was a conference of the future Church," Diane Knippers, President of the Washington-based Institute on Religion and Democracy, told United Press International. "This has been a stunning step forward."

"For years, we have struggled with the modernists, those sons and daughters of the Enlightenment, marked by rationalism and materialism, dismissive of miracles and alienated from the Transcendent," she went on.

"Let's not waste too much time and energy combating worn-out and unappealing modernist heresies," Knippers urged the nearly 700 delegates. "We face new, insidious challenges. In a post-modern era, the problem may not be unbelief but too much belief.

Theologian Donna Hailson calls it cafeteria religion, in which people create their own religion piecemeal out of the beliefs and practices of a global cornucopia of options. Here the radical feminist theologians lead the way -- mixing Wiccan... ceremonies, Eastern healing rituals, erotic litanies, drums and chants invoking ancestors, and even some old camp-meeting hymns, all in an intoxicating poisonous brew.

"Theology matters, indeed, now more than ever," adds Hailson.

Theology matters. This was the cantus firmus of this conference organized by the Association for Church Renewal, which resolved not to abandon the troubled mainline churches. Theology matters especially in a situation where abstruse teachings have triggered a stunning decline of mainline churches in the last 10 years.

The United Church of Christ lost almost 15 percent of its members, the Presbyterian Church (USA) 11.6 percent, the United Methodist Church 6.7 percent, the Episcopal Church 5.3 percent and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America 2.2 percent.

At the same time, Knippers pointed out, the U.S. population increased by 13 percent, and some of the more conservative counterparts of these denominations registered handsome gains. The Presbyterian Church in America grew by 42 percent and the Wesleyan Church by 47 percent.

Equally stunning is the healthy growth of the traditionalist wing of the otherwise shrinking groups. In less than 18 months, 1,275 congregations with a total of 400,000 members joined the grassroots Confessing Church Movement within the PCUSA, according to Craig Kibler of the Presbyterian Layman newspaper.

They make up 18 percent of the entire denomination's membership.

A parallel movement in the United Methodist Church has by now 600,000 adherents. One of its founders, Drew University professor Thomas Oden, had initiated the Indianapolis conference but could not attend for reasons of health.

However, a month earlier he chaired a preparatory meeting of confessing theologians that issued a powerful appeal in a pastoral letter to their denominations' faithful imploring them to avoid schisms.

"Ultimately, the reason we cannot and must not leave our denominations is that the Gospel can still be freely proclaimed in them and the sacraments administered without hindrance," the pastoral letter said.

"However true it may be that 'other gospels' are also heard in our midst, none of our churches have legislated against the preaching of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In such a situation, it is unnecessary for congregations to turn their backs on their churches."

At the same time, though, the theologians explained why Western society needs faithful Christian confessors:

"In the absence of faithful Christian witness, society establishes false idols. The 20th century is littered with the victims of secular ideology. Nazi and Marxist ideologies produced Auschwitz and the Gulag. The North American threat comes from a more benign form of atheism that banishes the Christian witness from the public square...

"Disoriented by the ideology of moral relativism, some church leaders haphazardly champion fashionable causes. In each case, the savor of the Church and the light of Christ is lost."

At the Indianapolis conference, Maxie Dunnam, President of Asbury Methodist Seminary, elaborated on this theme, quoting German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was martyred by the Nazis, "The Church must not become the world and the world must not become the Church."

Dunnam said the Church was under siege by those of its leaders who distort and suppress orthodox Christian doctrine. As a result, spiritual starvation has beset mainline denominations: "People both inside and outside the Church are starving for the living bread of Jesus Christ. They ask for bread and are being given a stone."

Diane Knippers sounded even tougher: "Some American church leaders are re-imagining, distorting, demeaning and denying the very faith for which some Christians in our world are dying. Our brothers and sisters are suffering slavery, hunger, oppression and imprisonment -- and some are shoveling excrement -- to defend the Gospel," she said referring especially to Christians in Africa.

In this situation, it seems, the Church is faced with a peculiar life-and-death dialectic. On the one hand huge chunks of it are manifestly moribund and trying to postpone their demise by what the Rev. Christopher Hershman described as "the necrophilia" -- meaning the quasi-marriage -- between his denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the rapidly fading Episcopal Church U.S.A.

On the other hand, Hershman went on, there was, equally manifestly, the true ecumenism of believers from 12 denominations reciting together Christianity's almost 1,700-year old statement of faith -- the Nicene Creed.

Actually, there is nothing new in this. For almost 2,000 years the Church has undergone similar cycles of death and renewal. Just look at Roman Catholicism, Diane Knippers reminded her audience.

"I don't think any of our denominations matches that (Medici) era of church history in its breathtaking debauchery. But next, in contrast, study the life and ministry of the current Pope, John Paul II. We must quickly conclude that, yes, reformations are possible, even within a church."