The other day as I left after two maddening hours at the Apple Store, running very late to fight the DC rush hour to pick up a friend for a baseball game, I got onto I-395 only to discover no traffic. Whole lanes empty. I called my friend to joke, "The rapture came and it's wonderful - you can finally drive in this town!" Turns out it was just the Friday before a long weekend, and the legions had left town early.
But this started me thinking. Harold Whatever-his-name-is messed up on his predictions earlier this year, but what if.... What if this 19th century concoction of the American theological imagination really happened... What if all the conservative evangelicals were pulled out by God suddenly? Would it really be a tribulation ensuing in their absence, or could we finally drive in DC... and have a serious talk about global warming... and civil rights for all of God's children... and correcting American policy favoritism in the Middle East... and so forth?
And then I got to thinking about many of the churches with whom I work, the Presbyterian, United Methodist, UCC and others, where so much has changed in the last fifty years. And it hit me: the conservative evangelicals in these churches have already been plucked. Maybe God pulled them, or just the cumulative forces of time and social change, but they are mostly gone. And in their wake, often a much smaller church, more nimble to move forward on issues of inclusivity, less able to recruit a steady, stable team of church leaders or to raise funds for the leaky roof.
In many healthy churches, there is a special synergy between the conservatives and the progressives that creates sparkling worship experiences and high impact ministry achievement. This was certainly true of the Gulf Breeze, Florida congregation I served that doubled its membership and expanded to three ministry sites. At Gulf Breeze, I discovered that part of that church's magic was combining an emphasis on healing with a non-charismatic theology. Without the interplay of diverse backgrounds, gifts and generational perspectives, we could not have done what we did there!
This creative pentecostal interplay is now lost in many American mainline congregations. The folks left are mostly old, or perhaps mostly left-of-center Democrats, or maybe mostly folks with graduate degrees, or something along this line. The most glaring change in most of these churches is that most of the people under the age of 50 are gone, either vanished entirely or reduced to a holy handful of folks. We are the Left Behind series in real life!
The children of these churches and their progeny have been raptured out, not to heaven but to the following places, in this order:
1. Soccer fields, grocery stores, coffee shops and yoga studios - to all the places most Americans love to haunt on Sunday mornings other than church.
2. Conservative, often non-denominational, congregations with large programs for children and teens.
3. Simple churches and other highly social, minimally institutional expressions of faith community - scattered all over the map in terms of varied theology and worldview.
For the most part, this diaspora is not coming back. A few will wander through our midst now and then, but for the most part, we've just been left behind. Left behind to rethink, to rebuild, and to move forward as a remnant church.
The people in Group 1 (the fastest growing sector of the three) are far more likely to be recruited by Groups 2 or 3 than by us. Most of Group 1 will never come back to any form of highly organized religion. In fact, the people in Group 2 constitute the largest supply of likely recruits for Group 1. Group 3 is definitely growing in places like China, but it remains (for now) a much weaker movement in the West.
Some folks would take issue with this outlook as too pessimistic. That is fine. Choose a more optimistic prognosis if you like. I find no compelling evidence for such. I do, however, find plenty of hope and positive ministry agenda for the classical Christian traditions in this post-rapture era. I find opportunities for growth, for planting new faith communities and for making significant social impact in ways disproportionate with our diminished numbers.
In my new book, We Refused to Lead a Dying Church, coming from Pilgrim Press in 2012, I examine fifteen mainline churches that have experienced amazing new life. From their stories we can see...
1.There is a rich future for all churches who wish to seize it.
2.The past is not a blueprint for the future.
3.The new people are not necessarily the people that left the church.
4. Most mainline churches will be smaller in the 21st century, but a few will grow very, very large.
5. Innovation is the key.
6. Churches that think in terms of rebirth and that align/orient themselves to the heartbeat of their communities, these will prosper far more than most.
7. Rebirth is not forever, it is a process that must repeat again and again, not every 30 years, but every 4-5.
8. The strongest movements will have a strategy for cultivating very high commitment folks while creating a comfortable space for less committed folks.
9. Immigrants and non-white populations are much more ready to engage.
10. None of the churches that rebounded panicked and threw out the baby and bathwater. They held fast to core convictions. It is rare to see a thriving religious body without a strong backbone.
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