To think about…

To think about…

Are Evangelicals are now the “Mainline church”

In the 1950’s when I was a kid “mainline churches” like Methodists, Presbyterians and Episcopalians reigned and held all the important downtown corner locations and had all the businesspeople and politicians with clout. If denominations were to be trains then these old denominations were the “main line” and evangelicals were shunted to be a “side line.” Evangelical often had shabby buildings “across the railroad tracks” in low rent districts and were considered something like a cult or strange sect to the mainliners.

Fifty years later the tables seem to be turned. The upstart evangelicals have all the prime locations at the edge of town while the mainliners are stuck with deteriorating buildings and aging congregations on forgotten corners of downtown areas. Evangelicals are the brand of choice for Americans in power and business people. Consider these things (many of them from Business Week’s special May 2005 report on the evangelical’s “Earthy Empires.”)

Evangelicals outnumber mainliners almost 2:1. Mainline protestants are 16% of Americans while “white evangelicals” total 26%--add in “black evangelicals for another 10%. (BW separated the two branches of evangelicals by race since they agree spiritually and theologically but often disagree on political issues)
Since 1998 the number of Christian radio stations has leaped from 1089 to 2014
Religious books now bring in $3.3 billion a year…yes, that’s a B as in Billion. Large corporations are chasing the religious market now.
The number of mega-churches with a weekly attendance of more than 2000 has leapt in the last 25 years form a handful to over 800, almost all of them evangelicals.
Bill Hybels’ Willow Creek church has an annual budget of $26 million and brings in 3.2 million form their bookstore alone (2.5 million form their coffee shop!)
Rick Warren’s successful sales of Purpose Driven Life as the best selling non-fiction book in the world has made him rising spokesman for evangelicals. The mainliner spokesmen seem to be anemic pasty-faced folk and even they get little TV time.
The largest church and preacher with the widest audience is an evangelical, Joel Osteen pastor of Huston’s Lakewood church. While Billy Graham may have the largest respect and occasional audience Osteen preaches to 30,000 life people weekly and another 18 million on TV.
Evangelicals are widely credited for electing George Bush and we are hated, feared and wooed by politicians. The leadership of evangelical political action is passing from the more “fundamentalist” approach of Jerry Falwell and James Dobson to political moderates like Rick Warren and Joel Osteen.

Face it evangelicals are now the mainline church and the likes of the Presbyterians have become the side line. The mainline church is like General Motors and IMB—evangelicals are the Yahoo and Google of the church world. Indeed evangelicals wouldn’t even use mainline and sideline—it smacks of an era when trains dominated travel, and era when the mainliners dominated. Mainliners prevailed in the era of trains and downtown stores. Evangelicals now prevail in the era of the Internet and air travel.

So what does all this mean for evangelicals? We are an impressive startup and now Bam-Slam-Dunk we are on top of the pile. How will being #1 change us? Will we use our power carefully? How will we treat the mainline-now-sidelined church—like they treated us when we were across the tracks or better? Will we get proud and fat and eventually get knocked off our high chair? How will being the biggest force in American religion change us? How will we accommodate? What will “evangelical” mean in 20 years? How will our dominance as evangelical change things in your local church? How should it?

So what do you think?

Keith Drury 7/21/05