Third Millennium Movements: Four Decades in the Church

By Eutychus Bailey

 

www.DruryWriting.com/David

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This article has also been posted here by Next-Wave.org

 

Editor’s Note: The following article was written on 3 February 2046 by Eutychus Bailey, author and former North American pastor.  Because of amazingly quick Internet access and the exponential growth of micro-processing speeds, we are now able to publish this column forty years before it was actually written.  This gives us the chance to get an unknowingly futurist perspective on where things are heading from this pragmatist writer observing his own times.

 

3 February 2046 Eutychus Report

Way back in 2006 when I was a young pastor Keith Drury wrote a column called The Five Great Waves recalling what he felt to be the four most significant movements among evangelicals in the last 40 years of the 20^th century.  This trip down Boomer memory lane was enjoyable for me at the time and I encourage you to read it if you find that classic on the internet.  He challenged his readers at the time to guess what the current wave among evangelicals happened to be.

 

At the time it may have been difficult to see where things were headed.  But as I type here 40 years after that article was written I’d like to take up a similar challenge and recount what movements have made the North American church what it is in the third millennium.

 

2000-2008

The Super-Church Satellite Movement

 

During this decade there was a great undercurrent of change fracturing into a hundred different mini-movements.  But none of them had truly taken hold of the grassroots.  The first decade of this millennium was the zenith of the super-church movement.  This was the logical result of the four movements that had gone before it.  Ecumenism enabled non-denominational super-churches to be a holding tank for thousands of post-denominational or church-shopping Christians.  Many super-churches were started during the evangelism and church growth movements.  And nobody “did worship” better than the super-churches.  So people looking for any of those movements found their best “carrier” in the super-church.  The first decade saw more than just a few leaders migrating to the super-churches in southern California and the Chicago Suburbs to find out how to lead the church.  Willow Creek’s Bill Hybels, Saddleback’s Rick Warren, Fellowship Church’s Ed Young, Northpoint’s Andy Stanley and about 6 other magnetic super-church pastors held the greatest influence over the church in the first decade of this millennium.  Everything else competed for attention on the fringe.  The Willow Creek Leadership Summits were broadcasted by satellite to more than 150 locations around the world.  Literally tens of thousands of leaders who themselves led hundreds of thousands of Christians would simultaneously watch Bill Hybels and his hand-picked speakers tell them how to lead the church.  Even more, the number of churches that went through Rick Warren’s book Purpose-Driven Life in the 40 Days of Purpose program was astonishing.  These developments turned a great number of local churches into functional satellite ministries of the super-churches.  Their leaders followed the lead of the super-church leaders.  Some of them even literally played the video messages of the super-church pastors instead of preaching themselves.  The super-church satellite movement definitely hit its peak at the turn-of the millennium.

 

2008-2019

The Post-Evangelical Movement

 

But it didn't last long.  U2 front-man and African-aid-activist Bono was interviewed at the 2006 Leadership Summit, and Rick Warren started to spend more time in Africa pushing his PEACE plan than he did in southern California trying to grow his super-church.  The emerging church spent a decade challenging evangelical modernity and instead of winning the battle the evangelical movement simply took the baby out of the emergent bathwater and co-opted the best elements of that movement.  Evangelical leaders and ordinary Christians were no longer comfortable calling themselves evangelical, and the movement moved into transition.  Most now agree that more than half of the former politicized evangelical movement became focused on several but not all of the core emerging church values:

        Help for the underprivileged worldwide

        Theological openness to the all those who want to follow Jesus

        Relevance to culture and emerging generations

        And a de-emphasis governmental and political means of operating the Kingdom of God. 

 

This shift snatched up many "former big-church" people and finally captured the imagination and hearts of the new pseudo-evangelicals.  In this decade you might say the emerging church finally emerged into more than the tipped hair and goatees of worship leaders and the Jewish roots and edgy claims of the Rob Bells and Brian MacLarens in the emerging church.  The band-wagons multiplied and everyone realigned.  Many evangelicals began describing themselves as "Emerging Evangelicals" and thus the movement was co-opted.  With great irony, this moment of greatest “success” for the leaders of the emerging church also caused them to disown what it had become.  “You cannot just re-paint the fence and call it emergent, you have to really move the fence” one emergent board member was quoted as saying in 2012.  Nevertheless the underground emergent movement went mainstream in this decade—for good or ill.

 

2020-2031

The Melting Pot Movement

 

Far before the turn of the millennium there was huge growth in the Hispanic population of the United States.  Forty years ago the Latino population passed that of the African-American in the States.  It kept climbing to a peak point in the 2020s as more than 3 out of every 7 Americans were of majority (50% plus) Hispanic descent.  Prior to the 2020s Hispanic churches were small startups borrowing worship centers from other churches or building small facilities the white population barely noticed.  But Post-Evangelical global concern, surging Latino numbers and inter-marrying with other races resulted in an actual melting-pot effect in American churches.  This had been an un-realized hope of evangelical, mainline and emerging churches.  But their efforts always seemed to ring hollow as their boards and lead pastor positions were always dominated by middle-aged white men.  They could not even seem to integrate white women into their structure well, let alone other races.  The Latino church network began to change that.  New structures developed in the first twenty years of the century to connect the rapidly multiplying Hispanic congregations in the States.  These organizations began influencing the “rest of us” since they were doing what we hoped to do but could never accomplish: multiplying with exponential speed, becoming more multi-ethnic every year, relating and reaching to those outside of the church, providing for social needs of poor communities and even doing it all through smaller networked communities instead of through colossal money-sucking super-churches.  The cross-pollinating of ideas enabled the post-evangelical church to become smaller and more of the true melting pot many have envisioned America becoming.

 

2032-2045

The House Church Movement

 

For years many in America decried the rise of large churches and trumpeted the call for a church that meets “from house to house and in the temple courts” as the early church did.  However, the American version of the house-church movement always sat on the sidelines of true movement influence.  The biggest problem was multiplication.  Many house churches were started—few started more than one.  Some super-churches had more small groups in one local church than there were house-churches in their entire state.  But the model of thinking small was borrowed from the Chinese and Hispanic churches that so influenced the third decade of the church in this millennium.  The key came in the dissolution of ordination as we knew it in denominations.  Most denominational entities were struggling even at the turn of the century.  But they clung to their role for decades through the sheer power of legal structure.  But by 2030 their hold was dangling by a string.  Over the last 15 years it seems like half of the denominations have either completely folded or merged into other larger denominations.  The other half changed what it means to be in a denomination.  They completely disassembled the ministerial authority structure retaining only fiscal and theological accountability for their churches.  Other organizations, like the Willow Creek Association, transitioned to provide fiscal and theological accountability for those WCA churches that were looking for it.  As denominations toned it down and parachurches turned it up they started to look like the same thing.  Local churches began to ordain their people by the dozens because they could.  Several superchurches in serious decline actually ordained every single small group leader in their church in order to launch a new model.  The number of churches and “ordained” ministers in this decade jumped by about 35% and the number of Christians rose a total of 7%... the first true gain in the number of Christ-followers in the United States in 75 years.  It’s a crazy church world we live in now… but few of us could argue that it isn’t working.

 

For sure there have been many other mini-movements that affected us other than these.  The emergent movement continued its sideline prophetic role.  The resurgence of apostolic ministry showed itself from time to time.  And certain trends affected each of the other movements, from immigration to technology.  But as I look back on the last 45 years these are the movements that made us in the mid-century church who we are.  Of course, hind-sight is 20/20 and I’m not sure if I saw any of these coming before I was in the thick of them.

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Born in 1974, Dr. Eutychus D. Bailey served as a pastor in the early decades of the 21^st century.  He “now” writes a column on the state of the mid-century church & culture which is being retrieved by us from the future because of recent technological advances enabling us to receive his articles 40 years before they are published.  Depending on your time-travel ISP speed, you may be able to reach the old codger by e-mailing him at [email protected].

 

Past Eutychus Reports at www.Next-Wave.org:

Preaching to the Pomo Choir

A Postmodern Retirement Party

Ministry Babies and Modern Bathwater

Conference in the Empty Super-Church

The Present War and the Bush Doctrine

Voting on a “Traditional” Pastor

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© 2006 by David Drury

 

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