Liberal churches are dying as conservative churches thrive

This is no surprise when many mainline churchgoers don’t believe in seeking converts to Christianity, writes professor DAVID MILLARD HASKELL

Mainline Protestant churches are in trouble: A 2015 report by the Pew Research Center found that these congregations, once a mainstay of American religion, are now shrinking by about 1 million members annually. Fewer members not only means fewer souls saved, a frightening thought for some clergy members, but also less income for churches, ensuring their further decline.

Faced with this troubling development, clergy members have made various efforts to revive church attendance. It was almost 20 years ago that John Shelby Spong, a U.S. bishop in the Episcopalian Church, published his book “Why Christianity Must Change or Die.” It was presented as an antidote to the crisis of decline in mainline churches. Bishop Spong, a theological liberal, said congregations would grow if they abandoned their literal interpretation of the Bible and transformed along with changing times.

Bishop Spong’s general thesis is popular with many mainline Protestants, including those in the United Methodist, Evangelical Lutheran, Presbyterian (USA) and Episcopal churches. His work has

won favor with academics, too.

Praising the bishop’s ideas, Karen L. King of Harvard Divinity School said in a review of Bishop Spong’s book that it “should be required reading for everyone concerned with facing headon the intellectual and spiritual challenges of late-20thcentury religious life.” Harvard divinity professor and liberal theologian Harvey Cox said, “Bishop Spong’s work is a significant accomplishment” and, indeed, Mr. Cox himself has long been at the task of shifting Christianity to meet the needs of the modern world.

Thus, liberal theology has been taught for decades in mainline seminaries and preached from many mainline pulpits. Its enduring appeal to embattled clergy members is that it gives intellectual respectability to religious ideas that, on the surface, might appear farfetched to modern audiences.

But the liberal turn in mainline churches doesn’t appear to have solved their problem of decline.

Over the last five years, my colleagues and I conducted a study of 22 mainline congregations in the province of Ontario. We compared those in the sample that were growing mainline congregations to those that were declining. After statistically analyzing the survey responses of more than 2,200 congregants and the clergy members who serve them, we discovered that conservative Protestant theology, with its more literal view of the Bible, is a significant predictor of church growth, while liberal theology leads to decline. The results were published this month in the peer-reviewed journal, Review of Religious Research.

We also found that for all measures, growing church clergy members were most conservative theologically, followed by their congregants, who were themselves followed by the congregants of the declining churches and then the declining church clergy members. In other words, growing church clergy members are the most theologically conservative, while declining church clergy members are the least. Their congregations meet more in the middle.

For example, we found that 93 percent of clergy members and 83 percent of worshipers from growing churches agreed with the statement “Jesus rose from the dead with a real fleshand-blood body leaving behind an empty tomb.” This compared with 67 percent of worshipers and 56 percent of clergy members from declining churches. Furthermore, all growing-church clergy members and 90 percent of their worshipers agreed that “God performs miracles in answer to prayers,” compared with 80 percent of worshipers and a mere 44 percent of clergy members from declining churches.

Other studies also have found that growing churches — nationally and internationally — have been almost exclusively conservative in doctrine. As we explain in our academic work, because of methodological limitations, these other studies did not link growth to theology. But our work suggests this is a fruitful avenue of research to pursue.

What explains the growth gap between liberal and conservative congregations?

In defense of liberal churches, one might venture that it is the strength of belief, not the specifics of belief, that is the real cause of growth. In this case, pastors embracing liberal theology are just as likely as conservative pastors to experience church growth, provided they are firm and clear in their religious convictions. Yet different beliefs, though equally strong, produce different outcomes.

For example, because of their conservative outlook, the growing church-clergy members in our study took Jesus’ command to “Go make disciples” literally. Thus, they all held the conviction it’s “very important to encourage non-Christians to become Christians” and therefore are more likely put effort into converting non-Christians. Conversely, because of their liberal leanings, half the clergy members at the declining churches held the opposite conviction, believing that it is not desirable to convert non-Christians. Some of them felt, for instance, that peddling their religion outside of their immediate faith community is culturally insensitive.

It should be obvious which of these two convictions is more likely to generate church growth.

While our research helps explains the dwindling ranks of liberal mainline congregations and might help them figure out how to reverse the decline, it won’t won’t encourage them, especially those on the theological left. But, if it’s any consolation, when it comes to growth in mainline churches, Bishop Spong and other liberals are right to claim that Christianity must change or die. They just get the direction of the change wrong.