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Congregations as Lively as They Are Liberal
 By Karen A. Keely
Saturday, March 18, 2006
 

We've all heard the reports that mainline churches are facing their end of days. Apparently it's conservative, non-denominational Bible churches that are booming, while traditional congregations have lost their vigor and their attractiveness to newcomers.

We've all heard the reports that mainline churches are facing their end of days.
Before we get out the funeral crepe, it's worth reading two recent books that provide important counter-evidence to reports of this trend. Diana Butler Bass's The Practicing Congregation: Imagining a New Old Church and Butler Bass and Joseph Stewart-Sicking's edited collection From Nomads to Pilgrims: Stories from Practicing Congregations work together compellingly to make the argument that, in fact, many Protestant mainline congregations are doing very well indeed, attracting new members, encouraging healthy discipleship, and engaging in vital ministries in their communities.

Both books grow out of the Lilly Foundation-funded Project on Congregations of Intentional Practice, a three-year study directed by Butler Bass and housed at the Virginia Theological Seminary. Butler Bass and her research associates studied fifty thriving congregations from seven mainline denominations, finding common practices among them that might profitably be studied by other congregations seeking greater vitality. Given the quantity of scholarship that already exists on conservative churches, Butler Bass focused her study on mainstream and liberal Protestant congregations, hoping to fill in this scholarly gap; this emphasis makes the books particularly helpful for Witness readers and their congregations. (Butler Bass does note that "interested Jews, Roman Catholics, and evangelical Protestants will find much here that resonates with their own experiences in faith communities" [Practicing Congregation xi].)

Many Protestant mainline congregations are doing very well indeed, attracting new members, encouraging healthy discipleship, and engaging in vital ministries in their communities.
Butler Bass's The Practicing Congregation (Alban Institute, 2004) lays out the study's findings, chief among which is that many Protestant churches are not in decline but are rather in what Butler Bass calls a "post-decline period," which she identifies as having emerged around 1990 (Practicing Congregation 11, 14). Moreover, Butler Bass identifies a common attribute in the vital congregations she studied: they are all what she terms intentional and practicing congregations (hence the title of her book). Such congregations "have theologically moderate-to-liberal messages (for example, they typically believe that the Bible is primarily story, myth, or allegory; they accept the consequences of religious and racial pluralism and multiculturalism, believing in an explicit or implicit universalism; they support expanded leadership roles for women and demonstrate higher tolerance toward gay and lesbian members) but they have embraced traditional Christian practices in worship, prayer, moral formation, and life together" (Practicing Congregation 14).

In other words, Butler Bass is studying the liberal version of what is increasingly being called "emerging church" -- intentional as opposed to established congregations that rely more heavily on lay congregants than paid professional ministers and that engage in "intentional practices … [that] cost something in terms of choice, commitment, and involvement." Emerging churches tend to be on the conservative end of the political spectrum (see her helpful graphic on page 84 of Practicing Congregation, as well as the less helpful graphic on page 87), but Butler Bass argues that such intentionality exists on the liberal end as well and concludes that these congregations are vital because their inherent "costliness creates a palpable sense of communal discipleship, mentoring, mutual learning, and spiritual formation; a pilgrim sensibility of people traveling together in community, whose practices embody a particular way of life in the world" (Practicing Congregation 81).

Certainly this all sounds exciting -- who wouldn't want to be in a congregation with all of these characteristics? -- but it's not particularly clear from the book exactly what this looks like in practice. And this is one of the significant weaknesses of The Practicing Congregation, which is strong on theory and very short on practice. For a reader engaged in "imagining a new old church," as the book's subtitle promises, the book's lack of specific examples is a serious hindrance. (Even Chapter 4, which is specifically about practices, does not include examples of actual practices.)

Clearly I'm not the only reader to have had this response, for Butler Bass and her research associate Joseph Stewart-Sicking have now followed up the first book with an edited collection of congregation's stories. They asked twelve pastors of the congregations they studied to write about their congregational stories -- what their congregation did that made it work, made it vibrant and growing and a touchstone for the rest of us. That being said, the stories here do not purport to be models but rather individual congregations' experiences; Butler Bass is quite clear in both books that she is not prescribing particular programs, styles of worship, or growth strategies (Practicing Congregation 4) -- rather, she and the pastor-authors are telling congregational stories that may inspire readers to imagine what their own congregation's story might be.

Butler Bass focused her study on mainstream and liberal congregations.
From Nomads to Pilgrims (Alban Institute, 2006) was, by the editors' own admission, pulled together fairly rapidly, and in some cases the writing and editing show this haste. I may be more sensitive than some to dangling modifiers and overworked and mixed metaphors, but in some instances sloppiness actually interferes with the cohesiveness and clarity of the book; for example, Butler Bass points out in the book's Preface that discernment and hospitality are the two key practices in intentional congregations, but by the Conclusion she has added another practice, "emotive and participatory worship practices," as the crucial third part of "the foundation of congregational spiritual depth and vitality" (Nomads to Pilgrims xiii, 167). Such discrepancies are frustrating in that they detract from helpful results of this Lilly-funded study, which has so much to teach those of us progressives in mainstream churches. Moreover, the choice of professional pastors to be the authors of all of these stories is no doubt a function of the haste with which the collection was created, but this choice undercuts Butler Bass's own point that practicing congregations are a product of both the "congregational imagination" and the "pastoral imagination" (Practicing Congregation 5, 94, 98, and passim); some of the writers were deliberate about including lay people's testimony within the essays, but overall congregational voices are distinctly missing from this collection in favor of ordained voices, a pattern in conflict with her definition of intentional (as opposed to established churches) and their emphasis on congregational leadership.

These weaknesses aside, the stories of vibrant congregations in From Nomads to Pilgrims are interesting, both for their own sake and for the ways in which they flesh out the theories found in The Practicing Congregation. I found most helpful Roy Terry's discussion of starting a new Methodist congregation based on the "apostolic core," N. Graham Standish's essay about pushing his Presbyterian session to abandon Robert's Rules of Order in exchange for a spiritual agenda grounded in prayer, and Scott A. Benhase's writing about his Episcopal parish's urban mission as a "full gospel church," but my choices may have everything to do with my own experiences in my parish; I assume that readers with different church experiences may find different essays most helpful, which of course is the advantage of a collection of diverse essays. In The Practicing Congregation, I found most interesting Chapter 3, on tradition, and Chapter 5, on dynamics within the national church. The two books together would be excellent reading for congregational study groups, vestries, and Christians interested in larger trends in Americans' faith communities today. A final book from the project, Christianity for the Rest of Us, will be released this fall (by HarperSanFrancisco), and I look forward to reading Butler Bass's conclusions from this fascinating three-year study. In the meantime, we can all take heart and find renewed courage from Butler Bass's evidence that mainline Protestant congregations are not only not in decline but are actually in a new era of rejuvenation; perhaps these two books together can inspire us to "imagine a new old church" and begin rejuvenation and a clearer sense of mission and practice in our own congregations.


Karen A. Keely is an Assistant Professor of English at Mount Saint Mary's University in Emmitsburg, Maryland, and has recently retired from her three-year vestry term at Memorial Episcopal Church in Baltimore. She may be reached at karen.keely@gmail.com.