Each Sunday morning, I drive down Fifth Avenue on my way to church.
My route takes me past First Baptist Church just as one worship service is ending and another is starting. Parking lots along the way are full of cars and scores of people fill the sidewalks and crosswalks.
It is a large white Southern Baptist church, less than one mile from my destination, Providence Baptist Church. Last Sunday, 25 people gathered in our sanctuary, five others joined by Zoom, and perhaps a couple dozen tuned into our live streaming broadcast.
First Baptist is not a megachurch, but just up the road is the main campus of Biltmore Church. It is a seven-campus megachurch with a branch in Hendersonville just five miles from Providence.
An attendance of 2,000 each week qualifies any church for the list of Protestant, Pentecostal, and Evangelical megachurches maintained by the Hartford Institute. There are more than 1,300 such congregations in the United States. Some exceed 10,000 in attendance and are called gigachurches.
Recent data released by the Pew Research Center demonstrates that the decline in Christian affiliation is almost exclusively from the Protestant wing of the Christian Community, from both Mainline and Evangelical churches. It is driven by a resistance to the version of Christian faith and practice that dominates these large congregations.
Trumpism.
Not that these megachurches would call it that. But they generally embrace the Christian nationalism associated with white supremacy. They describe their religious mission as working feverishly to restore the United States to its destiny as the premiere Christian nation in the world. “We are losing our country,” is a common refrain. A U. S. Representative (a high school dropout with a GED and a “born again” testimony) said this week: “I am tired of having godless people run this country. You and I are going to take it back.”
I witnessed this firsthand at the 2021 annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. But I read about it weekly in preparations for my Wednesday newsletter and Thursday broadcast.
Not that this sort of rhetoric would be heard on a typical Sunday morning at most of these large congregations. But family and friends, saints and scholars testify that such convictions are woven into the culture of churches like these: very Republican and very resistant to racial justice, gay rights, ballot access, and creation care, and all too often the epicenter of the anti-vaccine movement.
“If that’s what it means to be Christian, count me out.” That’s the refrain heard too often in public and in private. I mutter it to myself more often than I care to admit.
What is happening is this: White Christianity in the United States is increasingly dominated by this mega-church mentality of right-wing politics and right-wing religion. It is pushing out of our family of faith anybody who deviates. Increasingly, this megachurch version of faith has become what it means to be Christian in America.
I think about all this as I drive to church on Sunday and also at many other times during the week. I think about the minority voice I raise each Sunday, espousing a gospel that combines personal salvation and social transformation, that embraces both the holiness of mystery and also the hard work of justice.
I preached last Sunday taking the Magnificat of Mary as my text. At the Sunday dinner that followed, one person introduced me to the Canticle of the Turning which had been sung just that morning at her Lutheran church:
My soul cries out with a joyful shout that the God of my heart is great.
And my spirit sings of the wondrous things that you bring to the ones who wait.
You fixed your sight on your servant’s plight, and my weakness you did not spurn.
So, from east to west shall my name be blessed. Could the world be about to turn?
The message is very similar to the text of a hymn sent to me days before by another person, one I quoted in my Sunday sermon:
For everyone born, a place at the table, for everyone born, clean water and bread,
a shelter, a space, a safe place for growing, for everyone born, a star overhead.
And God will delight when we are creators of justice and joy, compassion and peace.
Yes, God will delight when we are creators of justice, justice and joy!
These are not the songs heard or sung in the megachurches near and far. But here and there, smaller Christian communities on main streets and side streets are bearing witness to another way of loving God, following Jesus, and living in the fullness of the Spirit.
And this lifts my spirits as I drive to church each Sunday morning, enough to say with all those in churches large and small, Merry Christmas!
(December 2021)
Each Sunday morning, I drive down Fifth Avenue on my way to church.
My route takes me past First Baptist Church just as one worship service is ending and another is starting. Parking lots along the way are full of cars and scores of people fill the sidewalks and crosswalks.
It is a large white Southern Baptist church, less than one mile from my destination, Providence Baptist Church. Last Sunday, 25 people gathered in our sanctuary, five others joined by Zoom, and perhaps a couple dozen tuned into our live streaming broadcast.
First Baptist is not a megachurch, but just up the road is the main campus of Biltmore Church. It is a seven-campus megachurch with a branch in Hendersonville just five miles from Providence.
An attendance of 2,000 each week qualifies any church for the list of Protestant, Pentecostal, and Evangelical megachurches maintained by the Hartford Institute. There are more than 1,300 such congregations in the United States. Some exceed 10,000 in attendance and are called gigachurches.
Recent data released by the Pew Research Center demonstrates that the decline in Christian affiliation is almost exclusively from the Protestant wing of the Christian Community, from both Mainline and Evangelical churches. It is driven by a resistance to the version of Christian faith and practice that dominates these large congregations.
Trumpism.
Not that these megachurches would call it that. But they generally embrace the Christian nationalism associated with white supremacy. They describe their religious mission as working feverishly to restore the United States to its destiny as the premiere Christian nation in the world. “We are losing our country,” is a common refrain. A U. S. Representative (a high school dropout with a GED and a “born again” testimony) said this week: “I am tired of having godless people run this country. You and I are going to take it back.”
I witnessed this firsthand at the 2021 annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. But I read about it weekly in preparations for my Wednesday newsletter and Thursday broadcast.
Not that this sort of rhetoric would be heard on a typical Sunday morning at most of these large congregations. But family and friends, saints and scholars testify that such convictions are woven into the culture of churches like these: very Republican and very resistant to racial justice, gay rights, ballot access, and creation care, and all too often the epicenter of the anti-vaccine movement.
“If that’s what it means to be Christian, count me out.” That’s the refrain heard too often in public and in private. I mutter it to myself more often than I care to admit.
What is happening is this: White Christianity in the United States is increasingly dominated by this mega-church mentality of right-wing politics and right-wing religion. It is pushing out of our family of faith anybody who deviates. Increasingly, this megachurch version of faith has become what it means to be Christian in America.
I think about all this as I drive to church on Sunday and also at many other times during the week. I think about the minority voice I raise each Sunday, espousing a gospel that combines personal salvation and social transformation, that embraces both the holiness of mystery and also the hard work of justice.
I preached last Sunday taking the Magnificat of Mary as my text. At the Sunday dinner that followed, one person introduced me to the Canticle of the Turning which had been sung just that morning at her Lutheran church:
My soul cries out with a joyful shout that the God of my heart is great.
And my spirit sings of the wondrous things that you bring to the ones who wait.
You fixed your sight on your servant’s plight, and my weakness you did not spurn.
So, from east to west shall my name be blessed. Could the world be about to turn?
The message is very similar to the text of a hymn sent to me days before by another person, one I quoted in my Sunday sermon:
For everyone born, a place at the table, for everyone born, clean water and bread,
a shelter, a space, a safe place for growing, for everyone born, a star overhead.
And God will delight when we are creators of justice and joy, compassion and peace.
Yes, God will delight when we are creators of justice, justice and joy!
These are not the songs heard or sung in the megachurches near and far. But here and there, smaller Christian communities on main streets and side streets are bearing witness to another way of loving God, following Jesus, and living in the fullness of the Spirit.
And this lifts my spirits as I drive to church each Sunday morning, enough to say with all those in churches large and small, Merry Christmas!
(December 2021)
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