» 5. Death

Some wisdom from David Mills on why we must resist religious bureaucracy.

1. Religious bureaucracy tends to define the mission of the church as the continuing life and success of the institution as it is, which means, that its processes continue to process.

Bureaucratic processes prefer “process people,” people who by personality and usually conviction fit [...]

What’s going on when a religious movement becomes a religious bureaucracy? David Mills paints a terrifying picture of the damage they inflict.
Any revival in these (mainline) churches will require not the reform but the abandonment of the many layers of bureaucracy they have built up over the last few decades, giving the local bodies the [...]

Seven lessons from the story of the rise and fall of the Student Christian Movement (SCM):

1. Drift to secularism
A recurring pattern in the lifecycle of movements is the drift to secularism. Finke and Stark write, “By ‘secularized’ we mean to move from otherworldliness, to present a more distant and indistinct conception of the supernatural, to [...]

Today I’m releasing the latest in a series of case studies in the lifecycle of a movement: SCM - Missionaries to Marxists

We’ll be looking at the final stage of the lifecycle: death. The case study I’ve chosen is especially instructive for those on left wing of the Emerging Church, described by Ed Stetzer as “revisionists”. [...]

Back in the bad old days the Soviets would display posters throughout their empire proclaiming: “Friendship with the Soviet Union Forever!” Locals would display their black humour by scrawling underneath, “But not a minute more!”

Had lunch the the other day with a dissident. He’s persona non grata in his denomination despite being totally committed to [...]

I went down to the sacred store
where I’d heard the music years before
but the man there said the music wouldn’t play
and in the streets the children screamed,
the lovers cried, and the poets dreamed
but not a word was spoken,
the church bells all were broken
and the three men I admire most,
the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost,
they [...]

Will the last Presbyterian please turn out the lights?

The Presbyterian Church USA is hemorrhaging.

According to the number crunchers at denominational headquarters, membership loss for the denomination in 2005 was estimated at sixty-five thousand, followed by an eighty-five thousand projected loss in 2006.

The projected 2006 loss would represent a single-year decline of 3.7 percent, the highest [...]

It seems my Shifting the Deckchairs in Newark has stirred up quite a bit of interest over at Signposts.

A few thoughts. . .

First of all you may want to read my original post on Spong The Suicide of Liberal Christianity.

It’s important to remember that Spong is not an isolated phenomena but part of a recurring [...]

A new report reveals the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, continues to be in serious decline. It’s membership is free-falling at a rate three times the national average for the embattled Episcopal church. Down by 46% since 1972.

Nearly 90 percent of its parishes were founded before 1942, and not a single church has opened in 16 [...]

Came across a report recently of a truck that destroyed a church in rural Australia last year.

The church, which was built in the early 1880s, had no-one inside when it was destroyed by the run-away prime-mover. The truck’s trailer held up the roof of the building while the truck cabin was perched on the edge [...]