» 4. Decline

Photo: Brendan Esposito

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Niall Reid, the head of the Uniting Church in NSW, has implored his church to start selling its underutilised churches, manses and halls and give the proceeds to the poor and disadvantaged.

Faced with dwindling congregations and conceding the church could all but disappear in 30 years, the [...]

Url Scaramanga announces the early demise of the “emerging church” in RIP Emerging Church: An overused and corrupted term now sleeps with the fishes. ... HT: Alan Hirsch UPDATE: Ed Stetzer’s article on The Emerging Church, the Emergent Church, and the Faith Once Delivered to the Saints.

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An update on the sad story of Francis Macnab and St Michael’s Uniting Church.

The Uniting Church Synod voted today to request St Michael’s remove freeway signs and other media related to its “new faith” advertising campaign because it causes “deep offense to many Christians, Jews and Muslims”.

The denomination is in a dilemma. Macnab has pushed [...]

Some more wisdom from James Hitchcock. This time on the “triumph of the therapeutic”.

Following Philip Rieff he describes the shift in Western culture from “inhibitory” to “remissive”. From a society whose dominant symbols carry religious and moral affirmations, which include prohibitions, to a culture which systematically grants permission to the individual to transgress these prohibitions [...]

I’m reading Catholicism and modernity: Confrontation or capitulation? by James Hitchcock. Written in the late 1970s in the wake of Vatican II. He writes as an orthodox Catholic facing the growing liberalisation of his faith from within the Church.

There are striking parallels in the story of the Episcopalian demise in the US and Canada and [...]

I got mad the other day and wrote this piece. Fortunately I had the wisdom to check it with Michelle before publishing. She told me “don’t you dare!”. Too negative. Too many names named.

So it sat here amongst my drafts with instructions to publish it when I die. But I got tired of waiting to [...]

David Mills asks, If it’s true that religious bureaucracy deforms and hinders Christian ministry, what should be done?

Western churches must radically change the way they work. They must reorganize their lives, by exchanging a centralized system run by processes with impersonal rules and directed towards centrally chosen ends, for a decentralized system allowed to work [...]

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 [...]

Declining organizations don’t want to know the truth about their demise. They deceive themselves and others. They hide from painful reality. Until it is too late.

The exception is the Presbyterian Church (USA). They are to be commended for the courage to confront the brutal facts and to publish them online.

But do they have the right [...]