This is a good rule that everybody needs to internalize; it is going to help you understand this century. It's also one reason why the fertility crash can easily turn into a spiral: young people move from outlying areas to the big city in pursuit of a dynamic environment, but the big city is itself a fertility-killing environment.
When it comes to churches, one thing I want to highlight is the prospect of preserving real estate by planting new churches into existing attractive church buildings. In a declining population environment, the building stock tends to decline, as the incentives are upside-down for building anything new or even for engaging in major renovations: there will be less demand for real estate tomorrow than today, so why invest?
You can turn this into an opportunity when it comes to, for example, Reformed Zoomer's project of taking control of liberal churches. Though there's also a prospect for saving dying conservative churches that have good buildings by planting a congregation within them and merging the two. I seem to recall a discussion about this phenomenon somewhere previously, of effectively merging a young group of believers with a dying conservative church.
I would frame up what you are describing in terms of increasing chaos as well as population shifts.
People seek stability in the form of more concentrated and therefore more stable churches. There is a Baptist congregation in a nearby small city with an engaging and effective pastor who is reaching out to nearby small towns, setting up satellite churches where the Sunday sermon is streamed to all the churches from the mother church, but each local congregation has a pastor who ministers to their local needs while calling on the mother church and colleagues for support. The satellite church in our town seems to be doing well.
I also wonder if the move to stability in the form of a larger, shinier church might also take the shape of seeking one of the more traditional liturgical forms, Missouri Synod or Catholic/Orthodox.
I found a book recently that I'd recommend: Christendom to Apostolic Mission. (available on Amazon) It is a short book that expresses very succinctly the dilemma all Christians face, The institutional churches are struggling in the battle against the secular culture; therefore, we have to shift into "apostolic mission" mode, which is "the difference between floating a canoe downriver with the occasional guiding push (in institutional/Christendom mode) or steering it upriver against the current with energetic strokes (in apostolic mode)". It doesn't pull any punches. The institutional structures still stand intact, but there is a lot of "floating downstream" when "paddling upstream" is needed. CS Lewis point out that we are in “enemy-occupied territory---that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.” The book comes out of the Catholic world, but it offers a wider message to all Christians. A great cosmic spiritual battle is going on all around us, and we have to take sides. Recommended!
Thanks for this analysis, Aaron. I could see the Indy story from a different angle from this one and appreciate the insights into churches, small and larger. These are some notes on Indy history from a more spiritual angle in some ways that might be of interest.
Turning points in the city and state history – more spiritual turning points but some with partly political and social connections. I don’t know that any city or state history has been written that way. I was just recalling stories I had written about or observed as newsworthy at some point in time. Oaks Academy is one example, but it is hard to do a time line, as the strengths of the venture have become more clear in recent years. Some initiatives are strong on vision but weak on execution. Others are less articulate on vision but exceed expectations in execution.
The Morales Group is another turning point, but I can’t pinpoint the date because the story keeps going now in the next generation of leadership (Seth Morales) and is answer to prayer for Leviticus 19:33-34.
The Indianapolis Theological Seminary is part of the big story and is ongoing. A date of foundation seems less important in this analysis than the timing of the Lord’s establishment (Psalm 90:17) and advancement (Psalm 75:6-7) of the ministry across several decades.
Wheeler Mission is such a salt and light ministry and is more than 100 years old and has been sustained or established across so many generations now, thanks to faithful board members and executive directors such as Leonard Hunt and Rick Alvis. Yet the launch of Purposeful Design more recently is so vital to the followup or discipleship side of this ministry.
A couple of sources of information are the Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, which is not fully updated at this point online. They have a backlog of entries to add. Another is Indiana’s 200, which came out in 2016 for the state’s 200th year.
I hope something here is of encouragement to you with the seminary, which is joining a great cloud of witnesses. I am thankful for the question.
Indianapolis and Indiana turning points in history
1959 – Billy Graham Crusade
1967 – Election of Mayor Richard Lugar
1970 – Unigov annexes all of Marion County into Indianapolis
1975 – First of four elections for Mayor Bill Hudnut, 1979, 1983, 1987
1978 – Some of us start praying for revival and reformation for Indianapolis and Indiana (About 25 years later Matt Barnes picks up the prayer burden as chaplain to state government)
1977-1994 – Community Outreach Center ministry, Percy Scruggs, later leading to Oaks Academy in the burned out Fall Creek neighborhood
1980 – William Bumphus gets saved in the jail; he returns to prison to preach, leading to Jesus House for former inmates
1991 – Steve Goldsmith is elected mayor and starts building important church-state bridges, asking churches to help resolve city social problems, based on what he had observed as county prosecutor
Around 1992 – Jeff and Sue Pankratz moved to 2300 Guildford, in response to the example of Percy Scruggs
1998 – Launch of Oaks Academy, out of prayer with the Pankratz, Fisher, Enas and other families.
2000-2010 – Matt Barnes prayerfully goes to the Statehouse and gradually becomes an informal chaplain to the General Assembly and state government, putting a structure to what had been our informal prayer times.
Christian men and women try to discern God’s will for the second half of their lives:
Don Palmer launches the National Christian Foundation of Indiana to scale up support for ministries.
Tom Morales launches Morales Group to provide work for the immigrants.
2010-2020
Launch of Indianapolis Theological Seminary
David Palmer launches Purposeful Design for the homeless to have jobs.
Jim and Nancy Cotterill launch Unite Indy to build bridges between the inner city and suburban churches.
Anecdotally, I observed many of your predictions take place in the fundamentalist world 10 years ago. Some churches experienced growth, as many smaller churches died out and it lended itself to unrealistic expectations for many up and coming leaders (in particular those involved in church plants). Talent instead of being one of several factors, became the deciding factor in whether or not a Bible college grad got a decent job afterward.
I'm going to throw the cat amongst the pigeons and say that praxis and ecclesiology has more to do with losing people than what might be assumed. What I mean here is, and I mean it's only one factor, that as evangelicalism has moved towards a more 'sermon centric approach' it means that becomes what is expected. Hence more people go to churches where they see the pastor as compelling. This is opposed to word and sacrament praxis. I might be biased here as I go to a Lutheran church, but I have noticed that when both communion and word are emphasised equally, then it deflects away from the pastor's sermon needing to be incredible for people to stay. I also think that this approach helps with the struggles of life, as Jesus suffers in our place and with us. This helps retain all generations as well as it is a tangible hands on experience which can be helpful to communicate the gospel.
I think 'sermon centric' churches may attract people when they are young, but as you get older, life gets challenging, and it's just not sophisticated and multi-layered enough to deal with complex questions. The other alternative being eucharist only has its own other set of problems. But I do think evangelicals have swung so far away from that the pastor's sermon has become the central act of worship. It also becomes problematic if the pastor has limited capacity to engage with his people. But that's a while other chapter that I will leave for next time :)
Lots of words, and there are also multiple factors going on in the background like generally Christians don't appear to be meeting other Christians and starting families, I think that flows from sermon centrism, but that's just my perspective.
To what extent does the decline in ministers correspond to the fact that it is increasingly difficult to maintain an upper-middle class lifestyle as a full-time pastor? One of the key features of the rising cost of living is that while objective indexes of cost-of-living might seem reasonable, when you factor in the class difference (the additional costs needed to maintain membership in the Upper-Middle Class) then the COL issue takes on a whole new aspect. What's becoming extremely expensive is not life itself, but the kind of life and respect that a person with a college degree expects to get as someone who self-identifies as UMC.
Full-time ministers tend to have expectations that they're going to be of equivalent social standing to engineers, lawyers, doctors, professors, businessmen, and other highly educated managers of modern society. However, it's become far less realistic that a person is going to be able to maintain that lifestyle on a minister's salary. The number of houses in the "good" neighborhood and school district are shrinking, the prices of those houses are growing rapidly, as the Upper-Middle Class today pulls up the drawbridge behind them and locks the rest of society out. I have a feeling that a lot of intelligent, capable young people considering ministry are specifically eyeing the house in the gated community and wondering if choosing this profession is going to lock them out of their social class. I see it frequently among fellow professors, this sense of abandoning teaching because they can't afford to keep working for such low wages without catastrophic loss of quality of life.
In which case, the preacher shortage is another thing downstream of the "secession of the successful" and its parallel effect, the lumpenization of labor.
>decline produces concentration
This is a good rule that everybody needs to internalize; it is going to help you understand this century. It's also one reason why the fertility crash can easily turn into a spiral: young people move from outlying areas to the big city in pursuit of a dynamic environment, but the big city is itself a fertility-killing environment.
When it comes to churches, one thing I want to highlight is the prospect of preserving real estate by planting new churches into existing attractive church buildings. In a declining population environment, the building stock tends to decline, as the incentives are upside-down for building anything new or even for engaging in major renovations: there will be less demand for real estate tomorrow than today, so why invest?
You can turn this into an opportunity when it comes to, for example, Reformed Zoomer's project of taking control of liberal churches. Though there's also a prospect for saving dying conservative churches that have good buildings by planting a congregation within them and merging the two. I seem to recall a discussion about this phenomenon somewhere previously, of effectively merging a young group of believers with a dying conservative church.
I would frame up what you are describing in terms of increasing chaos as well as population shifts.
People seek stability in the form of more concentrated and therefore more stable churches. There is a Baptist congregation in a nearby small city with an engaging and effective pastor who is reaching out to nearby small towns, setting up satellite churches where the Sunday sermon is streamed to all the churches from the mother church, but each local congregation has a pastor who ministers to their local needs while calling on the mother church and colleagues for support. The satellite church in our town seems to be doing well.
I also wonder if the move to stability in the form of a larger, shinier church might also take the shape of seeking one of the more traditional liturgical forms, Missouri Synod or Catholic/Orthodox.
I found a book recently that I'd recommend: Christendom to Apostolic Mission. (available on Amazon) It is a short book that expresses very succinctly the dilemma all Christians face, The institutional churches are struggling in the battle against the secular culture; therefore, we have to shift into "apostolic mission" mode, which is "the difference between floating a canoe downriver with the occasional guiding push (in institutional/Christendom mode) or steering it upriver against the current with energetic strokes (in apostolic mode)". It doesn't pull any punches. The institutional structures still stand intact, but there is a lot of "floating downstream" when "paddling upstream" is needed. CS Lewis point out that we are in “enemy-occupied territory---that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.” The book comes out of the Catholic world, but it offers a wider message to all Christians. A great cosmic spiritual battle is going on all around us, and we have to take sides. Recommended!
Thanks for this analysis, Aaron. I could see the Indy story from a different angle from this one and appreciate the insights into churches, small and larger. These are some notes on Indy history from a more spiritual angle in some ways that might be of interest.
Turning points in the city and state history – more spiritual turning points but some with partly political and social connections. I don’t know that any city or state history has been written that way. I was just recalling stories I had written about or observed as newsworthy at some point in time. Oaks Academy is one example, but it is hard to do a time line, as the strengths of the venture have become more clear in recent years. Some initiatives are strong on vision but weak on execution. Others are less articulate on vision but exceed expectations in execution.
The Morales Group is another turning point, but I can’t pinpoint the date because the story keeps going now in the next generation of leadership (Seth Morales) and is answer to prayer for Leviticus 19:33-34.
The Indianapolis Theological Seminary is part of the big story and is ongoing. A date of foundation seems less important in this analysis than the timing of the Lord’s establishment (Psalm 90:17) and advancement (Psalm 75:6-7) of the ministry across several decades.
Wheeler Mission is such a salt and light ministry and is more than 100 years old and has been sustained or established across so many generations now, thanks to faithful board members and executive directors such as Leonard Hunt and Rick Alvis. Yet the launch of Purposeful Design more recently is so vital to the followup or discipleship side of this ministry.
A couple of sources of information are the Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, which is not fully updated at this point online. They have a backlog of entries to add. Another is Indiana’s 200, which came out in 2016 for the state’s 200th year.
I hope something here is of encouragement to you with the seminary, which is joining a great cloud of witnesses. I am thankful for the question.
Indianapolis and Indiana turning points in history
1959 – Billy Graham Crusade
1967 – Election of Mayor Richard Lugar
1970 – Unigov annexes all of Marion County into Indianapolis
1975 – First of four elections for Mayor Bill Hudnut, 1979, 1983, 1987
1978 – Some of us start praying for revival and reformation for Indianapolis and Indiana (About 25 years later Matt Barnes picks up the prayer burden as chaplain to state government)
1977-1994 – Community Outreach Center ministry, Percy Scruggs, later leading to Oaks Academy in the burned out Fall Creek neighborhood
1980 – William Bumphus gets saved in the jail; he returns to prison to preach, leading to Jesus House for former inmates
1991 – Steve Goldsmith is elected mayor and starts building important church-state bridges, asking churches to help resolve city social problems, based on what he had observed as county prosecutor
Around 1992 – Jeff and Sue Pankratz moved to 2300 Guildford, in response to the example of Percy Scruggs
1998 – Launch of Oaks Academy, out of prayer with the Pankratz, Fisher, Enas and other families.
2000-2010 – Matt Barnes prayerfully goes to the Statehouse and gradually becomes an informal chaplain to the General Assembly and state government, putting a structure to what had been our informal prayer times.
Christian men and women try to discern God’s will for the second half of their lives:
Don Palmer launches the National Christian Foundation of Indiana to scale up support for ministries.
Tom Morales launches Morales Group to provide work for the immigrants.
2010-2020
Launch of Indianapolis Theological Seminary
David Palmer launches Purposeful Design for the homeless to have jobs.
Jim and Nancy Cotterill launch Unite Indy to build bridges between the inner city and suburban churches.
Anecdotally, I observed many of your predictions take place in the fundamentalist world 10 years ago. Some churches experienced growth, as many smaller churches died out and it lended itself to unrealistic expectations for many up and coming leaders (in particular those involved in church plants). Talent instead of being one of several factors, became the deciding factor in whether or not a Bible college grad got a decent job afterward.
Interesting.
I'm going to throw the cat amongst the pigeons and say that praxis and ecclesiology has more to do with losing people than what might be assumed. What I mean here is, and I mean it's only one factor, that as evangelicalism has moved towards a more 'sermon centric approach' it means that becomes what is expected. Hence more people go to churches where they see the pastor as compelling. This is opposed to word and sacrament praxis. I might be biased here as I go to a Lutheran church, but I have noticed that when both communion and word are emphasised equally, then it deflects away from the pastor's sermon needing to be incredible for people to stay. I also think that this approach helps with the struggles of life, as Jesus suffers in our place and with us. This helps retain all generations as well as it is a tangible hands on experience which can be helpful to communicate the gospel.
I think 'sermon centric' churches may attract people when they are young, but as you get older, life gets challenging, and it's just not sophisticated and multi-layered enough to deal with complex questions. The other alternative being eucharist only has its own other set of problems. But I do think evangelicals have swung so far away from that the pastor's sermon has become the central act of worship. It also becomes problematic if the pastor has limited capacity to engage with his people. But that's a while other chapter that I will leave for next time :)
Lots of words, and there are also multiple factors going on in the background like generally Christians don't appear to be meeting other Christians and starting families, I think that flows from sermon centrism, but that's just my perspective.
To what extent does the decline in ministers correspond to the fact that it is increasingly difficult to maintain an upper-middle class lifestyle as a full-time pastor? One of the key features of the rising cost of living is that while objective indexes of cost-of-living might seem reasonable, when you factor in the class difference (the additional costs needed to maintain membership in the Upper-Middle Class) then the COL issue takes on a whole new aspect. What's becoming extremely expensive is not life itself, but the kind of life and respect that a person with a college degree expects to get as someone who self-identifies as UMC.
Full-time ministers tend to have expectations that they're going to be of equivalent social standing to engineers, lawyers, doctors, professors, businessmen, and other highly educated managers of modern society. However, it's become far less realistic that a person is going to be able to maintain that lifestyle on a minister's salary. The number of houses in the "good" neighborhood and school district are shrinking, the prices of those houses are growing rapidly, as the Upper-Middle Class today pulls up the drawbridge behind them and locks the rest of society out. I have a feeling that a lot of intelligent, capable young people considering ministry are specifically eyeing the house in the gated community and wondering if choosing this profession is going to lock them out of their social class. I see it frequently among fellow professors, this sense of abandoning teaching because they can't afford to keep working for such low wages without catastrophic loss of quality of life.
In which case, the preacher shortage is another thing downstream of the "secession of the successful" and its parallel effect, the lumpenization of labor.