Accents • Fall 2007 Volume 37, No. 2   [back]
SEMESTER HIGHLIGHTS

Diana Butler Bass sees new life in Mainline Congregations

Surprise! The mainline church isn’t dead. In fact, according to Diana Butler Bass, “mainline pews are filling up with people who are uncomfortable with more narrow definitions of Christianity.”

The author of “Christianity for the Rest of Us” told the audience gathered for the Couillard Lectures on October 5th that she had found a tremendous sense of excitement and new possibility during her recent three-year study of more than one-hundred centrist and progressive congregations. The real news about the mainline church, she argued, is not about fights between liberals and conservatives, but rather about churches that have moved from being “conventional” to being “intentional” in the face of a rapidly-changing culture.

What’s perhaps even more surprising is that it is not new technologies or techniques, but “the most simple kinds of Christian practices — good worship, healing, forgiveness, caring for the poor,” that are opening the way to the future. In the times in which we live, “people are more concerned about practice and the authenticity of a community’s life” than about arguing politics or doctrine.

“How are we practicing hospitality?...Are we giving more of ourselves than we can possibly imagine?...What is God calling us to be?” Such are the fundamental questions that thriving churches are asking themselves in the opening years of the new millennium, and it is in answering these questions that they are, in Dr. Bass’s terms, serving as midwives at the birth of a new church for a new day.

— Steve Simmons
Continuing Education