Part One: The Unwise and Unwell State of Denominations
The United States is experiencing a significant religious transformation. For some it is the most exciting development in the past century. For others it signals the end of the world as we’ve known it.
Consider the Barna surveys conducted over the last three years. 74 percent of their sample reported they wanted to grow spiritually, 77 percent said they believed in a higher power, and almost half said that they were more open to God than before the pandemic.[1] Additionally, Barna reported widespread curiosity about Jesus among teens, with 77 percent reporting being “at least somewhat motivated to keep learning about Jesus throughout their lives.”[2] 71 percent of the general population surveyed (ages 13+) reported viewing Jesus positively, however, they listed their primary reluctance to hold Christian beliefs as the “hypocrisy of religious people.”[3]
Vastly open to Jesus, while largely closed to the institutional church, this summarizes the new protest-ant “spiritual but not religious” transformation taking place.
For those of us who have been nurtured, formed, and are now giving our lives in the service of a denominational expression of the church this could be interpreted as bad news. Denominations in the United States are not doing well by all conventional metrics (I’ll explore in a later post why the metrics themselves may be partly to blame). Particularly “mainline” denominations seem unwell and not-so-wise.
Most people think of mainline denominations as the churches that line the central avenues and railways of North America. William R. Hutchison, a leading scholar of American religious history coined the term “seven sisters of American Protestantism” to refer to seven major denominations that comprise the mainline: American Baptist Churches USA, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Church of Christ, and The United Methodist Church. However, “mainline” also applies to dozens of smaller denominations like the Alliance of Baptists, Church of the Brethren, Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, the Mennonite Church, the Moravian Church in North America, the Reformed Church in America, and the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).
Generally, the term mainline is used to distinguish these groups from those that are explicitly evangelical or fundamentalist. In the mid-twentieth century membership in mainline congregations made up the majority of the U.S. population. In 1970, even after two decades of decline, mainlines still claimed most Protestants and more than 30 percent of the American population as members (Hout, Greeley & Wilde 2001). In 2015 Pew Research reported the share of adults belonging to mainline churches had dropped from 18.1 percent in 2007 to 14.7 percent in 2014.[4]
In 2020, the Public Religion Research Institute gave the first good news for mainliners in fifty years, reporting a rebound to 16.4 percent, back up from thirteen percent in 2016.[5] It’s possible this is the front edge of a trend, as people U-turn from the dead ends of political polarization that have been conflated with the theological poles of many U.S. churches. Mainline churches offer a rational, deep, inclusive, and integrative approach to spirituality, and safe harbor from extremism. However, we can’t really describe this as a trend until the next round of census.
My theory is that the condition of mainline denominations traces back to the “compassion gap” described in my last post. The crisis is twofold. We have failed to form compassionate people, thus, the hypocrisy “nones and dones” rail against. And churches and their leaders seem to be in a state of compassion fatigue.
Barna also conducted research on The State of Pastors. 72 percent of pastors said they felt “very satisfied” with their job as a pastor in 2015. By 2020, that number had dropped to 67 percent. By 2022, just 52 percent of pastors are “very satisfied” with their jobs. Two in five (41 percent), said they’ve considered quitting ministry in the last twelve months. Covid and its aftermath has accelerated clergy fatigue and disillusionment.[6]
Gallup’s 2023 Honesty and Ethics poll demonstrated that trust of clergy persons continued to decline. People rated the moral standards of nurses, police officers, and chiropractors more trustworthy than religious leaders. Yep, chiropractors were more trusted than clergy in this sample! Thankfully, clergy are still more trusted than politicians, lawyers, and journalists… for now. But clergy reputation dropped from 40 percent to 32 percent in just the last four years. Again, further evidence that people are generally skeptical of religious institutions and the people who lead within them.[7]
It doesn’t require an advanced theology degree to deduce that publicly professing allegiance to Jesus, while not thinking, acting, and loving like him is a problem. But what if we were to utilize what C. Wright Mills first called “the sociological imagination” to assess the denominational situation? What are the intersections between “personal troubles of milieu” and the “public issues of social structure”? Surely the plight of mainlines are not merely “individual troubles,” but rather there are “structural issues” involved (Mills, 1959, 6-8). What social and organizational structures might be perpetuating this unwell and not-so-wise state?
Organizationally speaking, are mainline denominations healthy? Do members feel spiritually alive and nurtured? Do congregations seek the greater good, making their communities a better place? Do denominational stakeholders have high levels of life satisfaction?
As we move to these structural questions, we will now turn to the research of sociologists Monika Ardelt and Bhavna Sharma on organizational wisdom. Ardelt and Bhavna compared wisdom with intellectual knowledge and delineated the characteristics of wise and not-so-wise organizations in the areas of goals, approach, range, characteristics of leaders and employees, and perception of aging. Guided by this framework, they tested whether wise organizations have a positive effect on employees’ physical and subjective well-being mediated by wise leadership and job satisfaction (Ardelt & Sharma, 2021).1
Their results confirmed positive associations between an organizations’ overall wisdom index and employees’ physical and subjective well-being. They found that wise organizations encourage wise leadership, and wise leadership led to increased job satisfaction. This increased employees’ physical and subjective well-being (Ardelt & Sharma, 2021).
Wise organizations increase well-being. Not-so-wise organizations… not-so-much.
So, what is wisdom, and how does it become structurally embodied organizationally? How might these findings guide religious institutions that currently seem unwise and unwell to a better present-future?
Stay tuned for part two of this three-part series!
[1] Barna, Rising Spiritual Openness in the U.S., 2023.
[2] Barna, The Open Generation, 2023.
[3] Barna, Openness to Jesus, 2023.
[4] Pew Research, America’s Changing Religious Landscape, 2015.
[5] PRRI Census of American Religion, 2020.
[6] Barna, Decline in Pastoral Security, 2023.
[7] Gallup, Honesty and Ethics, 2023.
Ardelt Monika and Sharma, Bhavna “Linking Wise Organizations to Wise Leadership, Job Satisfaction, and Well-Being” (2021). Front. Commun. 6:685850.