In support of the Baptists (& Pentecostals): A postmortem of a postmortem
The talking points around the church water cooler last week were Central Easter Camp’s decision not to host an event in 2024 and Scottie Reeve’s dissection of what this means for the Kiwi church. Ok, poor analogy. Churches don’t have watercoolers, and I don’t know if I’ve actually ever seen masses of people talking intently while topping up their h2go bottles.
Scottie is a gifted writer who speaks with prophetic insight, which is why I think the article has been widely circulated.
He states, “Our Anglican congregations are shrinking and closing rapidly, as are those of our Catholic sisters and brothers. For a while, I think many put this decline down to the traditional shape of our worship. But as less traditional denominations are beginning to fade, we are realising that the Anglo-Catholics were just the canary in the coal mine. What has begun with the Anglicans is now moving to the Baptists, and when there is no more transfer growth left for independent commuter churches to take from neighbourhoods, they too will come into decline.”
I agree 100% with Scottie’s conclusions: that decline will enormously affect all of us and that it’s time to rethink our priorities and our methods. Scottie’s imagery of a coal mine canary is interesting. I take it that he’s arguing that when it comes to decline, all of us are in the same boat. It’s this bit that, in my opinion, isn’t accurate.
In this blog post, I want to explore how we got to the point where it is possible to think that the Baptists are McDonald’s and Anglo-Catholics are Georgie Pie (again, a less-than-perfect analogy there). It’s important because there are vital lessons in our history. And reflecting on them will be helpful as we head into this uncertain future.
If we were to jump into a time machine and revisit the church landscape of Aotearoa in the 1950s, we would discover a range of dynamics that those of us born in the 70s, 80s, and 90s (or later) would find hard to fathom.
The first thing we’d notice is that Christianity is mainstream. In a 1956 census, only 0.5% of adult Kiwis claimed no religious belief. When Billy Graham visited in 1959, roughly 14.2% of the population went and heard him speak live. That’s more than 350,000 people out of a population of 2.3m. It’s actually an even bigger deal than it sounds because he only visits Auckland, Wellington & Christchurch, and hundreds of thousands more tune in on the TV and radio (Yes, dear reader, Christian evangelism on prime-time airwaves).
The other thing we’d see is that the three mainline churches are massive. A 1961 census claimed that 64.1 percent of Kiwis claimed affiliation with the Anglican, Presbyterian, or Methodist church. Of course, claiming affiliation doesn’t mean you show up every week. (Kevin Ward reckons that NZ’s highest-ever weekly attendance was in 1896 at 29%).
The 1960s, of course, is when this begins to change. The Boomers, open to Sixties spirituality, all of a sudden don’t want a bar of their parents’ style of Christianity. Ward describes Boomers leaving mainline churches like a tide that just didn’t come back. Mainline decline has continued pretty consistently from there (the 2006 census had mainline affiliation at 27.6%).
The point I want to make, though, is that historically speaking, the decline has not affected all churches equally. Notice that Baptists aren’t one of the three mainliners. Baptist affiliation remained pretty constant through the 20th century at roughly 1.6% of the NZ population (17237 in 1966 to 23855 in 1991. If the Baptist story of bucking trends is noteworthy, the Pentecostal one is staggering. In 1961, the Pentes accounted for only 0.1% of religious affiliation. By 1996, 2% of the population affiliated as Pentecostal. So, while the mainliners are tanking, the Baptists are maintaining (well, growing at the same rate as the NZ population), and the Pentecostals are growing.
Now, as Scottie alludes, a good proportion of Baptist and Pentecostal numbers are mainline transfers. But my question is, why? Why did people jump their mainline ships for BP (Baptist, Pentecostal) shores?
The answer is that the Baptist and Pentecostal churches were theological evangelical, culturally contextual, and methodologically adaptive.
We’ll look at those phrases one at a time—first theology, then contextualization, and then methods.
Liberal theology has been a disaster for mainline churches. Its exclusion of evangelism has made it very hard to recruit new believers. And while its commitment to social justice and political action is deeply admirable, it formed thousands of Babyboomers (and all the generations below them) to wonder what exactly the purpose of church attendance was.
BP churches, in contrast, are almost exclusively evangelical.
Kevin Ward’s Ph.D. queried the assertion that theologically conservative churches grow and theologically liberal ones decline. He found that another major factor was involved in church growth. He observed that being orthodox was not enough to ensure growth; orthodox churches that did not attempt to connect with contemporary culture also declined. Culturally contextual means seeing good (as well as bad) in the goings on of current Kiwi culture. Growing churches were evangelical in nature and constantly made attempts to connect the gospel with the daily happenings of modern society.
Culture, of course, isn’t something that it’s possible for churches to ignore. While BP churches attempted to contextualize current Kiwi culture, the majority of mainline churches continued to contextualize a pre-Industrial eighteenth-century English culture. Yep, that’s where our liturgy and hymns came from. Ironically, many were developed by contextual whizz kids like Charles and John Wesley.
Since the 1960s, the BP churches have adapted their methods to suit NZ’s changing culture. Pragmatic to a fault, they were (mostly) early adopters of the charismatic renewal movement, the establishment of youth ministry, and the inclusion of contemporary music in church services. Easter Camp (whose heavy lifting is done by the Baptists, and to which all other churches are invited) is a great example of this as it expesses all three.
Simply put, we’re not all in the same boat because some of our churches have leaned into orthodoxy, contextualized into Kiwi culture, and been courageous enough to adapt their methods.
That doesn’t, of course, mean that those who have are home and hosed. The mixture of orthodoxy, contextualization, and adaptive methods has led to an attractional model that isn’t doing a great job of bringing people to faith or creating disciples. And stats tell us that a bunch of BP churches, too, are plateauing or in decline.
But there is no pole vaulting over these stages in church transition. Those churches that have stayed orthodox and learned to contextualize and adapt will, God-willing, have the courage to do it again. Those churches who haven’t have got double the learning to do.
Scotties’ conclusions that entertainment isn’t creating disciples, that we need to do better in the work of formation, and that it’s time to rediscover evangelism are bang on. He’s got the clarity to think this because he’s learned to (amongst other things) be and do these three things.
Sources: Kevin Ward, Losing Our Religion?: Changing Patterns of Believing and Belonging in Secular Western Societies, www.stats.govt.nz.