Remnant Review (May 3, 2012)
There is good news and bad news. It is mostly bad news for anything that used to be large and traditional.
MAINLINE PROTESTANTISM
The big oil companies are referred to as the seven sisters. So are the mainline Protestant denominations: Presbyterian (UPUSA), Methodist, Episcopalian (ECUSA), Lutheran (ELCA), United Church of Christ, Congregationalists, and Northern Baptists.
The entry on Wikipedia for "Mainline Protestant" is accurate.
Mainline Protestant (also sometimes called "mainstream American Protestant") are certain Protestant churches in the United States that comprised a majority of Americans from the colonial era until the early 20th century. The group is contrasted with evangelical and fundamentalist groups. . . .Members of mainline denominations have played leadership roles in all aspects of American life, including politics, business, education, science and the arts. In recent years, however, the mainline groups have shrunk as a percentage of the American population, as increasing numbers of American Protestants have come to affiliate instead with fundamentalist or evangelical churches. Politically and theologically, contemporary mainline Protestants tend to be more liberal than non-mainline believers. . . .
As a group, the mainline churches have maintained religious doctrine that stresses social justice and personal salvation. They were leaders of the Social Gospel and were active in social causes such as civil rights, and equality for women. In addition, mainline churches and laity founded most of the leading educational institutes in the US.
Mainline denominations peaked in membership in the 1950s and have declined steadily in the last half century. From 1960 to 1988, mainline church membership declined from 31 million to 25 million, then fell to 21 million in 2005. Today, they are a minority among American Protestants, claiming approximately 15 percent of American adults among their adherents.
One man was the incarnation of this movement: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. He bankrolled a lot of it: at least $100 million, back when the dollar was worth ten times as much as it is today. The story is in this now out-of-print book, The Rich Man and the Kingdom. This is almost an unknown story. I devoted a lot of space to it in my book, Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church (1996).
By far the best book on American church history is by two sociologists, Stark and Fink: The Churching of America. They show how liberals got in control of the Establishment. One strategy: they used the Federal Communications Commission's licensing to limit evangelicals' access to FCC-mandated free air time on Sundays. The #1 beneficiary was Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, Rockefeller's pastor. Fosdick's brother Raymond was Rockefeller's paymaster for 40 years, and his only official biographer.
Rockefeller died in 1960. That was the peak year for mainline Protestantism: the WASP elite. A few months later, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected President. Those two events were representative of the shift at the top. It has been downhill for the seven sisters ever since.
But the turning point was not 1960. It was 1926, the year after the Scopes trial, liberal Protestantism's greatest media triumph. The liberals captured Rockefeller's Northern Baptist Convention in 1926. The liberals captured the Northern Presbyterians in 1926. In that year, membership growth slowed for mainline Protestantism. The evangelical-fundamentalist-pentecostal movement began to grow. This was not perceived until a 1980 article by Joel Carpenter in Church History. I have written about the centrality of the Scopes trial here.
The main liberal seminary is Union Theological Seminary in New York City, which was Presbyterian until the 1890s. It is so close to bankruptcy that it transferred the ownership and administration of its huge library to its next-door neighbor, Columbia University.
ROMAN CATHOLICISM
An article in the Wall Street Journal heralded the victory of traditional Catholicism. Let me cite a few passages.
In his Holy Thursday homily at St. Peter's Basilica on April 5, Pope Benedict XVI denounced calls from some Catholics for optional celibacy among priests and for women's ordination. The pope said that "true renewal" comes only through the "joy of faith" and "radicalism of obedience."And renewal is coming. . . .
A new seminary is to be built near Charlotte, N.C., and the archdiocese of Washington, D.C., has expanded its facilities to accommodate the surge in priestly candidates. Boston's Cardinal Sean Patrick O'Malley recently told the National Catholic Register that when he arrived in 2003 to lead that archdiocese he was advised to close the seminary. Now there are 70 men in Boston studying to be priests, and the seminary has had to turn away candidates for lack of space.
According to the Vatican's Central Office of Church Statistics, there were more than 5,000 more Catholic priests world-wide in 2009 than there were in 1999. This is welcome news for a growing Catholic population that has suffered through a real shortage of priests. . . .
The situation in the U.S. is still tenuous. The number of American Catholics has grown to 77.7 million, up from 50 million in 1980. But the priest-to-parishioner ratio has changed for the worse. In 1965, there was one priest for every 780 American parishioners. By 1985, there was one priest for every 900 Catholics, and by 2011 there was one for every 2,000. In dioceses where there are few ordinations, such as New York's Rochester and Albany, people know this shortage well.
Still, the future is encouraging. There were 467 new priestly ordinations in the U.S. last year, according to a survey by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, up from 442 a decade ago.
This article is whistling past the graveyard. Do the math. There are under 500 new priests per year per decade to serve 78 million members: one priest for every 2,000 members.
Each member is supposed to come to confession every week. Confession is designated as a sacrament by the Church. It is today an abandoned sacrament. The Church may play pretend all it wants; confession no longer functions as a sacrament. There are not enough priests to administer it.
Let us not fool ourselves about this supposed revival of traditionalism. Between 15% and 50% of these newly ordained American priests are homosexuals. Sexually speaking, this newly ordained Roman Catholic priesthood is like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates: you never know what you'll get.
The bishops shrug this off.
Sister Maryanne Walsh, spokesperson for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, said that it would it be difficult to find evidence to support these [Sipe's] estimates [30% to 45%] of the percentage of gay men in the priesthood. She feels that it is also irrelevant. She said: "There's no real purpose in saying whether someone is homosexual or heterosexual. The issue is whether they can make a commitment [to chastity]."
Thanks, sister, for that clarification.
Meanwhile, lawyers are bankrupting dioceses around the nation: Portland, Oregon, Spokane, Washington, Wilmington, Delaware, San Diego, California. This is just getting started. There is too much money involved. It is moths to the flame. Lawyers cannot resist. And, there really were crimes committed.
This was not pedophilia, contrary to the homosexuals' spin in the media. There have been almost no pedophile priests. These were run-of-the-mill, off-the-shelf homosexuals doing what they have done from the beginning, stretching back to classical Greece: seducing teenage boys.
The Latin mass is gone. Fish on Fridays is gone. The Catholic school system is almost gone. Traditional nuns are almost gone -- aging and without funds to support them in their old age. Conservative seminaries are gone. And, for all intents and purposes, the members are gone. The churches are as empty as mainline Protestant churches. All this has happened since 1965. A good account of the beginning of this change sometime around 1965 is in the book by traditionalist Catholic defector Garry Wills, Bare Ruined Choirs (1972).
CONSERVATIVE SPLINTER DENOMINATIONS
Over the decades, members of mainline Protestant denominations who have grown concerned over the drift into liberalism have left the denominations in order to set up splinter groups. They maintain the liturgical trappings of the older denomination. They also attempt to retain much of the original theological commitment of the larger denomination. Usually, these splinter denominations are very small.
An example is the Reformed Episcopal Church, which separated from the larger Episcopal denomination in 1873. It was tiny then, and it is tiny now. Another example is the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, which split from the northern Presbyterian Church in 1936, and split again a year later. It was tiny then and it remains tiny today. A larger spin-off is the Presbyterian Church in America, which split from the southern Presbyterian Church in 1973. It has about 300,000 members. This is not a tiny denomination, but it is only a fraction of what the older church was. Meanwhile, the old southern Presbyterian Church joined with the Northern Presbyterians to form a larger denomination, which is still losing members. There are lots of smaller Presbyterian denominations that almost no one has ever heard of. They do not multiply as rapidly as Baptist congregations do, but they certainly maintain small memberships. There is an old saying that a Scottish revival is a church split. This is not far from the truth.
The Missouri Synod Lutherans have maintained a more conservative stance than the larger Lutheran denomination. The Wisconsin Synod Lutherans are much smaller than the Missouri Synod Lutherans, and more conservative.
In every organization there is always conflict between the hard-core and soft-core. The soft-core has most of the numbers. This is basically Pareto's law applied institutionally. About 20% of church members contribute 80% of the funds. These are the members who tend to have greater influence in the organization.
No matter how hard-core or tightly drawn a confession of faith is, there is always going to be a Pareto distribution within the organization. So, the organizations that tend to elevate theology as the highest principle of organization suffer from endless church splits, and they do not attract large numbers of communicant members. This is the price of remaining hard-core theologically. To think that a rigorously theological church is going to grow to match the First Baptist Church of Anywhere is naïve.
What is true of politics is also true of churches. There are some politicians who proclaim the benefits of big-tent Republicanism. These people are rarely ideological. They are barely distinguishable from moderate Democrats. The ecclesiastical equivalent of these people would be those who are committed to ecumenism. They tend to be liberals. They tend to want to be in large organizations that do not believe in anything in particular.
Within every denomination is a group of pastors who are committed to church growth, which always means congregational growth. They are committed to large numbers of small congregations. They are committed to a few large congregations, and they want to get hired by one of these congregations. So, the buzzword for the past 30 years has been "megachurch." This is the denominational equivalent of the First Baptist Church of Anywhere.
The megachurch model has always been with us. About 20% of the congregations have 80% of the geography's church members. Yet there are many congregations. Some grow into megachurches. Most do not.
In The Churching of America, we learn that the average Protestant congregation in 1780 had about 75 adult members. There were also other adult attendees who were not members. Today, we find that the average Protestant congregation has about 100 adult members. Occasionally, the figure has been as high as 120 adult members. The reality is this: Protestant churches rarely get larger than 100 members. There may be many reasons for this, with the obvious one being the ability of any particular pastor to manage an organization larger than 100 adult members.
But Pareto's law rules: megachurches have most of a region's church members.
Is anything likely to change this? A massive revival will change it for a time. Then the larger churches will adjust by adopting the house church model. They will provide leadership and resources. They will grow by training members to start house churches. The traditional churches that do not do this will be left behind.
Real estate is the crucial factor in today's church model. Think about this. If every member of a congregation invited one friend to attend on the following Sunday, and if 100% of the invitations were accepted, the church could not hold all of the visitors. Just one week of successful invitations, let alone evangelism, would short-circuit the entire ecclesiastical structure. This is not true of a mainline denomination or Roman Catholic parishes. Those organizations could stand a doubling for at least one week, and possibly two weeks. But even they would be overwhelmed within three weeks. The power of exponential growth shatters existing structures.
The reality is this: the typical weekly attendance at any non-mainline church will fill about 80% of the chairs or pews. So, the only way that a revival could take place is by the multiplication of meetings. This is what takes place in the huge Pentecostal churches in Asia and Latin America. They have services all day long. But this is not normal in white congregations anywhere.
The reality of limited space precludes mass evangelism. So, pastors had given up on mass evangelism by 1870. They know they cannot afford to expand their congregations, and they also know that they cannot personally manage a doubling of the congregation size. So, unlike a business, churches resist growth. Pastors say they promote growth, but church liturgies, pastoral training, and seating capacity point to the opposite conclusion.
THE INDEPENDENTS
The only gains that are being made in church membership in the United States today are being made by Pentecostals and charismatics. What they have in common, other than liturgy and a peculiar view of tongue speaking, is decentralization. Creative pastors can start in a storefront. Their goal in most cases is to create a megachurch. A few of them actually do it.
In Africa, and Latin America, and in China, the decentralized house churches are becoming the basis of a huge revival. This has been going on for 40 years in Africa. It has been going on for 30 years in China. The government of China arrests a pastor, and the pastor's wife takes over the local congregation. The congregation keeps growing.
Theologically speaking, Pentecostalism is the lowest common denominator. It is therefore growing the fastest. It is changing the lives of more people. It is not changing culture, because the theology of these movements is hostile to the idea that culture can be changed. They are mostly pre-millennial. But, with respect to personal change, they have a strong position of moral reform, personal self-discipline, and thrift. Men who join these churches stop philandering, stop drinking, stop smoking, and go home at night to be with their families. This impresses the wives. Then husbands and wives go to church, and they take their families, which tend to be large.
The model is decentralization, with respect to denominational control, but it does move in the direction of church buildings. It is not yet based on the Internet, because these are mostly poor people, and they do not yet have access to the Internet. The costs are falling rapidly. Satellite technology is bringing smart phones into villages, and it is clear that the social order is going to be radically changed as the new digital technologies extend themselves into the lives of villagers.
The Independents defeated the denominationalists in the Western United States from 1801 to 1890. They are defeating the denominationalists on the mission field today. This will not change. That is because the denominations are tied to the status quo.
THE STATUS QUO
American Protestant churches are content with the status quo. They do not want growth. They do not emphasize growth, with the exception of those congregations where a pastor who wants to build a megachurch occupies the pulpit. There are such pastors, and there have always been such pastors. They are ambitious men. They want a congregation large enough to reflect what they regard as their extraordinary abilities to preach, manage, and motivate people to increase their donations.
What we rarely see is a pastor who goes into a congregation and tells the congregation from the beginning that his goal is to build the church up to about 150 adult members, and then send about 50 of those members to another part of town to begin a new congregation. In other words, we do not see the multiplication of congregations.
One of the biggest reasons for this is the pastors are dependent upon the income from the donations of the members. There are very few pastors who are willing to risk cutting off their salary raises as a result of a deliberate church-planting operation. They do not want to admit that they have limited abilities to manage more than 150 members. They want to believe that they can manage 160 members. If the church gets to 160 members, they want to believe they can manage 170 members. And so on.
Step by step, baptism by baptism, letter of transfer by letter of transfer, congregations grow marginally until they reach the limits set by the Peter principle. The Peter principle says that an individual will be promoted until he reaches his level of incompetence. This is the plight of most pastors most of the time in most places.
Every business faces this, which is why most businesses do not become Fortune 500 companies. We should not expect anything different in a local congregation. I do not think most people do expect anything different in a local congregation. This is why most people are not interested in church growth and evangelism. All those extra people coming in the door will force changes into the pattern of worship. People do not like change, and this is especially true in matters ecclesiastical. They do not want the liturgy changed. They do not want to add multiple Sunday schools. They want things to bump along pretty much the way they have bumped along. So, things just bump along.
The problem is, population growth is such that the percentage of Christians in American society keeps declining. There has to be an active effort for churches to grow in order to keep pace with increased population. But, because the new population grows up in the public school system, and because the public school system becomes ever more secular, decade by decade, the number of people coming in the doors of churches at best remains the same, and this means that Christianity is falling behind.
Then there is television. I do not need to go into the issue of the content of television broadcasting. Most American households have the television on about seven hours a day. To this, we must add the Internet. A lot of it is devoted to entertainment. Hour by hour, people's lives pass through like sand in an hourglass. They suffer from a kind of addiction to digital drugs. They spend the bulk of their lives working in a job, watching television, being online, and sleeping. There is not much time remaining for anything else. Entertainment has replaced work, but it has also replaced personal interaction.
TRICKLE-DOWN VS. TRICKLE-UP
The goal of every reform group should be to raise the lowest common denominator. To do this, there must be programs to improve people's lifetime vision, whether they are at the very top or the very bottom. To think that reform can come from the top is against everything we know about the history of evangelism. The prophet Jonah did not go to the king first. He went to the masses first. The early church did not go to the rulers first. They went to simple people at the bottom of the social pyramid. A few leaders did become Christians, but the church did not specifically target them in its programs of evangelism.
There is trickle-down economics. There is trickle-up evangelism. Any system of evangelism that deliberately and self-consciously attempts to convert the best and the brightest is operating in opposition to what Christ taught about the wealthy, and in opposition to the history of successful evangelism. This was always the problem with Campus Crusade for Christ. Bill Bright self-consciously went after college students, back when there were not many college students. The organization always went after student leaders. This strategy has not worked to change the thinking of the people who were brought into the organization. It has not worked to change campus life. I liked Bill Bright, but I thought his theology was wrong, and I thought his strategy was wrong. He personally tried to recruit me back in 1960, and I have always been grateful that I did not succumb.
I think a prison ministry makes a lot more sense than a campus ministry. I have been involved with a successful prison ministry: Kairos. What you do to the least of these people, Jesus said, is how you will be evaluated on judgment day. So, I think it is a strategic mistake, as well as a theological mistake, to target the best and the brightest, except when an organization is run by the best and the brightest in order to recruit their own kind. It deals with a specific group only because the division of labor requires specialization in dealing with groups. To think that targeting the best and the brightest is the best way to transform the church, or the way to transform the nation, is categorically wrong. It is wrong theologically, and it is wrong organizationally. It will not work, and it should not work.
I have no objection for rich men to evangelize rich men. We normally evangelize within the circles in which we travel. The problem comes when the church as a whole, or a reform movement as a whole, or any other organization as a whole decides that the best way to make the world a better place is to persuade rich men, or powerful men, or members of some elite to switch sides. These people will attempt to gain influence, because they have always had influence. You have newcomers coming into the church with a lot of money, and these are not the people you want making decisions within the church. We have seen what happens when some celebrity announces that he has joined some church. The worst mistake a church can make is to let that celebrity become a spokesman for the church. The classic example is Eldridge Cleaver. We do not need any more cases like that.
If movie stars want to worship in congregations that have a lot of movie stars, that is fine with me. Birds of a feather flock together. What bothers me is that movie stars expect to have influence within the larger church community, but without spending years of study, and years of self-discipline, and years of tithing before stepping forward to be leaders.
The same is true of athletes. The same is true of politicians. The goal is not to convert the best and the brightest in order to increase Christianity's leverage within society. That is the strategy of the humanist elite. That is the strategy of the New World Order. That is the strategy of the Establishment, when it concentrates on recruiting the best and the brightest from approximately 3 dozen colleges and universities and a handful of law schools. This is described well in the book by Murray and Herrnstein, The Bell Curve. It is also described well in the book by Rothkopf, Superclass.
The power elite expects to maintain power by means of social control. Jesus talked about this from the beginning. He said that the leadership of the church should not be modeled after the leadership of nations. It should be based on service, not on power. The elite bases its control in terms of power, and it only gives lip service to the principle of service. We hear the language of public service, but it really means public control. It means taxing the broad base of the electorate, and forcing the electorate to go into institutions of propaganda, known as the public school system, so that certified teachers, who received their degrees from certified colleges and universities, will be in control of the curriculum. This has been their strategy for at least 170 years. The best book on the philosophy behind this is R. J. Rushdoony's The Messianic Character of American Education (1963).
In contrast, the Christian goal should not be to capture the public school system, either to make it Christian, which would be unconstitutional, or to make it neutral, which is philosophically impossible. The goal should be to cut off the financing of the public schools, and to replace them with decentralized teaching by mothers, or in some cases, by specialized teachers hired by families. The goal is some version of the tutorial system, although, in order to save money, families can pool their resources and hire a tutor.
The rival strategies can best be seen in American history in the educational systems in New England and Virginia. The New Englanders from the very beginning created public schools that were funded by taxes. Towns were supposed to make money available to parents who could not afford to send their children into the schools. This did not work well. The Unitarians captured the system in the 1840s, and from that point on, the model of Unitarianism for education was tax-supported schools. To this was added legal compulsion at the end of the 19th century.
In contrast, the Virginia elite hired tutors to teach their children. There were no public schools. In the name of democracy, the New England power elite gained control over the content of a supposedly democratic school system. In the name of noblesse oblige, the Virginia dynasties controlled the education of their children by means of hiring and firing tutors. The ultimate sellout in all this was Thomas Jefferson, who set up the University of Virginia, which was funded by tax money. He regarded this as one of the three most important things he did in his life, and he was correct. From that time on, the South was sucked into the ideology of tax funded education, and the result has been the triumph of New England Unitarianism, Washington humanism, and New York book publishing all over the South.
The reason why the homeschool movement is fought tooth and nail by the elite of this country is because the elite recognize that this is a rival worldview, and it is manifested in a rival strategy of education. It is decentralized, and this is exactly what threatens the power elite. The power elite has bet the farm on control over the centralized institutions of communication. These people control the public schools, they control the curriculum of the universities, they control the corridors of power in Washington, and they control the federally licensed media. Their members bought up the major newspapers, one by one. Now, the Internet is the greatest threat to them in the history of elitism. The gatekeepers no longer have the power to control the flow of information to the people behind the gates. The walls have collapsed. This is why a major social transformation lies ahead. The creativity of individuals, who are now in a position to communicate with each other at almost zero cost through the Internet, threatens the entire top-down system of control that the elite of the West has imposed on the West since the 12th century.
CONTROL THROUGH HIGHER EDUCATION
This system of elite leadership was developed first in the 12th-century West. The development of modern university was simultaneously inaugurated by the church and state. Both church and state needed literate bureaucrats to conduct operations at the highest level. The university of Bologna was set up to produce lawyers who would serve the state. The University of Paris, and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge were set up to serve both the state and the church. As always, a quest for power and control over the university system was basic.
From that time on, both church and state attempted to control the thinking of those lower-level bureaucrats who were brought into the two bureaucracies and who were allowed to advance. Continuity over time was secured through higher education. This strategy has worked for almost 1000 years. But now, because of the Internet, it is becoming possible for creative people to achieve wealth without certification from a bureaucratically operated higher education system.
The university has created a world made in its own image. The elite has attempted to superimpose the hierarchy of the state over the university, and from there over all other centers of power in society. This has been successful, but it will not be successful over the next 50 or 60 years. The power of the division of labor from the bottom up will displace the present order. It will enable gifted people to rise and gain influence and wealth apart from certification by bureaucratic institutions that are run by people of a bureaucratic mentality with bureaucratic skills.
EVANGELISM
If I am correct about this, then it ought to be clear what the next wave of evangelism is going to look like. It is not going to look like evangelism of the last 200 years.
Today, operating under the radar of the denominations, small, underfunded, laymen-run missions programs are creating house churches by the tens of thousands in Third World countries. One man who went into that region of India known as "the graveyard of missionaries" began with five people, and they established 2,000 churches in three years. This then led to the establishment of 80,000 local churches. He did this with virtually no support from the missions organization that sent him out the in first place. He did this in 14 years. Watch the first video, beginning at 26 minutes:
These churches are house churches. In fact, the missionaries find that the only thing that can stop the evangelism program is building a church facility. The moment there is a church building, the evangelism ceases.
This is going on even though it is unknown in the denominations. The denominations send out missionaries who then live in upper-class enclaves, earning 100 times the income of locals. These men have no local influence. They go out for 30 years, and if they are blessed by denominational standards, they establish one or two congregations. This has been going on for 50 years, and it does not change.
Meanwhile, laymen are going out with a program of decentralized church missions, and tens of thousands of congregations are springing up all over the world. The success of these missions is a lasting testimony to the utter failure of Western denominational missions in the 20th century. The bureaucrats who fund these denominational missionary operations do not want to hear about this. So, the laymen in the pews never hear about it. But this does not slow down the missions operations. The fact that not much money is being sent to these low-key missionaries is at the very heart of the success of their missions organizations. That is because there are hardly any missions organizations. There is almost no bureaucracy, so there is enormous success.
This is counter to Western social theory. Western social theory has rested everything on the power of the elite in controlling the institutions of higher learning, and through these institutions, they also control church, state, schools, missions, denominations, and everything else. The model does not work for Christianity. It enables elite groups to maintain control for a time, but the control is narrowly confined geographically. Now the Third World is entering into an era of cheap communications and economic growth, the influence from the centralized institutions is going to fade. It is fading. The gatekeepers are no longer in control.
It is clear to me where the revivals going to come from, and how they are going to come. They are going to come from the bottom up. It cannot come from the top down, because the top-down system is too expensive, too bureaucratic, and too dependent on real estate to work. Everything depends on buildings in this paradigm, and real estate is getting too expensive for the paradigm to survive. It does not matter whether we are talking about a local university, or a local civil government, or a local school system; it all depends on expensive buildings and on centralizing power inside those buildings. Western social theory has an edifice complex. This is why it is going to be replaced. The Internet is going to replace it.
If there is a revival in our day, it is going to come from house churches. It has to; anything else is too expensive in terms of real estate. There is no way that you can have mass evangelism in the West by means of church buildings. It is too expensive. We cannot bring enough new converts into the churches to affect massive penetration of the gospel into the general population.
A church is a useless building six days out of seven. A business can compete for the real estate, because the business operates at least five days a week, and in some cases seven days a week. It is generating income every day. In some cases, it may even be generating income for 16 hours a day. How can the church possibly overcome this? So, real estate is being bid higher and higher by businesses that bring money through the front door. Churches cannot do this.
There is no way that you can have mass revival in terms of the existing real estate of the modern church. It cannot be done. It can only be done through house churches. But the modern ecclesiastical structures do not trust house churches. There are not enough ordained pastors as it is. Surely, it is impossible for the modern church to ordain every head of a household church. The seminaries are the bottleneck. It takes four years of college and at least three years of seminary for a Presbyterian minister to be ordained. On average, it probably costs about $50,000 a year in forfeited earnings, tuition, room, board, and other living expenses for a man to go through seminary. It is a huge waste. There is not a word in the New Testament that anything like this is required to be a church elder.
We have already seen this. American Congregationalists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians after 1800 lost control over everything west of the Alleghenies to the Methodists and Baptists. They could not ordain men fast enough to penetrate the West, and the revival that began in 1801 had penetrated virtually all the Midwest by 1811. There was no way that the hierarchical denominations could respond to the demand fast enough. So, they were bottled up on the East Coast, and they lost influence on a permanent basis in the West.
I call it supply-side Christianity. The circuit-riding preachers created demand. Then they let local members run the show in between visits.
That did not persuade the Eastern denominations to change. They bided their time, and by the late 19th century, the Methodists and Baptists began adopting the college-based, seminary-based training system that the Eastern denominations had used since the early 19th century. At that point, evangelism ceased, modernism took over the denominations, and power and influence shifted to the humanist elite. That is where we are today.
If this is going to change, it is going to change by way of the Internet. This change will be by way of videos, curriculum materials, audio files, drive time self-education, and neighborhood house churches. The Baptists, Pentecostals, and other local congregations are going to see that they cannot compete with the house church group, which is based on the Internet, unless they adopt a program of training laymen and letting them start house churches. I do not think they will, because everything is geared to centralization of power and centralization of real estate. I do not think the operational models of the denominations can be modified fast enough to respond to an Internet-based revival.
THE SIMPLE CHURCH
There is a movement called "the simple church." The name reveals why it's wrong. Nothing in life is simple. There are aspects of any organization that are simple. But every organization that survives over time must give opportunities to gifted specialists.
This video shows what the movement is up to: http://vimeo.com/4521963. It shows the early phase of a new movement that really is spreading worldwide like wildfire. It's the honeymoon phase. But it cannot remain simple. Civilization is complex. The kingdom of God is the civilization of God.
The Internet offers a way to combine the simplicity of the one with the complexity of the many: specialization. Nothing like this has ever allowed this before.
The technology of the Web is having this effect in every area that it touches. There is both simplicity and complexity. Anyone can make a YouTube video. Anyone can start a YouTube channel. But there will be a Pareto distribution of productivity in every area of life. The ease of entry will allow highly creative people to rise to the top. Their videos will empower people.
House churches are into "relationships." How will they deal with adultery, theft, and all the other sins that afflict mankind? Where is their rule book? How can men get justice?
There is nothing simple about church.
But there is a new social order coming. It's Isaiah's job on a scale never before conceived.
The house churches will let people get started. The Web will let them become productive in every area of life: a civilization.
This is going to change our world. We have barely scratched the surface.
CONCLUSION
The technology is here. The communication systems are ready. The digital materials are not ready. But they are cheap to produce, and they are easy to post. The reason why they are not being produced is because the leadership in the denominations is hostile to the idea of decentralized worship, meaning decentralized real estate, meaning decentralized education, meaning decentralized power. These ecclesiastical control systems were developed in the Middle Ages, and they are with us still in church organization and education.
As the educational system becomes decentralized through the Internet, the paradigm that has governed Western civilization ever since the 12th century will be replaced. It will be replaced all over the world.
There will be megachurches: 20% of 20%. Pareto's law will still rule. Megachurches will function as loose denominations. They will be Internet-based. They will be house church-based. They will mobilize resources in terms of a common vision. But this vision will be administered in a bottom-up way. Local house church pastors will have the votes. They will be represented by a senior pastor who can preach effectively over the Internet, and who will train effective house-church pastors.
The smart phone, the World Wide Web, YouTube, iTunes, flat-screen televisions, and unlicensed providers of content are going to replace the present world order. It is only a matter of time.
We will see social change on a scale that we have not seen in 1000 years. It will be worldwide. The basis of influence will be leadership in a world of digital persuasion.
There will always be hierarchies: appeals courts. This system is different from bureaucracy. Initiative lies at the top in bureaucracies. This is not going to prevail. The decentralized social order will not permit it.
The Old Boy Networks will not prevail. The social networks will.
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