The Churching Of America, 1776-2005: Winners & Losers In America’s Religious Economy

One hot book! This book brings the data to support a New Testament model for training and multiplying church leaders.

Turns out that most of our “tools” fail us when they are in ample supply. The “Shining city upon a hill” that the Puritans established grew into a decidedly un-Christian nation by the time of the American revolution.

Life on the prairies was as rough as a Western movie. The cities were worse. But first the Methodists, later the Baptists prevailed and the United States became one of the most Christian nations on earth. Certainly the greatest fountainhead of overseas missionaries the world has known to date.

And it didn’t happen the way you’d imagine. Congregationalists, Episcopals and Presbyterians had a lock on religion in the colonies. The “establishment clause” forbid the government from funding religion, causing those groups to lose some of their prestige and power. But something else happened that changed history.

Methodist circuit riders and unruly tent meetings began to draw spiritually hungry people by the thousands. by 1860 the Methodists virtually ruled American spiritual sentiment. Why? Because there were lots of them. Their leaders rapidly multiplied themselves through disciplemaking and sacrifice. They didn’t bear the burden of expensive theological training. Their pastors didn’t demand high salaries and people met in rough buildings or under trees.

Then something happened. The prosperous Methodists started building seminaries and lovely church buildings. People grew more sophisticated. Pastors more critical of the Bible. And, the already lively Baptists began to surge to dominate the national scene–for mostly the same reasons the Methodists had reached predominance. While Methodism suffered slow torturous decline (until the 1990s when a reform movement began taking hold), the feuding Baptists expanded wildly. Again, it is a story of revival meetings, bivocational, home-grown leaders and rudimentary buildings. As the data unfolds, everything you and I so desperately need, we really don’t.

But, what about today? This is the 21st century. We need to compete in a high tech world. Well, today the better funded and more sophisticated are still losing ground. Now it is the tidal wave of often self-appointed Charismatics that are growing gangbusters while many smugly dismiss them for crude behavior and a simplistic view of God, the Bible and life itself.

Turns out, however, that “Humans want their religion to be sufficiently potent, vivid, and compelling so that it can offer them rewards of great magnitude. People seek a religion that is capable of miracles and that imparts order and sanity to the human condition.” That kind of faith seems to occur best in its simplest forms.

The book comes at church history from an economic-sociological viewpoint. The paradigm and deep data give it a unique authority.

There never has been such a strong documentary for the rapid multiplication of churches. A bit of a slow read, this is still a super tool for building confidence in home-grown leaders. I just took my church planters discipleship group through it. Faith grew!

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The Churching Of America, 1776-2005: Winners & Losers In America’s Religious Economy