Wilderness: the Changing Seminary and Church

Wilderness: The Changing Seminary and Church

Daniel O. Aleshire

Lecture 2 of the Schaff Lectures Pittsburgh Theological Seminary March 2010

In the evening quails came up and covered the camp; and in the morning there was a layer of dew around the camp. When the layer of dew lifted, there on the surface of the wilderness was a fine flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground. . . . they did not know what it was. Moses said to them, “It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat.” Exodus 16:13–15 (NRSV)

The children of Israel found themselves in the wilderness. The euphoria of liberation passed quickly as they recognized their plight. They were beginning to fear that the wilderness had no meat, no bread, and very likely, no water. The God who acted so dramatically in Egypt had grown quiet in the wilderness. The transition to freedom was filled with threats. It was not clear what was on the other side of the wilderness. What was clear was that they could not go back. Egypt had lost a great deal in their leaving— crops, first born sons, the army that pursued them to the Red Sea—and would surely get even if this slave workforce tried to return. The children of Israel could not go back, were not sure where they were going, and were not sure how long they would be there. They were in the wilderness.

The Protestant wilderness experience

I think that Protestants, especially mainline Protestants, are having a wilderness experience. It is cultural and ecclesiastical. The structures that used to work well have been scaled back for lack of funding, and in some cases, dismantled altogether. Membership decline has sucked capacity from many congregations, and financial decline has eviscerated denominational programs. The efforts that many mainline seminaries have employed to stave off the effects of denominational decline appear to have run their course, and many schools are facing serious institutional issues, including survival itself. In this lecture, I want to reflect on life in the wilderness. As we begin, I want to make two observations that frame everything else that I want to say.

Life in the wilderness The first and most important is that there is life in the wilderness. Wilderness is an interim experience. It is life between one thing and another, not the ending of life as it has been known. Everything that I have to say hangs on this affirmation. Much has changed; more will change. Some structures, congregations, and patterns of churchly connectional life will not make into it the future, but the Christian project—with faithful adherents, lively congregations, and viable structures that support and extend ministry—will be around. Any examination of religion in America must begin with the realization that this is the “churchiest” Western democracy in the world. Religious participation is very hard to estimate, but it appears that about 30 percent of the US population will attend some kind of religious service this weekend.1 In Canada, it is likely to be 15 percent, and in the United Kingdom, about 5 percent. We may be in the wilderness, but like Israel, we are there with a lot of people! Protestant theological schools are

1 financially stressed, but even with their strained budgets, they comprise some of the best resourced theological schools in the world. Christianity in this country is ubiquitous. It is on the radio; it is on the inspirational book stand by the pharmacy counter at the grocery store; it is on the television; it is evident in church buildings in neighborhood after neighborhood, and its artifacts lie in institutions and traditions that no longer view themselves as church related. There is no Western democracy that is more religiously active than the United States. The Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey data indicate that 56 percent of the US population think that religion is important in their lives, 92 percent believe in God or a universal spirit, 74 percent believe in life after death, and a similar percentage believe in heaven. Hell doesn’t do so well, garnering only 59 percent.2 Whatever wilderness we seem to be in, we must realize that Christianity is lively in it.

The heterogeneity of US Christianity The second is that Christianity—even Protestantism—has a healthy heterogeneous quality in this country. I was in Greece for a meeting of theological educators on two occasions within three years. Both meetings were in Thessaloniki, a modern city with an ancient Christian community witnessed by Paul’s letters. More than 90 percent of the Greek population identifies with the Greek Orthodox Church. With state financial support, a number of newer church buildings have been constructed. All of them seem to have been built from the same general plan. The exteriors are very similar, and interiors vary primarily in the iconography. The schedules and activities are also very similar. Christian practice in Greece is uniform. Not so in America. Sunday morning has mass in a Cathedral, worship in a neighborhood church, huge congregations at larger Protestant churches, small gatherings in homes, revival worship in urban store front buildings, and worship services in school auditoriums and vacated retail spaces in suburban malls. To talk about mainline Protestants is not to talk about Orthodox Christians, and to talk about Orthodox Christians is not to talk about Roman Catholics, and to talk about Roman Catholics is not to talk about evangelical Protestants, and to talk about evangelical and mainline Protestants is not to talk about historic black Protestants.

The diversity means that no one way of talking about American Protestantism is accurate. The 2010 Yearbook of Christian Churches reports that the Assemblies of God denomination grew 1.2 percent—it has grown each of the last nineteen years—while the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) experienced a membership decline of slightly more than 3 percent that same year—bringing its membership decline to almost one million since the reunited church was formed twenty‐five years ago. The Assemblies of God inclusive membership now equals that of the PC(USA).3 There is simply no way to talk about American Christianity in a single voice. The same is true for theological schools. Some had their best year last year with increases in income and significant advancement in their programs. Others were suspending payments to retirement programs, laying off staff, or furloughing faculty and staff for a period during the same year. The difference is not a function of the school’s ecclesial community, enrollment size, or region of the country.

Religion, including mainline Protestantism, is lively—some of the strongest and most active congregations in the United States, including many megachurches,4 are mainline Protestant congregations. Christian expression in this country has a diverse and varied texture. A person can practice his or her Christianity in almost any way that Christianity has ever invented itself. Diversity is a sign of health in an ecosystem, and American Christianity is about as diverse as it can be.

The wilderness of transition

2 The wilderness I want to explore with you is the experience of profound and substantive transition. More specifically, it is being in the middle of profound and substantive transition. We know what used to be; we know the old rules; and we know that they are dissipating. The new rules, however, are not yet clear. We are in the middle. Mark Noll concludes his history of Christianity in the United States and Canada with a question: “Has North America become a religious wilderness once again? In considerable measure, the historical record suggests that it has.”5 Noll is reflecting primarily on the influence of religion on the culture—and he concludes that there has been significant loss of the capacity to shape culture the way it did as the North American wilderness was settled. Religion continues to be a powerful presence, but it is not the presence that it once was. It has crossed over from its former place, on its way to another place, and we are witnesses to the passage, a journey through the wilderness. Like Israel, we will be in the wilderness for a generation or two, so it is advisable to learn its geography and figure out what to do with the quail that fly among us in the evening and the flakey white stuff that appears in the morning and nourishes like bread. I want to talk about some characteristics about American Christianity and some characteristics of the theological schools that are related to them.

Trends in Christianity

Christianity in the American wilderness has been effectively described in several studies, and can be characterized in a variety of ways.6 I want to explore a few of these with you that have implications for theological schools.

Denominational loyalties Denominational loyalties have dissipated. They have not disappeared, but they have weakened. About half of the people who join the United Methodist congregation in which I am active in the South Hills join from other denominations or no denominational past. I was conducting a conference at a Baptist congregation in Louisville earlier this month and asked the pastor about the denominational history of the people joining that congregation. He said that about half were Baptists and the other half everything else. Presbyterians and Methodists seem to move easily from each other’s congregations, as if Arminian and Calvinist positions are readily resolved on the basis of whichever congregation has the better youth ministry program. The Pew U.S. Religious Landscape researchers conclude that “If change in affiliation from one type of Protestantism to another is included, 44 percent of adults have either switched religious affiliation, moved from being unaffiliated with any religion to being affiliated with a particular faith, or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether.”7

As loyalties dissipate, there is a corresponding lessening of the Christian identity that denominational visions inculcated. At our church, I have seen people cross themselves at the communion rail and occasionally genuflect as they entered the pew. I am not a life‐long Methodist (I am one of the 44 percent of the population that relates to a different denominational family than the one in which they grew up), but I don’t think that these are typical Methodist patterns of piety. I think that they are practices from a religious past that made sense in a former religious identity —where the Blessed Sacrament was present, for example—but not much theological sense in the sanctuary of a United Methodist Church. Being good Methodists, we are fine with someone genuflecting, but it is not something we teach the youth group to do. Patterns of piety and religious practice have theological homes that shape a way of being Christian, but in the wilderness, traditions and practices have been separated from those homes, and they combine with other practices to create a kind of potpourri of theological understanding and practice.

3 Evangelical influence The dominant expression of American Protestantism is evangelical. Sixty percent of all students in seminaries that are members of ATS attend seminaries whose presidents are members of the Fellowship of Evangelical Seminary Presidents. On a typical weekend, the majority of all Protestants who attend church will be in evangelical Protestant congregations—either evangelical‐leaning congregations in mainline denominations or self‐identified evangelical congregations. The minority will be in mainline Protestant congregations. Evangelical Protestants have the largest percentage of larger membership Protestant congregations, and far more importantly, they appear to be setting the agenda for other Protestants.

Mark Chaves, one of the best sociologists of religion in the country, conducted a national survey of congregations in 1998 and repeated significant aspects of that survey in 2006–07. He found that the number of congregations with choirs has declined from 54 to 44 percent, the number that use a printed bulletin in worship has declined from 72 to 68 percent, the number of congregations that have spontaneous “amens” has climbed from 61 to 71 percent, spontaneous applause has increased from 55 to 61 percent of congregations, and the number of congregations where at lest some people raise hands in praise has increased from 45 to 57 percent. One way to describe these changes, as Chaves does, is that worship is becoming more informal.8 Another way to interpret them is that worship patterns most typical of evangelical Protestants are migrating to other congregations. I’ve seen people at our traditional United Methodist worship services raise hands in praise, even though that is rare, like genuflecting. We applaud a lot of stuff, too, like good music or to affirm the children or youth, or meeting a financial goal. I have never heard applause for a sermon or been asked to “Give Jesus a hand,” but we applaud other stuff.

There are other evidences of evangelical influence. Our congregation has two contemporary services among the five that it conducts each weekend. Mainline Protestants did not invent contemporary worship; they are following the invention of evangelical Protestants. One of my colleagues at ATS is the instrumentalist and choir director at a historic, smaller membership Presbyterian congregation. The choir will sing Easter music that originated in evangelical Protestant congregations. My United Methodist congregation has sent volunteer mission groups to Zimbabwe in the last several years. The history is not clear, but it appears that congregation‐based volunteer short‐term mission trips are an evangelical Protestant invention. The sanctuary of our United Methodist congregation was built at the end of the 1950s, at the height of mainline dominance. The digital projector and screen on the opposite side of the chancel from the pulpit are recent additions and are used to support worship in ways that have been pioneered by evangelical Protestants. There are many practices that mainline Protestants have adopted that are not evangelical, like Taize worship services and praying a labyrinth, but a significant number of current congregational and worship practices have their genesis in evangelical Protestantism.

Evangelical Protestantism is not only numerically dominant; it has emerged as a normative reference of Protestant worship and congregational practice. Mainline congregations are either adopting evangelical patterns or, in some cases, defining themselves by not adopting them—either way demonstrates that evangelical Protestant patterns are increasingly normative.

I am neither advocating evangelical Protestant practices as desirable nor judging them as substandard. We are not in the wilderness because worship is moving in an evangelical direction. In the wilderness, however, worship patterns are changing. It is not clear how enduring these practices will be, but they are the practices that a great many people now associate with worship and congregational life. In the

4 wilderness, mainline Protestants need to understand how evangelical Protestantism is defining normative patterns of Christian practice.

Church attendance Americans appear to be attending church differently, in at least two ways.

The first is that people who are active in church attend a little less frequently than they may have in the past. Several years ago, our congregation was interested in why the membership was increasing but worship attendance was steady or in some months, declining slightly. Our pastor asked that the administrative staff to take a closer look at the “friendship pads” on which worshipers routinely record their worship attendance. The conclusion appeared to be that persons who were considered “active” in attendance were not attending every Sunday. Maybe it was weekends at the cabin, or weekends of work, or Sunday mornings when the fatigue was greater than the discipline to attend worship, but for whatever reasons, it appeared that “active” members were less likely to be every Sunday attenders. If these anecdotal data are correct, then active church membership might be characterized by less frequent participation.

The second is that church attenders appear to be choosing different kinds of congregations. The 1998 National Congregational Survey found that 60 percent of churches have fewer than 100 regular participants; 30 percent have between 100 and 350; and 10 percent have more than 350.9 However, this 10 percent of American congregations has “almost half of the religious service attenders in the country.”10 In the 2008 follow‐up study, Mark Chaves found the same thing: 90 percent of congregations have less than half of all attenders and more than half of all attenders are in 10 percent of churches with the highest attendance. Americans seem to be choosing their churches like their hardware and grocery stores. The neighborhood hardware store has given way to the Home Depot, and the neighborhood grocery store has been replaced with the giant Giant Eagle Market District regional store.

Larger congregations signal something important about religious participation in North America. They provide music and programs and opportunities that medium and smaller congregations simply cannot provide. As people can find their way into these large organizations, they can find a group of peers who are interested in what they are interested in and struggling with similar issues in life and faith. Large congregations also have a normative influence on the definition and cultural perception of what a “good” church is like. This has always tended to be true; the cathedral played this roll in the past. Larger membership Protestant churches and the megachurches are the new cathedrals, and while some are mainline, most are evangelical. It is not clear if these congregations are a permanent part of the American religious landscape or if they are like the tabernacle in the wilderness, carrying a religious expression through a particular time as it waits for another longer horizon of work.

Global distribution of Christianity The center of gravity of the Christian movement has moved. Phillip Jenkins has documented the way in which and the extent to which Christianity is changing in its worldwide scope.11

Christianity is stable to declining in the Global North, and it is growing fast in the global South. Consider Roman Catholics, for example. The Catholic Church will grow from 461 million in 2000 to 606 million in 2025 in Latin America. In Africa, it will grow from 120 million in 2000 to 228 million in 2025. By comparison, North American Catholics will grow from 71 million in 2000 to 81 million in 2025, while Europe will experience a slight decline (from 286 million to 276 million). Philip Jenkins writes: “The

5 types of Christianity that have thrived most successfully in the global South have been very different from what many European and North Americans consider mainstream.” Christianity in the global South has been “far more enthusiastic, much more centrally concerned with the immediate workings of the supernatural, through prophecy, visions, ecstatic utterances, and healing.”12 The center of Christian identity and dominant expressions is moving away from the developed West to the developed and developing East and the global South.

North America was the center of worldwide mission expansion of Christianity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it no longer holds that role. The center of the most rapid growth of Christianity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was North America, but that is no longer true. Even when it was true in North America, it was a function of new immigrant populations of Christians and not a function of great numbers of conversions to Christianity. In Africa and Asia, the growth is a function of large numbers of people becoming Christians. This new Christianity is influencing Western versions of mainline Protestantism. For example, Anglicans in the global South are influencing the Anglican Communion’s ultimate response to the US Episcopal Church. If I am reading the numbers right, the nineteen United Methodist Episcopal areas outside the United States are influencing UMC actions regarding the ordination of partnered gay and lesbian persons. The center of gravity of the Christian church has moved before, from Jerusalem to Asia Minor, from Asia Minor to Rome and Europe, from Europe to North America, and now from North America to the global South.

Racial/ethnic demographics American congregations are adapting to a fundamentally changed racial/ethnic national population.

Like most congregations, the congregation in which I am active is predominantly one race, and in the case of Christ Church, it is white. Like many mainline congregations, we are concerned about our whiteness; but Pittsburgh, like most American cities, is a city of monoracial communities and neighborhoods, with only a few exceptions. In a Sunday emphasis on racial/ethnic inclusion several years ago, a visiting African American preacher told about a little girl’s question to her grandparent: “Which sex,” the girl asked, “is the opposite one?” While we were still in mid‐chuckle, the preacher looked at us over the pulpit and asked, “Which race is opposite?” We have always had an answer for that question—not the right one—but an answer. White was normative, and every other color was the opposite, the other, the minority. By sometime between 2040 and 2050, persons of African, Asian, Hispanic, and native descent will outnumber whites in the United States. By the end of the careers of some students in seminary this spring, the US white majority will come to an end, and the character of national life will change as the racial mixture changes. Mainline Protestantism has been historically white and continues to be overwhelmingly white. It will have to change if it hopes to be a viable part of the future in this country.

My daughter lives in New Orleans and attends a mainline Protestant church whose building was flooded badly by Katrina but was left structurally sound. It had been a middle class white congregation, as best I can tell, and I think in decline in recent decades. Not too far away, an African American congregation’s building was destroyed. The two congregations merged, and sitting in worship the Sunday before Christmas was an interesting experience for me. The pastor was deftly combining two very different worship traditions. Because of the rapid increase in Hispanic presence in New Orleans after Katrina, the denomination has provided a Spanish‐speaking associate and the church has begun a Sunday afternoon service in Spanish. Once a month, the Hispanic congregation joins the black and white congregation for a bilingual worship celebration. The sanctuary is full to overflowing for this monthly service. Everybody is worshiping a little differently than they did five years ago. Not all congregations are going to become

6 multiracial as this one has, but race will be a determinative factor in the future of American congregations.

These are the characteristics of Christianity in the North American wilderness, and once again, they are not characteristics with intrinsic positive or negative value. They are changes in which the church is participating. With the exception of the last one, they comprise Christian practices and churchly structures in which substantive transition has begun but not ended. The destination of restabilized practices and structures has yet to emerge.

Theological schools

Theological schools are intimately linked to the lives of the religious communities that they serve. While one step removed from those communities, the schools are invariably influenced by substantive changes in communities of faith. The many transitions I have characterized as the wilderness in which mainline Protestantism is living also define the wilderness in which many theological schools find themselves. I want to note a few issues about the schools.

Enrollment Enrollment, with some exceptions, has been stable with small, incremental growth across the past two decades. This trend has reversed. The number of students enrolled in all programs in ATS schools, including the MDiv program, declined about seven percent between fall 2006 and fall 2009. This is significant. Higher education enrollments have tended to increase in economic recessions, and I hoped that the continuing decline would at least be arrested, but it has not. In our preliminary analysis at ATS, there appears to be no one variable that accounts for the decline.

This overall decline is significant, but perhaps not as significant as the shift of enrollment within the schools. Over a twenty‐five year period, the number of white males in MDiv degree programs declined. All of the growth in the MDiv—which over these years has amounted to about 30 percent—has been a function of increased enrollment of women and persons of color.13 Mainline Protestants changed their understanding of gender and ordained leadership, and that resulted in an increase of women enrolled in MDiv programs. Women now comprise 34 percent of total enrollment of ATS and 31 percent of total MDiv enrollment. The enrollment of women in MDiv programs is most concentrated in mainline Protestant schools, with many of those schools having women as a majority of their MDiv enrollment. The percentage of racial/ethnic persons in the population has been growing, the percentage of African Americans who hold baccalaureate degrees has been increasing, and more ATS schools have recruited racial/ethnic faculty and students. The result is increased racial/ethnic enrollment. This past fall, almost 40 percent of all students enrolled in ATS schools were of African, Hispanic, Asian, or Native descent, or visa students, mostly from Asia, Africa, or Latin America.14

The enrollment has changed in yet another way. Most ATS schools, like Pittsburgh Seminary, were founded by a denomination and maintain an ongoing relationship with that denomination. For much of their history, they educated primarily students from the sponsoring denomination. That pattern began to change in the last decades of the twentieth century, especially in many mainline denominational seminaries. As denominational membership declined, these seminaries maintained enrollment by welcoming students from a wide variety of denominational backgrounds. There are now some mainline schools that enroll more students from other denominations than from the sponsoring denomination. For many others, like Pittsburgh, students from the sponsoring denomination continue to constitute a

7 majority (57 percent in Pittsburgh’s case), but the enrollment is heavily supplemented by students from other denominations (43 percent of the students at Pittsburgh are from denominations other than the PC(USA)). More liturgical denominations, like the Episcopal Church and ELCA, continue to have a high percentage of Episcopalians or Lutherans, but even these schools are enrolling more and more students from other denominations.

One other change is significant. In the last decades of the past century, the average age of students in ATS schools continued to increase. The percentage of students in their thirties and forties continued to grow and the student bodies of ATS schools began to change. Many students came to seminary as a decision to change careers. In the past decade, there has been another shift. If the total enrollment is divided by age decades, the percentage of students who are under 30 is increasing, as is the percentage of students over 50. The percentage of students who are in their thirties or forties is declining. While the number of students over 50 is not great, the change in relative percentage is striking. Students over 50 may not be changing careers to enter ministry so much as they have completed one career and are entering ministry for a next one. They have completed twenty or thirty years of military or government service, or a career in public education, are now in their 50s, and have sensed a call to ministry for the next ten or fifteen years.

The result of these internal changes to the enrollment is a much more diverse student body than was the case in theological schools forty years ago. The diversity is a blessing that complicates how faculty members teach, what services the seminary provides for students, and how classes are scheduled, among others. The patterns of enrollment have changed and continue to change, and in the transition, it is difficult for schools to discern how to institutionalize their responses. For example, do they build more dorms for younger students who can move and attend classes on campus, or do they abandon an investment in housing because the students increasingly come from the local area and don’t need housing?

Finances Another significant change that seminaries are addressing is the financing of theological education.

Most ATS member schools were founded by denominations, and denominations provided a significant amount of these schools’ operating budgets. That amount has been in decline for the past forty years. With cooperation from the Association, researchers, beginning with Badgett Dillard and continuing with Tony Ruger at the Auburn Center for the Study of Theological Education, have monitored the amount of funding provided to a group of Protestant seminaries by the sponsoring denominations. The most recent report in this series15 concludes that, from the early 1990s to the early 2000s, the actual dollar amounts received from most denominations have declined, and across the decades, even when dollar amounts have increased, they have not increased as much as inflation. If one examines the percentage of operating budgets funded by denominational grants, the long‐term trend is even more evident: denominations are funding an ever‐decreasing percentage of the actual costs of theological schools. This has placed a demand on schools to find support to offset what has been lost from denominations.

Most schools have begun significant efforts in development and institutional advancement that have found significant funding partners among individuals and family foundations. The increase in these gifts has more than offset the loss of denominational money, and for some schools, annual gifts comprise the majority of the school’s operating income. Other schools have focused on gifts from individuals for endowment, and for several ATS schools (including Pittsburgh Theological Seminary), income from

8 endowment is the major source of operating revenue. In these strategies, the cost of theological education has shifted from the entity that receives the greatest benefit from the work of theological schools (denominations that receive the leaders they need for congregations and their work) to those who have the least direct benefit (individuals who do not attend seminary and may never attend a congregation served by a graduate of the seminary they support). This is an interesting and fundamental shift. Individual gifts have rescued theological schools that would have otherwise closed as a result of the loss of adequate denominational support.

Other schools have sought to address financial needs by increasing the amount of tuition income they receive. Tuition revenue has been increased by three strategies. The first has been to raise tuition. Tuition at ATS schools has been historically low and continues to be low compared to tuition for graduate or graduate professional education in other private institutions (the average MDiv tuition is slightly more than $12,000 for the 2009–2010 academic year, slightly higher in university‐related schools). However, across the past decades, schools have increased tuition at a rate about twice the consumer price index of inflation16 and slightly higher than the higher education price index. These increases are offset by the relatively generous amount of financial aid that ATS schools provide (an average across ATS schools of about 35 percent of what is received in tuition). The second strategy has been to inaugurate new degree programs that bring students to seminary who have never been there before. These efforts generate new tuition revenue. The third strategy has been to take existing programs to new places, either to physical extension sites or virtually by online courses. These efforts have made theological education accessible to students who would not be able readily to attend, thus increasing tuition revenue.

In many ways, these various efforts have reached their limits. There are not many locations left in which a student can’t participate in the extension site of a least one seminary. Schools have begun most of the degree programs that they have the educational expertise to offer. Other new programs will require the addition of new faculty and library resources, and the economic benefit will be more limited. Seminary students are accumulating a great deal more debt than they did even a decade ago, and increases in tuition further exacerbate the student debt problem.

With these many efforts, many ATS schools remain underfunded. With the recent decline in the equity markets and the resulting decline in value of institutional endowments, the percentage of schools with six months or less of spendable reserves has increased markedly. While some student families and a few faculty families would be pleased to have as much as six months of reserves, these limited reserves seriously erode an institution’s ability to invest in new programs, support students more effectively, maintain facilities in good condition, and serve its mission. Both the number of schools operating at a deficit and the size of typical deficits have increased. A significant group of ATS member schools are financially stressed.

Conclusion

The schools, like the church, find themselves in a wilderness. They are not lost, but they are between old ways that are gone and new ways that have yet to be invented. The student bodies of mainline Protestant theological schools, and most others, will never again be dominated by young, white, males. The primary financial support for denominational schools will never again be provided by the sponsoring denomination. The degree programs will never return to the simpler days of a dominant MDiv surrounded by a few other programs. The educational patterns of most Protestant theological schools will not return to students who live on campus, take classes on campus, eat together, and in other ways share

9 community life. The educational and institutional structures of the schools are in transition, and the restabilized long‐term patterns are not yet evident.

A community in transition wants a spy, if it can find one, to look into the future and see what is on the other side of life in transition, and that is the topic of the final lecture.

1. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life 2008 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey reported that as many as 40 percent of the American population indicate that they attend church weekly. That percentage is high, I think. This percentage reflects what has been found in Gallup polls across the years. Kirk Hadaway and Penny Long Marler counted the actual number of people in all the churches in one Ohio county and compared that number to the number who said they attended church that Sunday in an opinion poll. The opinion poll identified that 40 percent or so were in church, the same as other national polls had identified, but Hadaway and Marler counted the number of people who actually attended church in all the congregations and found that slightly more than 20 percent were in church that weekend. (C. Kirk Hadaway, Penny Long Marler, and Mark Chaves, “Overreporting Church Attendance in America: Evidence that Demands the Same Verdict” American Sociological Review 63, no. 1, February 1998, 122–130). I am using a percentage that is halfway between the Hadaway and Marler data and the percentage who report that they attended the previous weekend in Gallup polls and the 2008 Pew U.S. Religious Landscape survey. 2. See http://religions.pewforum.org/. 3. This information is taken from the introductory summary of changes, see http://www.ncccusa.org/ news/100204yearbook2010.html. For a comprehensive summary of Assemblies of God membership and attendance statistics, see http://agchurches.org/Sitefiles/Default/RSS/2008%20Summary%20Statistical% 20Report.pdf. For data on the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), see http://www.pcusa.org/research/ compstats/cs2008.htm. 4. The Hartford Institute on Religion Research considers a Protestant church a megachurch if it has average weekly attendance of 2,000 or more, http://hirr.hartsem.edu/megachurch/definition.html. 5. Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1992), 552–553. 6. Among the more enduring references about these changes, I would refer readers to Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); and more recently, Mark Chaves, Congregations in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 7. http://religions.pewforum.org/reports. 8. Mark Chaves, “American Congregations at the Beginning of the 21st Century,” National Congregations Study, http://www.soc.duke.edu/natcong/Docs/NCSII_report_final.pdf. 9. Chaves, Congregations in America, 19. 10. “The National Congregations Study,” Hartford Institute for Religion Research, http://hirr.hartsem.edu/cong/research_ncs.html. 11. Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002). 12. Ibid., 107. 13. 2002–2003 Fact Book on Theological Education, The Association of Theological Schools, http://www.ats.edu/Resources/Publications/Documents/FactBook/2002‐03.pdf.

14. These and all other enrollment data are taken from the ATS institutional database, which can be accessed as the Annual Data Tables, at http://www.ats.edu/Resources/Pages/ AnnualDataTablesFactBooks.aspx. 15. Anthony Ruger, Seek and Find: Revenues in Theological Education, no. 11, Auburn Studies (New York, NY: Auburn Center for the Study of Theological Education, April 2005) http://www.auburnseminary.org/finance‐and‐student‐debt. 16. Ibid., 11.