March 20, 2014 7 minute read

Anyone care for a bold uninformed prediction? Yes? Okay, heres one: Nondenominational evangelicalism ofthe Rick Warren, Mark Driscoll, Chuck Smith brand will shrink into almost total irrelevance over the nextsixty years. The American landscape will be littered with large, empty, tacky buildings and our great-grandchildren will wonder at the fact that these vacant monstrosities were once filled with Christians.

Ok, why such a bold prediction? My hypothesis is that the megachurch non-denominational church culturecan only exist in a nation where there is a strong Christian consensus and church-going is a recognized virtue.I.E. pre-9/11 America. This hit me a while back when I stumbled across a sermon series by Perry Noble wherethe praise band opened with Rock and Roll by Led Zeppelin. As I shrank in horrified embarrassment frommy computer monitor I asked myself, who thinks this is cool? Certainly not anyone who actually likes LedZeppelin, rock and roll, or Christian worship as it has existed for the last two thousand years.

Then the lightbulb came on: This appeals to Christians! christians who know they have an obligation to go tochurch but arent sure why; christians who are bored with their tiny, tired church and looking for a reason toget out of bed on Sunday morning. I suspect if you took a survey of the crowd you would not discover manyrecent converts but a large group of lifelong churchgoers poached from numerous small, unspectacularcongregations in the surrounding area. I bet if you asked them why they attend NewSpring Church they wouldmention how funny Pastor Perry is or how much they like the music.

The one thing that this sunday morning performance isnt doing is reaching the lost. No heathen is waking upon sunday morning saying Great Scott, I have a hankering to watch a bland rendition Led Zeppelin and amediocre standup comic push a moral message. Honey, get the kids in the car! These churches justify suchshenanigans in the name of reaching the lost but in reality they are only further isolating themselves. ThatLed Zeppelin song is what preaching to the choir looks like in our day and age. Please do not miss the irony.

I submit that the patrons of the non-denominational evangelical movement are not pagan seekers but Christianconsumers looking to check the church on sunday box and not be bored while doing it.Non-denominationalism is only appealing to people raised in a cultural context where denominationaldistictives were actually something people deeply cared about. If Joe Baptist causes an uproar by marryingJane Catholic, then you have a ripe market for the kinder, vaguer face of non-denominational evangelicalChristianity where Loving Jesus is the important thing and not Presbyterian VS. Episcopalian polity.NewSpring Church is only appealing to people who have been bored by church in the past.

But heres the problem, the generation that created Evangelicalism is vanishing. America is shedding itsChristian consensus at a shocking pace. If the surveys are to be believed, the next generation will be the mostsecular to ever exist in this nation. The market that Evangelicalism fed off is aging and dying andnon-denominationalism didnt create the same religious angst that would make the next generation into buyersof what its selling.

Quite simply, the fatal flaw of Evangelicalism is its inherent shallowness. Its a movement where a core valueis deliberate vagueness on issues that Christians have historically found important enough to fight about. Thismight make a generation sick of arguing happy but if those divisive issues were actually important thenEvangelicalism bought its unity at a dear price.

Ask a first-generation Evangelical churchgoer for their testimony and what you will hear is remarkablysimilar: Raised in a strict religious environment, probably Catholicism or Baptist. After a short period of

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leaving the faith, they had a religious experience of some sort in which they encountered a vibrant, exciting,less strict version of the faith of their upbringing usually appearing to them in the form of a revival, concert,etc. And they happily returned to the kinder, hipper church never to look back. By I suspect that their strictreligious upbringing created the essential religious angst that drove them to their later conversion and embraceof non-denominational evangelicalism. Non-denominationals carry around their denominational rootsunawares.

This is never more apparent in the methods that Evangelical churches use to try to pass on the faith to the nextgeneration. Instead of catechesis they engineer catharsis: camp revivals, youth rallies, alter calls, all attemptsto recreate the external context in which they, the previous generation, believe they came to the faith. But thesad truth is that Evangelicals only have an experience to pass on to the next generation, not a faith.

The result is that the next generation of Evangelicals arent actually rejecting the Apostolic Catholic Christianfaith, theyre just outgrowing it like an adolescent crush. Theres no crushing law, no absolution, no remissionof sins, no baptism, no Eucharist, no priests, no creeds, no catechism, no confession. Theres no there there.And so the Evangelical generation will walk away never having actually arrived at much in particular.

So what does the future of American Christianity look like? I think it looks very Roman Catholic,Presbyterian, Anglican, Lutheran, and Baptist. When you enter a Christian church sixty years from now,youll probably hear an organ instead of Led Zeppelin. At least I hope so.

You heard it here first, folks. If any of what Im saying remotely plays out, I expect to be remembered as aprophet.

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Levi Nunnink

@a_bandculturezoo.comEvangelical Catholic. Episcopalian in Ecclesiology, Lutheran in everything else. I find your lack of assurancedisturbing. Attending: http://emmanuelgv.org/ in Grass Valley, CA and Living Savior Lutheran in Portland, ORA few points on Real Presence The Evangelical SacramentRoonShare

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