Old-Time Religion For Mainline Churches

Mixing tradition and modernity in mainline Protestant worship is one answer, said Bass, who just turned over her 800-page report on 50 such congregations to the Lilly Endowment, which funded the study.

Other examples cited in the report are Church of the Holy Communion (Episcopal) in Memphis, which offers evensong services featuring Celtic music and the glow of 500 candles, and Cornerstone United Methodist Church in Naples, Fla., which celebrates Communion to the accompaniment of a praise band and dual video screens showing images of Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic icons.

Another is Church of the Epiphany in Northwest Washington. The congregation seeks to give full meaning to the Christian tradition of hospitality, not only serving a hot breakfast to 200 homeless people every Sunday morning but also inviting them to participate in a worship service. The service is followed by recovery group sessions and prayer and Bible study groups.

David A. Roozen, director of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, said that congregational growth is directly related to intentionality and an emphasis on spiritual practices -- a conclusion he reached after sifting through the profiles of more than 14,000 congregations in a Hartford-directed study.

According to the study, released by Hartford in 2000, 75 percent of evangelical Protestant churches experienced growth in the last decade of the 20th century, while about half of mainline Protestant churches did so -- rates that remain about the same, Roozen said. Most of the congregations experiencing increased attendance had developed spirituality-based programming, he said.

To determine whether an increased use of spiritual practices would affect the viability of declining mainline denominations, Roozen plugged hypothetical numbers into a computer model that measures congregational vitality. This statistical simulation suggested that the adoption of spiritual programs would increase the number of growing mainline churches significantly -- enough to cut the growth gap with evangelical churches by half, he said.

Bass agreed that the change makes a big difference. "When a congregation takes on these kinds of spiritual practices, it creates an overall sense of vitality and growth that has not been in the congregation previously," she said.

In contrast to the typical scenario facing mainline congregations, none of the 50 congregations in her study is declining, and none is suffering money problems, she said.