Grant Us Courage by Randall Balmer
Marty, Martin E.
CAUT IONARY TALES Grant Vs Courage Travels Along the Mainline of American Protestantism Randall Balmer Oxford, $22,154 pp. Martin E. Marty Hplendid narratives about twelve American Protestant...
...They certainly would not have considered Trinity Lutheran Church of Freistatt in Missouri and its Missouri Synod "mainline...
...And Olive Chapel Baptist Church in Apex, North Carolina, belonged to what the mainliners of 1950 thought of as a nadir denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, a church body that is now having its "Great Churches" hour...
...Or the glorifying of humans...
...expect to hear regret at statistical dreams unfulfilled...
...He or she might have to dredge up a title from an earlier Balmer work, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory...
...repentance for failing to have anticipated some changes and for having complacently ridden some crests...
...If everything written for Christians by "Church Growth" experts encourages them to think and build big, the same stories ought to serve as cautionary words...
...They were not all large or wealthy or rich in prospect, but these parishes had something about them that spelled fulfillment and led readers to want the editors to find out and tell more about them...
...don't try anything...
...Those few who would, would have been making a category mistake...
...Catholics who care enough to mourn, and some do, as tearful hier-archs close dozens of once thriving "Great Churches" in the former Catholic Ethnicdom of our metropolises, will find confirmation here of their impression that nothing lasts...
...We've fallen on hard times since...
...Take the money, and the remnant, and run...
...reference, in many cases, to heydays and good old days...
...at least five of these churches did not belong to the cluster later dubbed mainline...
...Deserting downtown Memphis, it now owns a 376-acre "campus" and a $34 million (in 1989) building complex in the "high-tech faux colonial" style...
...Its story is a rare one in this company...
...You'll find it in the word of the Southern Baptist interim pastor at Olive Chapel, when Balmer phoned her about a visit: "Oh yes, this church had its real heyday during the 1950s...
...not to make fun of "the mainline" and its "follies...
...It is led by harder-line pastor Adrian Rogers, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, and a leader in its fundamentalist takeover...
...But demography, population changes, cycles of history, participation in religious games played by innings, occasional unpreventable misfortunes (for example, pastoral lapses and scandals), hit them all hard...
...Those evangelical or conservative Catholic relishers of Schadenfreude (the sin of rejoicing in others' misfortune) who blame "Mainline Follies"-which means adaptation-to-culture-for the church's problems, have few reasons to rub their hands together in glee...
...Credit the other prospering parish, Mount Olivet Lutheran Church in Minneapolis, with having stayed in its mid-dle-class neighborhood, and with having come up with the right mix of continuity (even in the blood line of the Youngdahl pastors) and innovation or enterprise...
...Watch them as they there celebrate the divine mysteries and from which, no matter what their size or market possibilities, many engage in the works of love, as thousands of the people who have come and gone and, sometimes, stayed as the Grant Us Courage churches have done...
...Those who see, or rather sightsee, empty churches across Europe, old Christendom, may very well find a shock of recognition in these (mostly) emptying churches that prospered at midcentury but languish or-says this Christian hoper who is looking over Balmer's shoulder and beyond his lenses-have to find new missions today...
...make only small plans...
...The remaining seven churches-Presbyterian, Methodist, Congregational, "Community"- do not for the most part give evidence that they were folly-filled...
...Evangelicals who think their surge of these years is resulting or will result in stable, ever-prospering, congregations, will find reasons for caution in the same stories...
...There is Washington Prairie Lutheran Church of Decorah, Iowa...
...The congregations whose careers are here condensed were but two generations ago nominated as "Great Churches" by readers of the flagship mainstream Protestant magazine, the Christian Century...
...Or "My Eyes See What Once Had Seen the Glory of the Lord...
...If this review, which first beckons readers simply to enjoy an elegant if elegiac book, and to find the drama in quotidian existence, as Balmer does, is turning into a sermon, it has to have a point...
...Martin E. Marty Hplendid narratives about twelve American Protestant congregations and their careers from the middle toward the end of this century carry implicit lessons...
...Balmer shows that most of them have tried hard, tried everything...
...One or two of them still bustle and thrive...
...Stock in Church Growth, a movement that employs market techniques to tell planners how to grow churches, might well turn bearish, if pastors and lay people read these accounts...
...Condense the plot of ten or eleven of these church stories into a line or two...
...But they would like to go on and warn the Bellevues and the "Church Grown," megamall congregations that while they are enjoying batting in their half of the inning, not to enjoy Schadenfreude too much...
...They would do better to read Balmer and ask whether their boasts and brags and swaggerings-as they are doing the adapting-to-culture-are not setting them up for a future ironic traveler to visit...
...Round up or resurrect their pastors and lay leadership from a half century ago and listen to them...
...If nothing else, Randall Balmer7 s stories ought to remind Christians that they are a pilgrim people and that nothing lasts except the eternal Word...
...Of course, you can balance that with the story of one of the two statistical winners, Bellevue Baptist Church, a hardline boomer that "won" by having lost-and having moved...
...few would have called it "mainline" back in mid-century...
...The point is not: avoid hubris...
...It is rather: recognize the mission to and through and among people who, for a brief moment in time and a little spot in space, witness to the acts of God wherever, and erect buildings as momentary stays against chaos...
...Then grow, for another round...
...So five of the twelve "Great Churches" at midcentury were at best located at the Lutheran-Baptist margins of the mainline then and hardly represent it now...
...The subtitle, which finds Balmer traveling "Along the Mainline" is unintentionally misleading...
...the others would be overlooked by nominators today...
...The bottom line of Balmer's mildly disapproving but restrained story of Bellevue...
Vol. 123 • September 1996 • No. 15
