From Pumping Life Into Mainline Protestantism, an interview with Diana Butler Bass, of Virginia Theological Seminary, by Linda Kulman, in U.S. News & World Report (extra paragraphing added):
An Episcopal church in Arlington, Va., reconstituted their congregational life by thinking of themselves as an urban abbey. It’s a lay monastic vision of the ordering of one’s life, but instead of being done out of a monastery, it’s done out of a church.
[Ed.: The urban-abbey parish appears to be St. George’s. The urban-abbey concept is intriguing; see especially the brochure.]
They have a certain expectation of study and scriptural text, service to the poor, and they ask the congregants to do a retreat once a year. [But] they don’t have to wear hair shirts inside out or anything like that.
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It sounds so simple, but most mainline churches became mired in very businesslike ways of doing things. They thought of themselves like companies and that if you applied strategic long-range planning, it would work, and it was very secular.
Most of these churches rejected that and found ways to work that were spiritual. That was a radical thing for these churches to do. They broke with the ways of doing business that their parents and grandparents had.
As one of my friends said, “It’s not rocket science.” When they go back to the simplest things, they’re experiencing new growth. They didn’t know they had everything they needed.
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… Most of these churches have more ritualized forms of liturgy. They’re connected to traditional denominations, so the forms of government are different. There’s more openness to gay and lesbian people, and there’s a complete acceptance of women clergy and the whole range of issues associated with contemporary feminism.
They share something with evangelical churches, and that is [that] they’re a lot more expressive. Religious experience matters. They believe in things like healing and even a sense of the miraculous. The Holy Spirit is very personal. They share that kind of emotive stuff, but the framework in terms of tradition, political issues, and theological emphasis is entirely different.
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In these 50 congregations, most have grown by at least 10 percent over the past 10 years. However, we have a couple of congregations that have doubled in size. Calvin Presbyterian Church outside Pittsburgh has gone from 200 to 400 congregants. Another has gone from 500 to 1,400 in eight years. A good number of them have experienced some very significant growth.
But none of them is declining, and even those in difficult areas are holding their own. They’re not threatened by closure.
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