Stalled Movements

 This will likely be the last post I write about Julia Duin's book "Quitting Church."  The next-to-last chapter of the book is "Bewildered Charismatics" about people wondering what had happened to what seemed to be a strong and growing movement.

Over the years, I have been part of several Christian movements:  the small group movement of the 1960s and after, the Christian homeschooling movement, the discipling movement, the charismatic movement, the praise and worship movement, the Vineyard movement...I was interested in the house church movement, but there was not much of it where I lived.

I also grew up in a denomination that grew out of a movement in the early 1800s--the Campbell-Stone New Testament Restoration Movement.  Their goal was to break free of denominations and creeds and unite Christians around the New Testament pattern.  Many of their early preachers would not take a salary from their local congregation; they chose to support themselves by farming, writing, teaching or other activities.  They did believe in financial support for foreign missionaries, but not their neighborhood pastors.  But by the late 1800s, most of their churches were back to paying their pastors; and by the 1960s what had started as a reaction against the rampant sectarianism of the early 1800s had become one of the most sectarian groups in the US.  They had also split into three groups--the liberal Disciples of Christ denomination, the independent Christian Churches, and the acapella Churches of Christ.

Between the history of the group I grew up in and the experiences of the modern movements I had been involved in, I reached a conclusion about Christian movements.  Typically, they have a useful life of about twenty to forty years.  After that, they usually don't go away or disappear; but they quit "moving"--they don't learn any more, they don't gain any new ground, and often they actually backslide a bit from their original ideas and practices.

I experienced this in the praise and worship and charismatic movements.  I was in places where we were singing the "new music" back in the 1970s.  Back then, we did not have PA systems or even bands--if we had a two or three guitar players who could take turns leading the singing, it was good enough.  In the '80s, bands were coming in, and things got more active; we stood up and sang our hearts out, danced in the pews, and sometimes broke into marching around the room as we sang.  But even then, the music was starting to be commercialized.  By 2000, much of it needed a band and backup singers to make it work.  In recent years, I have been hearing that in some churches, most of the people no longer sing; they sit in their chairs listening to the concert.  And in what I have personally seen of the current music, I am not all that impressed with the melodies or the words of the modern products.  And even the Holy Spirit seems suppressed; apparently in a lot of congregations, there isn't much prophecy from the people--they expect the pastor or guest speaker to tell them what the Holy Spirit has to say.

I am now 72 years old, and a lot of the excitement we knew when I was in my 20s and 30s has subsided.  I am afraid that's what people do.  When God moves, they are caught up in it for a while, but eventually they sit down and start building a monument to what God did.  That's how most of our modern Protestant denominations started--Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans, Christian Church, Pentecostals, and more.  But I have chosen to skip the monuments and keep my eyes open for what God does next.