Changing the Denominational Map

How can we extend the gospel more effectively beyond the South? How can Southern Baptists best see the robust growth of evangelism and church planting in major non-Southern cities and pioneer areas? Does history offer us any clues about this question?

I'll be uncharacteristically brief. It is very, very difficult to change denominational maps like the ones that I discussed in my previous post. France is still Catholic, as are Spain and Italy. In Russia, you'll find that the Russian Orthodox Church is still the big kid on the block. Germany is Lutheran (even if only nominally so). Texas is Baptist. Once these geographic patterns are set, they are very difficult to change.

But change they sometimes do. Historically God has employed two major factors to effect these changes:

1. Population Migration

   The Diaspora of Jewish Christians from Judea contributed to the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman world. Likewise, the westward migration of American citizens during the nineteenth century dramatically altered the religious landscape of the United States of America. The Great Depression enlarged the Southern Baptist Convention, forcing people out of the South and into places like California and New Mexico (two non-Southern states that traditionally are stronger in SBC life than many other non-Southern states). Even Alaska has a stronger Southern Baptist presence because of economic and military factors that relocated many Southerners into that portion of the country.

   Maybe the best way to do missions would be to relocate entire churches of Southern Baptists into the areas that we wish to reach? Maybe we need to pray for some sort of an economic disaster in the South?

2. Spiritual Awakening or Reformation

   The most dramatic alterations of the religious landscape of this continent took place in the First and Second Great Awakenings. As a result of these movements, a theretofore predominantly Presbyterian and Anglican nation was transformed into a predominantly Baptist, Methodist, and Restorationist nation.

   Previously in Europe, the spiritual awakening known as the Protestant Reformation had entirely rewritten the spiritual map of the Old World. Spiritual constants that had been on place for centuries suddenly and dramatically changed, then to remain virtually unchanged from that epoch until today.

   Rather than disaster in the South, perhaps we should be praying for reformation and revival.

Certainly, whatever is the dominant Christian denomination of choice in a region, it steadily grows weaker between times of spiritual awakening or reformation. We see that trend at work in each one of the places mentioned above subsequent to their last encounter with population migration or spiritual awakening.

I can't think of anything else in the entire history of Christianity that has worked. Can you?

The Revolution and the First Great Awakening

Today's article in The Washington Post by Phillip Pan gives us an empathetic look at “Georgia, a Nation Stalled On the Road to Democracy.” The subtitle hints at the broader principle extrapolated within the body, “Fragility Is Norm for States in Transition.”

Although Frank Lambert (Inventing the Great Awakening) provides valuable insight into the promotional genius that people like George Whitefield employed to promulgate the gospel in the 1700s, his suggestion falls short that the Great Awakening was more a media event than a widespread phenomenon of spiritual transformation. America after the Great Awakening was simply too different from America before the Great Awakening for it to have been anything less than a life-changing event for those involved. Denominations split. Vast migrations from denominations like Anglicanism to groups like the Baptists forever changed the religious shape of our soon-to-be nation.

First Great Awakening revisionists like Lambert, Jon Butler (who has called for disuse of the term “Great Awakening” altogether), and Joseph A. Conforti notwithstanding, I not only believe that the Great Awakening as traditionally described was a real event, but I further side with Alan Heimert and William G. McLoughlin (against Christine Leigh Heyrman and Christopher Jedrey, for example) in seeing the First Great Awakening as instrumental in the creation of the United States of America. McLoughlin's description is fitting: The First Great Awakening was "the key which unlocked the door to the new household of the republic."

What does this have to do with Georgia? Everything. Our national ambition under George W. Bush has been to export democracy to the world. I'm a big fan of democracy, and if our nation believes in it, we ought to be willing to export it. Certainly despotism and collectivism have their flaws writ large on the history of the modern era. Yet I think a despondency is palpable and growing in reaction to the fact that democracy does not quickly and readily succeed in every soil into which we plant it. Eastern Orthodoxy may want an alternative to Stalinism, but it will not soon lose sight of the English King James I's poignant observation that non-episcopal religion “agreeth as well with a monarchy as God and the Devil,” and vice-versa.

The soil in which democracy thrives is evangelical Christianity. Exporting democracy is no good reason to spread the gospel abroad, any more than it makes sense to purchase the Happy Meal just for the toy, but I do believe that the spread of political freedom cannot possibly succeed among people who are in bondage spiritually. This is not only a good explanation for the struggles to implement democracy in Russia or Georgia, but is also a good cause for us to pray all the harder about the future of our own nation of people migrating further away from the core truths of the First Great Awakening.