#3 Richard L. Hardison | 2004-12-15 20:30
The Methodist Church used to the largest denomination in the country. The slide started in the 1890s when the editor of the their denominational magazine introduced a few Calvinist doctrines and began watering down the Old Wesleyan doctrines that built the denomination and, for all practical purposes, buried Calvinism in this country. The Calvinist denominations had already gone liberal by the 1890s, Presbyterians particularly, but the cancer had fully metastasized by 1960. All we are watching are the death throws.
I attend a Methodist Church in Pennsville, Ohio, and have found there are a number of very good people in the denomination. But, there has, in the last 10 years, grown a strong movement of evangelicals within the denomination and there is probably going to be a split soon. One Pastor I've talked with (shared my truck with him for the last two days, in fact) who is predicting the split will come by 2008. IN the liberal "Calvinist" denominations, most of the solid people have already left to form other groups.
What I am seeing, however, in the evangelical denominations is disturbing. The Southern Baptists have declined in evangelical fervor, and some of the doctrines held by the so called conservatives are simply loony. Penetecostals are more and more going over to charismania, the very stuff they used to preach against 40 years ago. More and more, you have to judge the individual congregations and not the denomination itself. The label simply doesn't tell you much anymore.
The day of the centrally run denomination has ended. In fact, the entire church in the US isn't growing anymore. Individual congregations are, but they are doing so at the expense of other congregations, not by evangelism. Some Assemblies of God minsters were voicing concerns on this very thingnot long ago. The Tennessee District, for example, in 1988, with 170 churches, had seen only 7 people saved in the entire year. This was typical for the other pentecostal denominations. The SBC was seeing simlar results (although they counted those who were "saved" but didn't stay "saved" in their success statistics). The Assemblies of God, however, was growing at a phenominal rate during this period. When the growth was studied to find out why they were growing with so few evangelical results they found the growth tracked almost exactly with the decline of the United Methodist Church.
Anyone familiar with US history should be deeply concerned by the above. Touqueville would be predicting the end of the US because righteousness was no longer thundering from the pulpits and few people in this country have any desire to live righteously. If the country were spirtually healthy neither Kerry or Bush would have been seriously considered for the presidency.