GRAPEVINE, Texas (ABP) — The popular “generic Christianity” represented by nondenominational churches holds promise for Baptists if they reclaim the importance of rituals, recapture the individual and communal aspects of church life, and respond to the challenges of secularism and religious establishmentarianism, church historian Bill Leonard said.
Leonard, dean of the Wake Forest University Divinity School in Winston-Salem, N.C., led a workshop on the “nondenominationalizing” of American churches during the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship General Assembly in Grapevine, Texas.
Nondenominational Christianity “bubbled up out of reaction against denominationalism,” he asserted. In part, it reflects a rejection of the corporate model of church life that became prominent in the United States after World War II.
“Scratch out ‘IBM' and write in ‘Jesus,”” Leonard said to describe the approach.
The younger generation's rejection of centralized authority in favor of local control has contributed to the growth of independent churches and the decline of denominational loyalty, he added.
“People think of themselves belonging to a local congregation rather than a national denomination,” he said.
Some nondenominational churches — and networks of such churches — have grown up around commitments to ideology, Leonard noted. He cited as examples churches on the political left being “welcoming and affirming” of homosexuals or on the political right engaged in a culture war opposed to same-sex marriage and abortion.
But he pointed to Joel Osteen's fast-growing Lakewood Church in Houston as characteristic of a new paradigm in nondenominational churches, embracing a “less argumentative kind of Christianity.”
Osteen and his multiracial, charismatic church represent a bridge between the megachurch and the postmodern emerging church, Leonard asserted.
Megachurches that bill themselves as “full-service, one-stop-shopping” centers offering many of the same services and resources that denominations once provided have contributed to the decline of denominations, he noted.
Postmodernism — with its emphasis on relationships and experience over reason — leads to a new church model that embraces diversity in practice and thought.
Whereas megachurches stripped their meeting places of religious images, emerging churches blend ancient and modern worship practices and revel in multisensory images, rituals and symbols.
The emerging church offers hope for Baptists, Leonard insisted. “I'd rather be Baptist in the postmodern period than anything else.”
Baptists should reassert ritual, particularly the “danger and decisiveness” inherent in the ordinances of believer's baptism by immersion and the Lord's Supper, Leonard said.
With their emphasis on religious liberty and a believer's church grounded in uncoerced faith, Baptists uniquely are positioned to respond to secularism, pluralism and religious establishmentarianism, he asserted.
“We should affirm and accept pluralism without running to syncretism,” he said.