First, well done Mr. Spencer, your post, The Coming Evangelical Collapse was a very interesting post. I had bookmarked Internet Monk but I now regret not adding it to my RSS feeder. I will remedy that. It is not my intention to refute his post, just adding to the conversation. Also check out Evan Curry’s post, “Dear Mom, the Evangelical Collapse is Coming”.
Indeed change is in the air. I agree with the consensus, it’s coming but I don’t think the “collapse” will happen within the next 10 years. My main reason is the Boomer Generation is not yet old enough and they still have enough money.
Consequently, I see the following happening within the next 30 years: “Collapse” is too overstated, I see it more as a evolutionary, and we’ll look back and cal it the “Renaissance of Evangelicalism”.
I mean no offense by this, though there is a strong attraction to the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican faiths, their current approach to family ministries will not be relevant enough to the children of young X’ers and Millennials. This will result in the aforementioned evolution of evangelicalism.
Agreed, there will be a drop off political ideology in the evangelical world. Meaning, there will be less and less of an assumption that evangelicals are republicans.
Agreed that the mega-church will stick around in the coming years. There will be fewer and fewer mid-size churches (600+) There will be fewer and fewer of the less than 100 people churches in their traditional role. They will more likely be house churches, or cell churches.
Agreed that we will not be speaking about the “emergent church” but not because it failed but as so many have pointed out, it was a segue to different conversations that did not create their own brand or denomination (praise God).
[…] my take. I don’t know that collapse is the right word. Maybe evolution. To be sure, I completely agree that evangelicalism has a cultural and political monolith will […]