I have a bit of a pet peeve. And that is people redefining words, or terms.
Last night Jeff, Liz, Q, Glyn, and I were talking and the term “main-line denomination” was used. I then qualified a denomination as “main-line” as I figured would make sense (I referred to Southern Baptists as main-line), and Jeff told me that Christianity Today would term mainline denominations as only United Presbyterians and United Methodists. (He forgot to lump Episcopalians in there, but I later found an article that does, so I will for my purposes here.) Now, there are a few ways of looking at the term “main-line,” and as far as I can tell, one makes sense not lumping the Southern Baptists in there with those groups and another doesn’t. The one that makes sense is referring to “main-line” as the most secularly accepted churches of of Church (capital C). Or in other words the most tolerant of liberal theologies or mindsets in the church. (Liberal primarily meaning people who don’t necessarily accept the Bible as the inerrant word or God, not liberal in political ideologies.) This does make it so that Southern Baptists, and (according to an article on church growth / decline) Lutherns, who as a denomination (although Lutherns are harder to pin this on) are traditionally more conservative and somewhat more inflexibly evangelical. The other definition is that main line means the most accepted by the people, or the most popular. Main-line music is not underground music, it is the popular rock / rap / jazz / pop stuff. It isn’t indie stuff on with no label. So doesn’t it makes sense for a main-line denomination to be the large ones, with the most churches and the most members? If you take that into account then you have to toss SoBap’s in with the Methodists, United Presbyterians, and Episcopalians. Also, you have to toss American Baptists, Lutherns, and Assemblies of God, all with a good bit over 5,000 churches in the US. Vineyard by comparison has abuot 600 churches in the US, definitely not Main-line by either definition.
Now, I’m not criticizing Jeff’s definition, because as I mentioned there is a valid point of seperation where I could see the term main-line being used differently then I see it as, but I’m more saying that it annoys me that I can’t have a conversation in english and understand what the hell people are trying to say. I get lost in a sea of words like evangelical, postmodern (which is about the most difficult to define), liberal, charismatic, and so on.
Also it annoys me that a magazine decide what a word is going to mean. This happens all over the place in modern culture. I’m sure Brent could ramble off a books worth of examples in the past where words have been re-defined similarly by the culture it is used in. But it still annoys me because as soon as I start to think I have a good definition of a word…it changes. “Postmodern” is the best example of this. Earlier tonight I read an article about how postmodernism isn’t about self-sufficience or anything like that, but it is about a return to orthodoxy and the generations of historical background we can draw from and all I could think is “what the hell is this” this doesn’t sound like anything I know as postmodern. I generally think of someone who is “postmodern” as a person who can’t tell you why they are postmodern or how they got that way, not someone who strongly emphasizes the role of the past in their present lives. I could be totally wrong, and that’s cool, I’m just annoyed I can’t pin that down.
Another place where I’ve been trying to pin a label and can’t find one to stick is in defining the church system I came out of. My family is, as many of you know, largely United Methodist. This is a big part of who I am, because my family is a big part of who I am and where I came from. My Grandfather was a United Evangelical Brethren pastor, which in the sixties merged with the Methodist church to become the United Methodist Church. So, anyway I’ve been trying to show people that the United Methodist church isn’t as liberal as people like to think it is. This somewhat stems from the fact that I know a lot of Methodist pastors personally and almost none of them are very liberal. Also, I like to point out that the General Conference (an elected body made up of delegates from each region of the US and regions of the international community) has always voted to word any important by-law in the Book of Discipline very evangelically, always going back to the Bible as its base. But the problem arrives in the fact that the these by-laws state nothing about the personal systematic theologies that members or leaders of the church must agree with. So, this leaves a lot of room for liberal theologies, and personal interpretation, or just overall ignoring parts of scripture by claiming current cultural irrelevance. And no one has a problem with this, in fact there is wording that allows for this wiggle room in the beliefs of the methodist church, and some very welcoming statements are in there that call all people into community no matter what they believe. So this creates the dilemma that the laws within the church system are based on a book that people leading with in the church system don’t completely agree with. And that causes conflicts like the homosexuality issue I talked about before with the Methodist church.
So, the large portion of the leadership has a visibly evangelical outlook on matters of how to approach church law, but a significant portion has a liberal outlook on the church today. So how do you classify the chruch, is it liberal, or is it conservative / evangelical in its interpretation of the Bible and how it carries out its interpretation?
Man, defining crap is hard. I sorta don’t like all this labeling we do, it seems to be more aimed at dividing then at including. Sorta like we want to build up all these walls with descriptions that box us in to define exactly who we are, and who we are not….almost like the who we are not is the more important part. Jeff said something really cool about talking about who we are when we get to Minneapolis, by saying that we should definitely avoid saying who we are not, because it sounds negative. (Like “we are not Catholic” “we don’t have liturgical worship services” “we don’t sing hymns often”) But it is hard to explain to people who we are with terms like evangelical when one of the dictionary defnitions of that word is protestant, and we are using it to qualify ourselves as a specific type of protestant. To the average washed out protestant christian who we might want to attract to our church that would be hard to explain without some of those “who we aren’t” kinds of statements, because how many average joes on the street can tell you what an evangelical person is, but I bet they can tell you what they think a Christian is, or maybe even a protestant.
So anyway, labeling the Methodist church. I think maybe it is a “moderate” church. They makes room for everyone in their churches, and they haven’t sacrificed the Biblical integrity of their message on a large scale level, and they would probably schism before the majority gave up that biblical integrity within the church government. So “moderate” seems appropriate.
I’m tired and I’ve been up too late now, so I’m hitting the sack. This was my rant about words, I hope you enjoyed it.
harambee78 says
I use the term “old-line denominations” to encompass any of the “traditional” (read older) denominations around (as opposed to the new “apostolic” denominations like the Church of God, AOG, or even Vineyard). That includes Methodists, Episcopalians, Catholics, Southern Baptists, Lutherans, etc. In that group, the SoBas are certainly in their own class. Two reasons (which I think are related): the SoBas made a point of completely rejecting liberal theology at its height in the 20s and 30s and when it had become very influential in the 50s and 60s. The other reason is that the SBC continues to grow in membership every year whereas the others are all in decline.
It is true that the UMC hasn’t been as damaged by liberal theology as the other oldline denominations, but that may be due to its democratic structure and not because the UMC took a stand against it.
I don’t know about this term “main-line.” I guess it just highlights the importance of defining terms. I’m starting to write my dissertation now, and the FIRST thing you do is to define all of the main terms you’ll be using in a exact manner. I think its important to do that in conversation as well.
Jeff says
ok, i’ll define terms in terms of distinctions that i find it necessary to make. i will not use the term mainline, as it is probably true that it is imprecise
three distinctions about the holy spirit’s work:
spirit-filled: used to refer to charismatics, pentecostals, third-wave, others who emphasize a visible, supernatural work of the spirit, tongues, healing, prophecy, etc.
open but cautious: people who are not opposed to such things but do not emphasize them’
cessationists: people who are against the visible work of the holy spirit, espeically tongues, healing, prophecy.
two distinctions about theology
evangelical: christians who affirm (1) inspiration, truth and authority of every word of the bible, and (2) who see Christ’s work on the cross as the only means of salvation.
liberal: christians who do not affirm the above two affirmations. there are lots of shades of liberals, some i like quite a bit (for example, martin luther king and maybe karl barth and probably dietrich bonhoeffer would b e classified here), some i think are off their rocker (paul tillich and john shelby spong).
two distinctions about protestant churches (i am making this up now):
denominational: i will use this to refer to churches that belong to large, historic denominations. if pressed, i would probably set an age limit and a minimum size for a denomination to be classified ‘denominational’.
post-denominational: churches that are either independent, or belong to one of the smaller, weirder groupings that have emerged in the late 20th early 21st century (vineyard, calvary chapel, willow creek association, evangelical free church, etc.)
certainly alll these are imprecise, but i think they are helpful in understanding the differences between churches. it’s just a fact that there are significant differences between, say, an evangelical presbytarian church and a vineyard church.
i think i might add one more distinction between traditional and contemporary, but that probably has the most shades of gray of any of these.
BigCat says
I wasn’t criticizing you in particular, I was using the situation the other night as an example of a time where I was just annoyed because I couldn’t find a foothold in language of the conversation. There are other times where this happens, but usually it is because I’m completely ignorant of the vocabulary, it has just been more and more that I am around more intellectual Christians that I know what the dictionary definition of the word is, or I know what I think a word means and have used it successfully in conversation in the past, and now I don’t have any idea how someone is using it.
Anyway, I thought I would make that distinction since it isn’t limitted thing for that to happen (it happens all the time when I talk with James…but I usually slow the pace of the conversation to ask him how he was using the word in context).
But I do like a lot of these definitions….they will definitely help when talking with you about church stuff. Now, if we could get these in a dictionary verbatim then I’m in buisness cuz I could force everyone to talk being on the same page…. 🙂
BigCat says
Good definition with the “old-line” thing there. I like that.
On the liberal theology with the UMC you make a great point. For a long time I’ve thought other churches were uniquely independant compared to where I came from in the UMC, but now I think I’m begining to see how the UMC is uniquely tied together with its democratic system. I don’t think that there are a lot of other large church systems that operate the way the UMC does, especially considering how similar it is to the US government. And I think maybe just the epicopalians and catholics have anything close because they seem to have a very set hiearchy similar to the UMC. Maybe I’ll blog about how interesting this fact is to me later, because in the last couple days researching a little about other church systems I have found that while SoBas have the convention which makes statements about liberal theology, they also have even more wiggle room within that doctorine to support fundementalist churches and places like Saddleback under the same hood. I think that some strict ground rules with some room for intrepretation on a congragational level is a strength the SoBas have, and something I believe the Vineyard will adopt too at some point. (By saying that I mean the Vineyard as an organization hasn’t been around long enough to be forced to create specific docterines on some things….infant baptism is one good example).