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Have you read something recently, say, about church growth or religion in general, and encountered the word "postdenominational"?

It’s a loaded term. What does it mean to say we are living in a postdenominational time and place? And what does it mean for those of us trying to be faithful to Jesus Christ within this denomination? The term postdenominational can be used in different ways. Some writers, such as sociologists, use it descriptively. They aren’t making value judgments about any particular denomination. They just observe that our sociological landscape makes it hard for traditional American denominations to grow and thrive.[1]

The term is also used prescriptively not just to describe a phenomenon, but rather to offer solutions or prescriptions. Prescriptive postdenominationalists call for a radical rethinking of church structures from the ground up. For the prescriptive postdenominationalist, the key to the church’s survival is radical change.

What about “new wineskins”?

A great example of a prescriptive postdenominationalist is the renowned C. Peter Wagner, Professor Emeritus of Church Growth at Fuller Theological Seminary. His most recent work, Changing Church: How God Is Leading His Church into the Future (Regal Books, 2004), describes the postmodern aversion to religious brand names and the “old wineskins” commonly known as denominational structures. The “new wineskins” that hold promise for the church today are what Wagner calls the “new apostolic” churches. These churches sport streamlined doctrinal commitments, emphasize equippingthe saints for ministry, and favor barebones structures. Accordingly, it is the “new wineskins” that God has raised up that will usher the church into the postmodern future that awaits it.

Wagner is well aware of organizations like Presbyterians For Renewal that are committed to renewing traditional denominational structures. He acknowledges their sense of call, but hasn’t seen much success. “The denominational leaders, true to their ideal of pluralism, have tolerated them, but the problems of control, power, and particular management of financial resources have caused them to domesticate the renewal movements, a skill at which they are competent. What renewal might have taken place is largely cosmetic.”[2]

Wagner is a reputable scholar and an experienced researcher, but it’s not clear how he knows just what ways of structuring the church God has ordained for her future. His views seem to come less from fieldwork and more from his analysis as an armchair church historian. He reasons that in every era of the church’s existence, beginning with the New Testament, Christ empowers his people at two levels: at the level of unity—in the church’s governing structures through which the church works in unison—and through the diversity of gifts and ministries among the saints, where each member is called to exercise gifts individually. Together these are the means by which God builds up the church. Each new era brings new wineskins through which God’s people are empowered. Christ gifted the early church one way and the Reformation church in another, and Christ has still another new wineskin for our day, seen in the work of the nondenominational “new apostolic” congregations emerging worldwide.

William Abraham, an astute theologian and a committed mainline renewalist, has written on Wagner’s work. If one takes Wagner seriously, the decline of churches like the PC(USA) is no surprise. We, like other mainline denominations, are “wedded to forms of ministry that God once blessed, but their wineskins are now obsolete, given the new work God is doing in the new apostolic churches.”[3]

But Abraham is not persuaded by Wagner. In Abraham’s mind, the “new wineskins turn out to be a loose assemblage of convictions and practices that have no coherence or stability.”4 He thinks Wagner’s understanding of the church is rooted in superficial interpretation of Scripture and an even more superficial and naïve understanding of church history. Abraham doesn’t see Wagner’s work as very helpful for renewal. But if mainline Protestants are not to cast our lot with Wagner and the new wineskins that he and others insist God is providing, then what are the alternatives? How do we renew the church?

In the same essay, Abraham discusses the work of R. R. Reno. Three years ago, Reno, an Episcopalian, wrote In the Ruins of the Church: Sustaining Faith in an Age of Diminished Christianity (Brazos, 2002). The book is a call for orthodox Episcopalians to stay put and be faithful. Reno is suspicious of grand schemes of renewal on both the left and the right. He has little patience with talk of any ideal church. The real church, the church that is Christ’s Body in which his Spirit dwells, is not some ideal, but a real community that today is broken and dysfunctional.

Reno traces most of the contemporary church’s problems to its compromise with modernity. But according to Reno, renewal schemes like Wagner’s are equally modern solutions. They are inspired, he writes, not by the Holy Spirit, but by the spirit of the age. We must look back, returning to apostolic tradition and practices, struggling to be faithful in our dysfunctional church, contending against the dangers and temptations of modernity that got us into this predicament in the first place. Unfortunately, Reno’s vision for the church seems to be a smaller, disciplined church focused more on its own survival than on God’s mission to the world. And so Abraham is not persuaded by Reno either.

Abraham’s analysis of Wagner and Reno and the schools of thought they represent is poignant and persuasive. The renewal of the Presbyterian Church isn’t going to come through either naïve romanticism or a nostalgic conservatism.

But this much is certain: the way forward will involve change. We have much to learn from post-denominationalism. Increasing secularization, the eroding of Christendom, the general widespread suspicion of institutions, and the seeming preference for generic “spirituality” over time-tested religious traditions are just a few factors that characterize our culture, and they don’t seem to be going away. Renewal must involve restructuring and revitalization. The way forward cannot mean ignoring the past, through which the Spirit worked, nor can it mean closing ourselves off to new and imaginative ways of being the church that the Spirit might put forth.

How can we reach the emerging generation?

As Gen Xers, we take seriously the realities that cause many experts to call our culture postdenominational. But we also think their descriptions don’t do justice to the spiritual sensibilities of the emerging generation. We agree with sociologists who don’t see a future for churches that glory in their institu- tional bureaucracies and accomplishments. Those who insist that Presbyterians are united by our polity and by the work of our bureaucratic arm, holding it out as the hope for our future, simply don’t understand the cultural landscape.

But the Presbyterian Church is much more than its centralized bureaucracy. It is, at its best and by God’s grace, the people of God struggling to follow Christ alone, by grace alone, through faith alone—a people whose final authority is Scripture alone. The solas that our fathers and mothers in the faith struggled for, and sometimes died for, are still compelling today. Neither of us was raised Presbyterian. We both came to Christ as teenagers through the witness of friends. But we’re Presbyterians today because in the PC(USA) we found a tradition and a community in which our passionate commitment to Jesus could be lived out for the long haul.

“Churches that want to lure Xers should give up their glitzy, poppy entertainment strategies and stick with the elements of tradition,” advises Lauren Winner, author of Girl Meets God and Real Sex, and a member of Generation X. She isn’t speaking just from experience. She is reflecting on the work of researchers like Colleen Carroll, who sees Generation X as by and large drawn to the traditions of particular denominations. The emerging generation isn’t compelled by bureaucratic structures, a church’s logo, or uniform educational curricula. What is compelling to a generation of nomads is a spiritual home, one that offers a connection to the deep and wide family of faith. Our denomination has such roots. We exist because a 16th century French lawyer in his twenties was captivated by the teachings and stories of the Scriptures. His name was John Calvin, and he went on to rediscover catholic Christianity for his time, revolutionizing his age and ours.

Our denomination has a future, even in a postdenominational age. But it isn’t one that will come through pragmatic schemes or through the new wineskins offered by some of the prescriptive postdenominationalists, or through nostalgic memories that seek to take us back to some idealistic church of yesteryear. Nor does it lie with a centralized bureaucracy that some misguidedly suppose is the essence of Presbyterianism.

The way forward is an ancient-future one.[5] We need to cling to our confessional tradition and to the catholic roots of the faith at its heart. This tradition will point us back to the Word of God that will reform us and make us a Reformed church for our time.

Inspired by the witness of our Reformation forebears, Gen Xers like us are likely to be passionate about reform, not retreat. Many of us share Wagner’s openness to the innovative work of the Spirit, but not his negative judgment about traditional structures. We share Reno’s passion for the concrete church with all its messiness, and his respect for the tradition, but we don’t identify with his aversion to change. We have the energy to invest in evangelical networks and generative friendships above the congregational level that will help us engage and transform—rather than abandon or merely tolerate— the existing structures.

Our future is bound up with our obedience to Jesus Christ, the true Source of our unity. He is the one Word of God who we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death (Barmen 8:11). He speaks to us by the power of his Spirit, through the Scriptures. Our ancestors in the faith heeded his Word in a time of unprecedented change and turmoil, and trusted it alone for guidance. We must treasure their example and heed it, as we are called to sing a new song to the Lord in this strange land.

Scott Jones is co-pastor of Woodland Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, and Michael Walker is executive director of Presbyterians For Renewal. Both are PhD candidates at Princeton Theological Seminary.

NOTES

1. Various reasons are cited for this conclusion: a marked increase in American individualism, a pervasive consumer instinct that shapes the way everything is seen in our culture, including and perhaps especially religion, as well as an eroding commitment to traditional societal institutions. For a good collection of essays that represents postdenominational analysis, see Beyond Establishment (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993), edited by Jackson W. Carroll and Wade Clark Roof.

2. C. Peter Wagner, Churchquake (Ventura, CA: Regal, 1999), 149. Cited by William Abraham in The Logic of Renewal (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003).

3. Abraham, 139. 4. Abraham, 148–149. 5. The term “ancient-future” was first used by Robert Webber in his Ancient Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Post-modern World (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999). Webber argues that the best way for the church to be faithful in a postmodern world is to rediscover some of the key practices and thought of the premodern ancient church. Groups like the Emergent Church, a group of younger evangelicals committed to the formation of missional churches for a postmodern world, seem to take thinking like Webber’s seriously. The Emergent movement, unlike Wagner, sees the potential for new wineskins through the rediscovery and imaginative appropriation of the church’s premodern ecumenical tradition.

4. Abraham, 148–149.

5. The term “ancient-future” was first used by Robert Webber in his Ancient Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Post-modern World (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999). Webber argues that the best way for the church to be faithful in a postmodern world is to rediscover some of the key practices and thought of the premodern ancient church. Groups like the Emergent Church, a group of younger evangelicals committed to the formation of missional churches for a postmodern world, seem to take thinking like Webber’s seriously. The Emergent movement, unlike Wagner, sees the potential for new wineskins through the rediscovery and imaginative appropriation of the church’s premodern ecumenical tradition.