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I don't know what to call it, but over the past twenty years we steadily watched a certain form (and I mean "form": musical style, liturgical structure, ecclesiology) of church emerge, independent of particular denominational affiliations, enter into cities and towns... 1/
and slowly cannibalize local believing communities. This has happened almost everywhere (in the US), and it has taken many names: "the planting movement," or "Acts 29," or, just plainly, "evangelicalism" (but in a new mode from the old alliances), but the end result... 2/
has been the advancement of a particular version of the Gospel complete with specific structures of formation and worship that, in a very stunning way, large swaths of the church have just... ... accepted. Now, there are varieties: megachurches and core-and-peripheral..., 3/
wholly independent and independent-within-denominational-structures, unified by ideology / theology or moderate vanilla on-purpose... but it is a religious phenomena that has "appeared," almost "ready-made," and, without argumentation, self-justified itself! 4/
We *might* call this thing "evangelicalism," but I think it is a new religious formation because it takes the core commitments of evangelicalism but then homogenizes worship practices instead of diversifying them. Forty years ago, folks raised "evangelical" would have... 5/
had radically different localized experiences, encompassing the strangeness of the evangelical alliance; today when you hear "exvangelicals" speak, it is in response to communities halfway across the country, in different denominations or traditions, that sound *the exact same*6/
The phenomena I'm describing is largely suburban and urban, but I've noticed its slow arrival in the rural over the past five years too – there are two churches like this in Carlinville: one's AoG, the other (loosely) SBC, but you can't tell the difference, really. 7/
I write all this to say that I think it important that we mark the past 20-30 years as a time of *major religious change* in American Protestantism, and that that change was largely one of *homogenization* into *new liturgical / formative practices,* and that that is ODD. 8/
Like, this involves a *more radical* shift than the Reformation. (After all, early Lutheranism would look and sound very "Catholic" to us.)
A thesis I've been proposing is that we see America as the land of the "Radical Reformation," but I think we should describe... 9/
A thesis I've been proposing is that we see America as the land of the "Radical Reformation," but I think we should describe... 9/
the past 30 years as a Reformation within that Radical Reformation, and this Reformation quietly has renovated the whole place in some serious ways that we did not account for, that are dangerous, actually, because liable to abuse and propaganda. 10/
[cue @benjamindcrosby on our convo about the Radical Reformation!]
So, when I say, like I said yesterday in a joke, that I don't believe a church fellowshiping over 1000 people is actually a church in a meaningful way (to troll JMac),... ... I actually think I mean that, and, further, there's something *new* (thus suspicious) about... 11/
churches organized the way JMac's church is organized. In fact, most of these "celebrity pastors" have... ... new... church organizations. And I don't think we've really viewed them properly in that light. Not really as "conservatives," but as religious innovators... 12/
heretics, even. fin/
(Jk., maybe not! but since my sentence was going that way, I wanted to end the thread with a bang. It's a pretty beautiful tweet to just hang like that.)
@socofthesacred: does this follow what you see in the sociology of evangelicalism (is there much writing on this)?
