In a Thanksgiving Day sermon in 1868, Rev. Dr. Hanford Edson, pastor of Second Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, said that the city needed a library. He said, “The deficiency that is really fatal to the city’s character is the want of a public library.” Shortly thereafter, a group of leading citizens who were members at Second organized to begin developing what’s now the Indianapolis Public Library.
While Indianapolis would surely have gotten a library at some point regardless of Edson’s sermon, this story goes to show the role that tall-steeple mainline churches played in the civic life of their communities. Second Presbyterian was founded in 1838, with the famed Henry Ward Beecher as its first pastor. For over 150 years it has been the establishment church in Indianapolis, and it is one of the largest Presbyterian churches in the country. Bill Hudnut, who became senior pastor of Second Presbyterian in the 1960s, went on to serve a term in Congress, and then become a four-term mayor of the city who is largely credited with its early downtown revitalization and other important accomplishments.
The current senior pastor of Second Presbyterian, Rev. Chris Henry, has a podcast called Faithful Discourse, and I was delighted to be his guest for an episode that was released last week.
This podcast is a good introduction to my work on religion, including my “three worlds” model, for those of you who are newer here and aren’t yet familiar with it. But even for those of you who are, we discuss a number of important topics, such as demographic transition. As a parallel to the church, I tell the story of my experience attending opera, where I could see 25 years ago that its very old audiences were going to create a vacuum one day. But since it was still sold out, the problem wasn’t yet manifest. Now it is, and companies like the famed Metropolitan Opera are in real trouble. This same pattern is hitting or soon will hit many of our institutions. The reckoning is finally here. I also note how even younger-skewing organizations can have similar challenges, using the example of my experience the Gospel Coalition conference. It was packed and had big energy, but I didn’t see many Generation Z people in the room.
We also talk about the factors underlying the decline of the mainline churches, and the return by some younger people to more traditional liturgies, my relationship to Tim Keller, and much more.
A lot of people have written off mainline Protestantism as a lost cause, or even bidden it good riddance. The demographic trends there are certainly not good. But America has not found any replacement for the roles it played in society, such as in the moral formation of a community’s leadership and as a nexus of civic action.
There’s a really great video with this one, so while the audio is in my podcast feed, I recommend watching it if you are able.
