I don't know how Bethany Lutheran Church fares these days, but when I was a member, it was a typical, struggling, inner-city congregation. There were three major demographics in the church. The first was the aging Norwegians who had once formed the core of the congregation but who were slowly dying out. Half of them were living in the nearby elderly high rise down the street, and a good many no longer attended because they lived in nursing homes. The second, considerably smaller, demographic was young mobile families with no particular history with (or allegiance to) Lutheranism, who moved in for a while and then left. The third and smallest -- but also fastest growing -- demographic were the Oromo (Ethiopian) immigrants who were theologically much more conservative than the rest, and eventually split off to form their own congregation. Then there were folks like me: young gay men who drifted into the congregation long enough to learn that folks like us weren't welcome -- yet. I hear that Bethany Lutheran Church recently voted to become "Reconciled in Christ," (i.e., openly welcoming of gay, lesbian, bi & transgender folks) something I had yearned for when I was a member there but which was considered too great a leap at the time. It sounds cold to say it this way, but they probably had to wait for enough of Demographic Number One to die off to finally realize that they actually needed to make people feel welcome if they wanted to survive.

When I was there, the aging Norwegians liked to reminisce about the glory days of the congregation, back in the 1950s, when there were hundreds of children in the Sunday School, and scores of people in the choir, and the sanctuary was mostly full on Sunday morning (instead of mostly empty). The great villain of that story was the Evil Highway 35W Project that came through, forcing many of the younger families to leave, cutting the neighborhood in half, and turning a good portion of it into a Third World slum. By the time I arrived, University expansion had converted some areas of the traditional parish into cheap student housing; but the student demographic generally found nothing attractive about the congregation. I was the exception that proved the rule. Everybody loved me, until I turned out to be gay. And why should young students stick around, when the primary obsessions in the congregation were trying to keep up the institutions and ethos of the Glory Days, and the nursing home visitation program? Folks had a fit when the pastor suggested using a version of the Lord's Prayer with more modern (i.e., 1850s language instead of 1650s). Enough said about that.

Bethany's dilemma was not unique. There's a whole generation of Protestants who grew up thinking that Church meant a whole bunch of things like a big institutional building, a grand old Tabernacle-Choir-type organ, a mass choir dressed up in lots of pretty choir robes, and a superstar pastor -- the loftier the seminary credentials, the better. Programs were inwardly focused and building-centered. Most of the people who still think that way are affluent, conservative, and now live in the suburbs. Those of us who are sticking it out in the urban centers of America are learning some painful lessons.

Of course the mainline Protestant ethos was not my upbringing. Growing up Mormon in a predominantly non-Mormon area (upstate New York), we tended to view the world as a mission field, our neighbors as potential converts, and ourselves as an embattled minority struggling to build an outpost for the true Gospel of Jesus Christ. We had a sense of mission. And we weren't ashamed if we had to meet in a dusty, abandoned YMCA building or an old rented storefront. We didn't care if we were small in number. We had an unconquerable conviction that as more people learned the truth our numbers would grow. And our numbers did grow; though I think I can honestly say that numbers didn't matter. We used to say, "If I bring but one soul to Christ, how great shall be my joy..." "Where two or three are gathered in his name..." And we believed it. We knew that Jesus did not have that many disciples when he was alive, and that numbers don't validate what you know to be true. Only you can validate that for yourself. At bottom what mattered was how faithful we were to what we knew to be true.

It was common wisdom among the Mormons I grew up with that mainline Christianity was on its death bed. According to Mormons, mainline Protestant churches had played an important historical role in preparing the world for the true faith, but now they were dead shells, incapable of inspiring the same kind of faith and allegiance as the "true" gospel. Having abandoned biblical inerrancy, and having no concept of modern-day revelation, they were now adrift in a sea of apostasy, with nothing to anchor them to the truth. Clinging to moribund tradition and their numbers falling every year, they would eventually diminish into insignificance. Since the seventies, Fundamentalists, Moonies, and Muslims have also been singing this funeral chant for mainline religion, and many who don't particularly rejoice in the possibility they are right have wondered if they might be, myself included.

Before getting too righteously indignant, mainliners should remember that we have indulged in this kind of arrogance too. In the 1950s and '60s, in the heyday of mainline Protestantism, the popular wisdom was that fundamentalism was on its way out, a dying remnant of the bad old days when religion was unenlightened by rationalism. We've learned our lesson, I hope. Before anyone declares anyone else's religion dead, it is important to remember how fluid, adaptable and powerful faith is. Churches can become stodgy and arteriosclerotic, and they often do die painful deaths. But faith is harder to pin down. And while it may be possible for others to point at the bad shape our mainline institutions are in right now, for them to claim our faith is dead would be dead wrong.

There is a pattern of faith and religious life in history that should shed light on the ups and downs of religious institutions. New churches and movements inevitably spring up when the old churches and movements have become so inured in an oppressive status quo that they are no longer capable of asking and answering the significant questions. This usually happens when religious institutions become pillars of imperial state power and ally themselves with society's ruling classes and kingmakers. This was true of the Paganism of late Imperial Rome that persecuted but could not stamp out Christianity. It was true of pre-Reformation Catholicism, that spawned countercultural monastic movements, the religious rebellions of the Albigenses and the Hussites, and eventually Protestantism. It was in turn true of the Protestant establishments of the Enlightenment Era that spawned Anabaptist and Pietist and Puritan rebellions. And it was true of the Puritan establishment of New England, which gradually crumbled as increasing numbers defected to the Quakers, Baptists, and Free Churches.

I'm particularly interested in the Puritan example, because my Wrathall ancestors, prior to becoming Mormons in the 1840s and 1850s were Congregationalists; and I'm now connected to the United Church of Christ, one of whose founding streams is the old New England Establishment. Most Americans don't know that the Congregational Way was the state church of Connecticut until 1818. In the end, many Congregationalists were themselves demanding the separation, because they realized that Congregationalism probably could not survive if they didn't.

The American separation of church and state was a radical concept in its day. At the time it was fought tooth and claw by those who had most to lose: Puritans (who controlled New England) and Anglicans (who controlled just about everywhere else). One of the major forces in support of religious freedom were not the Deist founding fathers, but Baptists. That's right, the denomination of Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson once actually believed in separation of church and state. Despite their resistance, disestablishment was probably the best thing that ever happened to Episcopalians and Congregationalists, since as "mere" denominations they thrived in a way that they never had as state churches. Today, in per capita giving to religious institutions and attendance at worship, the United States of America is the most religious country in the world. Sociologists of religion are unanimous in pointing to the disestablishment of religion as a fundamental explanation. Southern Baptists, before you renounce your historic commitments to freedom, beware: Had America clung to church-state establishments like Europe, perhaps we would today be a people similarly disinterested in religion, with 90% of the population nominally Christian but only 5% actually giving a damn about Christianity.

Despite official disestablishment of religion in America, it has often been pointed out, there has long been been an unofficial establishment of Evangelical Protestantism. At times, the Evangelicals have flexed their muscles by imposing their beliefs and values on others in law, as when they banned Mormon polygamy, jailing Mormon church leaders, confiscating Mormon church lands, threatening to occupy Mormon temples with Federal troops, and blocking Utah statehood until Mormons finally agreed officially to renounce the practice. (At the time, the war between Mormons and "Gentiles," which actually turned into a shooting war for a brief period in the early 1850s, was considered necessary to break the Mormon church state establishment in Utah. Of course, none would sanely argue that Mormonism is not still a sort of unofficial theocracy in Utah, something attested to even by Mormons who, like me, grew up "in the mission field" and had a radically different experience of our religion than those who grew up under the shadow of the Salt Lake Temple.) The plethora of late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Sabbatarian and blue laws (remnants of which still exist in American law books) were all efforts by Evangelical Protestants to prove who was boss, and Prohibition was their crowning (if most embarassing) achievement. The great religious question of our day is whether Christian fundamentalists will successfully storm the ramparts of church-state separation over the issues of sodomy, abortion, and state funding for religious institutions. Oh, what a friend they have in George W. Bush.

But a new thing has been happening in mainline churches. A growing number of mainline Christians have seceded from the "unofficial establishment," demanding full religious equality for non-Christians, an end to persecution of gays, and siding with feminist challenges to the Christian patriarchy. The vehemence of the hatred and anger this has aroused among their more conservative co-religionists was witnessed last week in Minneapolis at the national convention of the Episcopal Church in America, when a narrow majority agreed to let the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire (gasp!) elect a gay bishop. Along with the usual denunciations and accusations of apostasy, the tolerant majority was accused of seceding from the church universal and of dooming the Episcopal Church to become a dwindling, moribund, liberal backwater. The church would lose large numbers of members, perhaps even split in two.

Whether the anti-gay partisans are right or wrong about that, the liberals have forged ahead anyway, in the Episcopal Church and elsewhere. Are they crazy? Have they lost their Christian senses? What if the worst comes to pass, and the mainline churches, embracing radical justice and equality for all humans, watch their traditional institutional underpinnings crumble? What if their numbers keep dwindling? What if they can't afford to keep the costly institutional structures their forebears built in the last century?

What if we gave it up? What if we stopped worrying about the prestige of having a pretty church building with lots of stained glass windows and a great big organ? Of having numerical superiority (whatever that means)? Of pleasing conservatives who see the elimination of gays and feminists and non-Christians as the hallmark of true faith? Might we not finally hear the clarity of divine Love calling us in a world riven by religious hate? Might we not have more energy to become the seeds of change for a new millennium?