Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in the New Millennium

Christian Century, Nov 19, 1997 by R. Stephen Warner

By Donald E. Miller. University of California Press, 263p., $27.50.

A group of social scientists--and I am one of the group--have been articulating a "new paradigm" for understanding American religion. emphasizing the popular demand-drive, consumer orientation of religious groups. Donald E. Miller applies this "new paradigm" label to a burgeoning group of West Coast-based churches, including the Pentecostally oriented Vineyard, Calvary Chapel and Hope Chapel and by extension such "seeker-sensitive" evangelical churches as Willow Creek and Saddleback community churches.

For Miller, professor of religion at the University of Southern California, "new paradigm" churches are ones that attend to consumer demand by tuning their worship and organizational style to today's culture, not the cultures of the past. He contends that the success of these churches offers lessons and warnings to a declining Protestant mainline.

In sheer organizational terms at least, the Vineyard and Calvary Chapel associations (on which Miller concentrates) would seem to merit the "winner" designation he bestows on them. Founded in 1965 by former Foursquare Gospel minister Chuck Smith and still led by him, Calvary Chapel now claims over 600 congregations in the U. S. and another hundred worldwide, especially in the former Soviet bloc. The Vineyard emerged in 1982 from two congregations affiliated with Calvary. It now numbers some 406 congregations in the U.S. and another 173 abroad, particularly in the anglophone democracies.

To judge from the rich quantitative and qualitative data collected by Miller and his research assistants, Brenda Brasher and Paul Kennedy, Calvary churches appeal to a working- and lower-middle-class constituency and lean toward fundamentalism. The Vineyards promote the public exercise of gifts of the spirit (especially tongues and healing) and have slightly more educated and affluent members.

Both churches feature contemporary worship with guitars and overhead projectors (not organs and hymnals) and low-key teachings (not stentorian, theologically learned sermons) relevant to the everyday lives of people who have learned to value their families more than their careers. This recipe is improvised upon by such men as Vineyard founders Kenn Gulliksen and John Wimber (all the senior pastors in this world are men) on the basis of their musical skills and their own checkered histories. Their approach appeals to baby boomers and even baby busters whose absence from mainline churches marks those churches as "losers. "

Based on surveys, extensive interviews and participant observation (vividly reported in the book), Miller's portrait of these new paradigm churches highlights not only their upbeat Sunday worship but their intense, mid-week house-group meetings and the physical intimacy, mentoring, "discipling" and leadership training that they promote. A great deal of religious substance lies beneath the relaxed, youthful style of these congregations. They give direction to aimless lives, channel energies into food pantries and prison ministries and promote home schooling and marital fidelity. To be sure, the religious substance is consistently conservative--new paradigm Christians believe that it will take changed hearts to bring about a changed world--but is no less serious for that. (Miller notes that Brasher's forthcoming book will explore the implications of Calvary and the Vineyard for women's roles.)

In claiming that the new paradigm churches are highly "demanding" if not classically "strict," Miller addresses one of the raging issues in the sociology of religion. (It is frustrating, however, not to be given more information about the sampling procedures that produced the 36-page appendix of questionnaire results.) Another controverted issue is whether the members of these new churches are in fact new Christians, as many of them claim to be, or instead represent what Canadian sociologist Reginald Bibby calls the "circulation of the saints."

Miller's interviewees speak of radically changed identities, but his questionnaire data indicate that 65 percent of members went to church weekly when they were growing up and 36 percent had fundamentalist or evangelical backgrounds. This suggests a pattern of backsliding and return. (Another 28 percent--38 percent for Calvary rank-and-file--say they grew up Catholic, a matter Miller might have spent more time on.)

Indeed, Miller consistently underplays the conservative theological baggage that new paradigm Christians bring with them, either through family backgrounds (especially in the case of members) or through mentors in the movement (especially in the case of pastors). He prefers instead to highlight the empirical and pragmatic attitude they bring to both their experience and their frequent Bible studies. In stressing respondents' protestations of presuppositionless religion--"no creed but the Bible" as affirmed by the Holy Spirit--Miller overlooks particular echoes of restoration theology and California-style Pentecostalism.