In this episode, theologian Ted Smith explores the transformation of denominations in the United States, moving from broad structures to more specialized affinity groups. The shift is driven by societal changes, leading to more homogeneous and smaller denominations. Smith highlights advantages like reduced conflict, clearer paths to ordination, and lower institutional overhead. Despite benefits, challenges include the loss of diverse viewpoints and potential alignment with political movements. The discussion also addresses the evolution of theological education in response to current trends and the evolving landscape for seminaries.
Suggested Reading and Listening:
The Aftermath of the United Methodist General Conference with Drew McIntyre | Episode 187
Inclusion, Pluralism and the Presbyterian Church (USA) with Jack Haberer | Episode 188
Predictions About the Future of the Christian Church with Ryan Burge (Russell Moore Show)
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[0:15] Music.
[0:50] We'll be right back. Bye. Hello and welcome to Church in Maine, a podcast for people interested in the intersection of faith in our modern world. I'm Dennis Sanders, your host. This is the podcast for people who look at the world with the day's news in one hand and the Bible in another. If you want to learn more about the podcast, listen to past episodes, or donate, check us out at churchinmaine.org. And you can also visit churchinmaine.substack.com to read related articles.
[1:20] Consider subscribing to this podcast on your favorite podcast app, and please consider leaving a review. That helps others find the podcast. So the last two episodes that I've had, not including the most recent solo episode, had a similar theme running through them. And that was a changing nature of American denominations. American denominations used to be considered in many ways big tents or a broad church. There were institutions that included people from various walks of life, from different viewpoints and perspectives. And they've been changing over the last few decades to more towards affinity groups or organizations that reflect the values of its members. So what's happening in the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church USA, those were the two denominations we talked about in the most recent interview episodes, is actually happening in other denominations, and that's happening in both conservative and progressive denominations. But it's also really actually happening in institutions beyond the church. So what does this all mean? Is this change good for the church or is it detrimental to the church's work?
[2:34] So I spoke about these changes with Ted Smith. He's the Associate Dean of Faculty and the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Divinity at Candler Theological Seminary in Atlanta. Smith is a Presbyterian pastor who serves as Director of Theological Education between the times. This is a project that gathers diverse groups of people to think together about the meanings and purposes of theological education. He is the author of three books, the most recent being The The End of Theological Education, which came out last year. And in this episode, we will talk about the good and bad about the changing nature of religious institutions. So, with all that, join me in this conversation with Ted Smith.
[3:18] Music.
[3:53] Well, Ted Smith, thank you for taking the time to chat with me this afternoon. It's my pleasure. Thanks for the invitation. I think before we start, just a little idea, if you could kind of explain or talk to the people a little bit about who you are, your background. I know that you are a professor at a Presbyterian seminary, but kind of to go from there. And it's actually not a Presbyterian seminary. I'm wrong. You're a Presbyterian pastor at a Methodist seminary. I'm getting the two mixed up. Yeah, I think my dean would be appalled to hear that. Yeah.
[4:29] Sorry about that. No problem. So again, my name is Ted Smith, and I teach at Emory University's Candler School of Theology, which is indeed seminary-affiliated with the United Methodist Church. And just as you say, I'm ordained to ministry in the Presbyterian Church USA. And here I serve as Charles Howard Candler, Professor of Divinity. And I also am Associate Dean of Faculty. Okay. And you also have a background or have had a background in congregational ministry as well? That's right. For about four years, I served as the solo pastor of two small membership churches in upstate New York. And those were very happy and very formative days for me. Okay. Well, I think the first thing I wanted to sort of start off with is,
[5:22] kind of to talk about the nature of our churches as institutions and denominations. And one of the things that you've talked about in your writings and some other podcasts and things to that extent is the importance of, in the past, of the voluntary association.
[5:43] And that kind of, in a lot of ways, guided us for many centuries until recently. Can you kind of explain what the Voluntary Association is and why is it starting to fumble this time? Yeah, I appreciate your lifting that up. I do think that that institutional kind of focus is a really important lens for understanding the present moment in religion in the United States and in the West more broadly. So, the argument that I put forward in my most recent book, which is called The End of Theological Education.
[6:25] The argument I put forward in that book is that with the revolution, especially, you have a deep change in the form of religious life in the United States. Before the revolution, and this is especially from the beginnings of European settlement on the continent, and it was kind of unraveling over time. But there was this aspiration that the colonists had to setting up something like the established churches of Europe. the churches that were put together through the Treaty of Westphalia. The Puritans were dissenters in England, but in New England, they wanted to be the established church, right? And so the churches were funded by taxes.
[7:06] They had special privileges of all kinds. That was the mindset. But with the revolution, a series of things happen, and it doesn't happen all at once with the revolution, but there's a kind of democratic ethos that grates against the established church. There's also a of religious pluralism that's emerging in the United States for a variety of reasons. And crucially, there's revivals. And the revivals, people are pushing back against the established church and the kind of spirituality that it seems to be nurturing. So all these forces and more come together to undo the old established church form. And it seems for a minute like there might be just chaos, or there might be no religion at all. In 1776, by one pretty good study, I think about 17% of Americans were affiliated with a congregation. So shockingly low, and it's because the institutional form was just so badly out of sync with the times.
[8:10] But there's this innovation in the late 18th and especially early 19th century, and this is the establishment of a voluntary association. And this is where members come together, they're relatively self-governing, and they come together with some particular purpose in mind, especially they're under this larger canopy of a national mission. And those voluntary associations come to structure all corners of American life, everything we think of as civil society, but religion in particular. It's the main place they come from, and it's where they're almost exclusively formed. So you move to a situation where the core things are not an established church with parishes, but rather congregations that then are part of denominations under a larger national polity. And I think that held for about 200 years, but in the long 1960s, it began to come unraveled, and now we're seeing it coming undone all around us.
[9:14] Um you talked actually to one of my colleagues who is um or in richmond junior um who is a disciple and i'm a disciple as well all right so i mean both of our that heritage um is very much a volunteer voluntary association kind of model um it was the nomination was very much which fit the context of American society.
[9:43] But it's interesting now for us to see how that is changing. And so then what does that mean for a denomination and tradition that was founded in that kind of milieu? How does that change, and what does it look like coming into the future and the decades ahead? Yeah, that's exactly right. Right. Disciples are native to that Second Great Awakening wave of revivals. So, never had the fantasy of an established church, and were kind of a native born in the voluntary association form. I do think that presents certain challenges. You know, I think the Catholic Church, for instance, has other institutional forms in its history, in its library, that it can draw upon. They're like, sure, we've been the house churches of nobles, we've been an established church, we've been monasteries that everybody attends, you know, we've been all these different kinds of things. And the congregation was actually kind of a hard... The Congregation as Voluntary Society was a hard thing for Catholics to adapt to in the United States. It took a number of years.
[11:01] They did eventually move there, but even so, it doesn't match their ecclesiology. So it's... It's easier to leave behind, I think, than for those of us in traditions that are sort of native to this ecology. What has brought about the unraveling of that tradition of the voluntary association? That's a great question. I think, you know, you get a standard explanation from people like Robert Bella and Tom Wolfe and Christopher Lash, all of whom I admire, but they see it as a kind of moral failing, that there's a selfishness that arises, an individualism that becomes the founding ethos, what Tom Wolfe calls the me generation.
[11:46] There is a dimension of that, but I think at the same time, we can't see it only as a moral failing. There are powerful material forces that are individualizing people today. I mean, the simplest example of that to me is the shift from a defined benefit pension plan with a company to a 401k. Like that's a fundamental shift in your material existence. And with a 401k, you're on your own. You are an individual. So that just goes all the way through society. I mean, it's there in free agency and sports leagues.
[12:26] But all these, and it's there in the breakup of unions as a really powerful force in the United States. So one way you, to me, one of the real important test cases for what's driving the individualization that we're seeing is who is the most broken out of voluntary associations?
[12:45] Now, if individualism is a kind of vice, a luxury of the wealthy, which is the way it's often cast, right? Who are nuns? Well, it's yuppies at brunch. That's who's not going to church. If that's the case, if it's a vice, then you would expect to see lower rates of attendance in the upper quartile of American income. But that's exactly the opposite of what we see. The people who are most likely to be part of a church are the people in that upper quartile in American religion. Religion, and the people who are most individualized, not part of a congregation, not part of a local civic organization, not part of any of these things, really on their own, that's the poorest quartile. And what that says to me is, if you just don't have any resources to resist these individualizing forms, they really bear down on you hard. And they bear down, then you're in a gig economy, which is really individualized, right? Or you're in the informal economy, and that's where you really see these trends accelerating. So that's where I think to tell the story of how individualization has happened, just as a moral failing, it doesn't get it. It doesn't get it all. You've got to tell this story in material terms as well.
[14:10] Yeah, I think it's interesting that you note about this not as a moral failing. Because I think, especially when we talk about individualization, we kind of always say it in negative terms and maybe not in positive or at least in neutral terms, that it's something that is part of the culture. Which then leads me to this question is, and I'm as guilty of this as anyone else, is that we tend to have a certain nostalgia for certain forms that are breaking down and look at them as, if we look at what's current as something that's flawed, then we look at what is maybe going away as something that was this kind of golden age.
[15:00] Yeah. So what is the downside of a voluntary association? What were the things, where did it fall short? Yeah. Let me just make a few brief responses to, you said so much there. I want to pick up on a few things. One is, for me, one of the important analytic shifts I'm trying to make is in stressing the material, it's the degree to which individualization is not a choice. Hmm. It's not just something we choose, it's imposed on us. So that's entirely compatible with it being bad, right?
[15:37] But it just means it's not a moral failing of individuals. If anything, that's a funny way in that analytic lens, right, to criticize individualism through an individualist sociology as a kind of moral failing. But it's not that. It's often imposed on us, especially on those with fewer resources to resist it. So that's the first thing. The second thing I'd say is that I absolutely don't want to be read or heard as saying that individualism is a good thing and it's a brave new world and on we go and who needs that bad old voluntary association. There is literature out there like that, kind of post-church or whatever kind of literature. I'm a grumpy old Calvinist, and I think every institutional form is shot through with sin and shot through with accommodations to the powers and principalities of this world. And I also think that the institutional forms of church life, all of them, can be used by God in the work of redemption. So there's a way in which I, you know, and if you look at the long scope of church history, hey, institutional forms have come and gone. The Holy Roman Empire was there. Now it's not. It had some, there were good things, there were bad things. So I can always hold these things, I think, at some distance. So now to the question you ended on, what were some of the downsides of the voluntary association? I think...
[17:07] A lot of these are historically contingent. It's not automatically hardwired into it. But the way that it evolved in the United States, one thing I would say is that it was uniquely well-adapted to Jim Crow-style segregation. Because you could say, hey, we don't have to integrate the church. We're just going to let people go wherever they want, wherever they want. But then those are going to be kind of like groups. And we also let individual voluntary associations police their own borders. So that's why King could say, you know, the most segregated hour in the United States is 11 o'clock on Sunday. That's right. And the voluntary association form facilitated that. You see a very different kind of thing, say, in England, where you have the established church, you have a lower voluntary association ethos. And so when immigrants from the broader British Commonwealth have come in, they come into the same parishes. I mean, there's still segregation, but it's not like it was in the United States. So I think the unique adaptability to Jim Crow is one thing. The other thing I would cite, and this really comes out when you read the 19th century arguments for the Voluntary Association from somebody like Lyman Beecher, but he sees the Voluntary Association as playing a crucial role in white Protestant manifest destiny.
[18:34] By which I mean, his vision, his argument for the seminary, he's raising funds for Lane Theological Seminary up and down the East Coast in the 1830s, 1820s, 1830s. And his argument is, look, this is in the Mississippi watershed. He's like, we've got to win the Mississippi watershed for Christ. And if we win the Mississippi watershed, we'll win the continent. And if we win the continent, we'll win the world. Now, how are we going to do that? Well, we need voluntary associations. He said they're like the lattice on which settlement grows. So, they're key to the settler project. And then what the seminary is, is what trains people to lead all the parts of the lattice. And so the Voluntary Association and his vision, and I think you can largely say in reality, was crucial to the project of white settlement. And it was also used self-consciously as a moral justification for it. What Beecher says is, hey, look, it's not just that the Voluntary Association is going to help us win the continent. It shows that we should, because who are we bumping into? Who's already here? Well, Catholics, and they're despotic, right? They should be displaced. And then these Native American tribes, and they're not democracies, they're not little societies like the Voluntary Association, so they should be displaced. So the Voluntary Association then becomes both the means and the justification for the White Settlement Project.
[20:03] Again, it could have been otherwise, but in fact it wasn't. And there are still residues of that deep in the kind of imaginary of the Voluntary Association. So I think those are things about which we're rightly ambivalent. What do you think, though, is, and I think, like you, I'm probably also, and because of my tradition, somewhat Calvinistic in that I think that there are things about anything that has both good and bad in it.
[20:40] And voluntary association obviously as you're saying had some good things but also had a lot of um bad things that you know aren't things that we would necessarily sometimes that we want to paper over and not always pay attention to so that kind of leads me to then what are we heading towards if that is breaking down it's changing for a lot of reasons reasons probably in the economy and culture in general what are we heading towards yeah especially for denomination but also for churches yeah i you know i i try to be chased in thinking about the future i'm i I'm a bootleg historian and a sociologist of sorts, so I'll make claims more confident about claims about the present and the past. So let me make a claim about the present, what I see happening right now.
[21:40] And that is, I do not think that what we're seeing is a secularization in the form of a kind of decline in religious beliefs and practices. That, I think, is not happening. Instead what I see is a surge of energies that you could only call religious or religious-ish or spiritual, something like that. A surge of those kinds of energies that are either not institutionalized and so they're somewhat ephemeral or they are being institutionalized in different ways.
[22:12] So what are the ways? One way I think that really fits these times is chaplaincy. What is a chaplain but a religious leader who is not the leader of a voluntary association right they're embedded in a very different kind of institution and we see chaplaincy growing in every dimension there's more students who want to become chaplains there are more people who want the services of chaplains because they don't have a regular uh congregational pastor and then there's more writing about chaplains there's more funding for chaplains that whole sector is growing um Um, that's one form and it fits exactly with this individualization that we're seeing across the society. The chaplain is uniquely positioned to serve those folks. A second form that I think you can see is the megachurch. The megachurch is a congregation of sorts, but megachurches increasingly, they function less and less like voluntary societies, especially over time. So some of the most megachurchy megachurches don't even have a concept of membership, right? That's not even where they're going.
[23:25] And people aren't involved in the governance and the institutional maintenance of the megachurch in the same numbers, in the same ways. You're not going to be asked to join the Christian Education Committee or the Building and Grounds Committee right away. And those activities that people do do, especially in small groups and other things, or if they're running the soundboard or something, it's very much tied to a kind of expressive identity, like that's who you are. It's really different than a mindset in which maintaining the institution is just good in itself because the institution is inherently valuable. So, chaplaincy megachurches. And a third thing that I see emerging are house churches of a whole bunch of different forms. Some of them in the kind of more fresh expression style or like the St. Lydia's Dinner Church in Brooklyn, you see those kinds of things. But some of them are just really small churches that kind of, when you boiled them down, they weren't really voluntary associations ever. They really were always extended networks of three or four families who've been together for a long time, and they're still together.
[24:35] And then you're like the cousin who isn't a member, but he's still part of the family, Right? So he's still kind of part of the congregation. So those, you know, congregations that look more like kinship networks, they seem to be thriving too, and they're very durable, you know? So those are three ways that I see... Christianity and just religious life more broadly adapting. I don't think, I mean, my worry about all three of those is that they're not, we haven't yet really figured out how to make them sustainable and how to make them oriented towards the public good and how to make them really, I mean, megachurches I think do better and worse, but oriented towards discipleship and kind of sustained patterns. I mean, those are the challenges, but those were the challenges that face the Voluntary Association in its early days, too. Yeah, I think in hearing this, at least two out of three of them, there are things that can be troubling. For sure. With the chaplaincy, obviously that's an important aspect in life that people need.
[25:45] But it's also, if it's not tied to people don't have that regular connection with someone, one, it's kind of that they have this person that they go to when it's just kind of an emergency. It doesn't really seem to form any kind of lasting bond there. And that's neither here nor there. I'm not saying it's necessarily good or bad, but it just seems like that's something I've noticed. And I think with the megachurch...
[26:15] For some reason, I just remember, maybe it was two years ago when they had the podcast, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, of the sense of that kind of powerful pastor, but there's no really connection beyond that, and that that could be a danger as well. Or just that it relies too much on individual relationships to a charismatic pastor without the kind of horizontal network of relations of people to each other. I think both of those are fair critiques of those models. The thing I would push back on a little bit, like when thinking about the voluntary association, especially opposed to, say, chaplaincy or something, I think another way in which the voluntary association often went wrong was in that the people were connected, but what was really important was the institution. And the institution often could grow in ways that displaced God even, right? Or Christian discipleship. So what are you really loyal to? Well, you're really loyal to First United Methodist Church of wherever USA. And then the church gets involved in respectability politics, and it marks your class identity. And so people are powerfully bonded to the church. But is that being powerfully bonded to God's great work of redemption?
[27:42] Yes and no. But I wouldn't want to romanticize those bonds. People were bonded to the institution, but that wasn't the same thing necessarily as being bonded to the work of God in the world.
[27:56] One of the things that you've talked about is that in changing the denomination is that they are becoming, in some ways, smaller and more homogenous in ways.
[28:10] And how in the past, sometimes there might have been a vote on contentious issues, but if the losing side would usually still stay, because they were, in the voluntary model, They were still connected to the denomination, and that's not the case anymore for a lot of different reasons. And we've seen schisms and things like that happening over the years, especially with LGBTQ issues and with mainline churches. What are the kind of the benefits and the drawbacks of denominations becoming more, for lack of a better word, more like affinity groups than they were, say, 20, 30 years ago? Yeah, I do think that dynamic is happening. There's a movement where the denomination becomes more like an affinity group or what Robert Wathenow called a special purpose group, which were, you know, in the 90s were activist groups within denominations. But now it's like the denominations have become those activist groups.
[29:16] And yes, with the splits, the denominations become more homogeneous. And I think it's exact, the dynamic you name where people who lose a vote leave, that's a very important dynamic. And I think it's because you've got to shift from a time when the institution itself was so powerful in people's social imaginary that you would stay even if you disagreed, right? It was part of your identity. It mediated your relationship to God. So you just couldn't even imagine not being Presbyterian or something, right? Right. And, and if you lost a vote, you're like, well, we're just going to get them next time. And you would fight and fight and fight, even if you were losing because the denomination was inherently valuable. But when you lose that sense of the voluntary association of the denomination as being inherently valuable, then when you lose a vote, you just, you're like, well, this is out of, and what's really valuable is your own self-expression, your own identity. When it, you know, it's about when it shifts to a language of identity. Well, then if that's what what really matters. When you lose a vote, you leave, and you go to something that more clearly expresses that identity.
[30:31] Um, what's gained and what's lost in those transitions. I think one thing that's gained, um, is, uh, at least for the short term, we're fighting less and denominations can actually do some work. Um, that's not all bad. Uh, I think there's all, I'm thankful for my students who have greater clarity about ordination and paths to ordination. Very thankful for that. Um, that those, those wars within denominations had a body count and it's usually the body count of younger people and I do not lament the cessation, you know, the ceasing of conflicts. What's lost? Well, sure, money, power and influence and institutional size, those are all lost as we splinter. I think all of these splits are like divorces in which it's not like you just split things 50-50 but you retain all of it. It's more like each side gets a third and a third is just lost.
[31:26] And that's true of the money, that's true of the members, there's a lot of people who are were put off by it, all those things. I think another thing that is lost is the denominations at their best were places where people who were very different had to connect with each other, and they had to kind of reason together. And partly that's just the goodness of difference, but I think like in the Presbyterian denomination that I know best, I stayed in the PCUSA, so I'm there with a more liberal wing, but boy, I miss the commitment to the Bible and I can already hear my liberal colleagues say, oh, we love the Bible too. I'm like, yeah, but it's not quite the same. I miss that and I miss the fervent piety.
[32:10] We're poorer without our evangelical colleagues and I think they're poorer without us. So I think each side is impoverished by that kind of split. And I think the church's witness is impoverished. It also makes the church even more ripe for a kind of takeover or subsumption into political movements because we're already... We're already functionally aligned with them. Almost all of our denominations are now. So then we just kind of, you know, it's too easy for them to become aligned with a bipolar America instead of being something genuinely other to the bipolar division we have.
[32:48] Yeah, I think one of the things that I have somewhat lamented in some ways is the loss of what I would call the big tent. Yeah. A belief in various parts of society that we are losing that because we don't have the opportunity really to speak to someone who might have a different viewpoint.
[33:10] And not argue with them, but literally kind of get to know them and know who they are. And that's becoming lost in a way. Yeah, I think this is an interesting, I've been thinking a lot about this lately. I think there are two places that I see where there are still sometimes big tents, and they're there for somewhat cynical, kind of Weberian sorts of reasons. To me, the most important ecumenical organization in North America is the Association of Theological Schools, because accreditation matters for your school. And what that means is that there's financial incentives, there's legitimacy incentives, all kinds of things. But what that means is you've got an incredible spectrum of institutions that want to be accredited. And it hasn't always been that way. I mean, the Catholic schools didn't really join until after Vatican II, so that's really recent. recent, Pentecostal schools were like, that's not us. It's just the anointing of the Lord. And we train people to be receptive to that. But they've joined since the 90s in large numbers. And then you've got the old mainline, you've got evangelicals. It's the Orthodox...
[34:26] Like it's the most diverse, most richly plural ecumenical body. And then you have to actually deliberate on standards for education, right? So there's like actual high stakes deliberation. So ATS is one place that's still a big tent. And if I can put in a plug for the university divinity schools, I think they are too. And that's not just because we're like, whatever, you know, so high minded. It, it's because there's extraordinary social capital, cultural capital that's invested in a degree from a top university-affiliated divinity school. And so the faculty might be too liberal for you, but I want that degree from Emory or from Duke or from Yale, and so I'm going to go. Or the faculty might be too conservative for you, but I'm going to go there. Or it might be too white for you or it might be too whatever for you. But those schools do tend to be bigger tents, I think.
[35:31] And again, that's for reasons that Max Weber would not be surprised by at all. But I think we've got to make use of what big tents we've got in the present moment. One question I have is that to see what is kind of pushing us towards that kind of more expressive model, is there anything about kind of the changing nature of American society?
[36:01] You know, one of the things about the Voluntary Association that we may think a lot about is that, For the most part, it was primarily white, whereas as America, we're becoming far more diverse in a lot of different ways. Is that one of the things that is kind of pushing this kind of newer, more expressive form that is just part of the change of what's the changing part of our society? Yeah, that's an interesting question, and it definitely is worth further study. But let me hazard a couple of thoughts on it. One is, you absolutely have to pay homage to the power of voluntary associations in African American life. And that is true of congregations, which are still among the strongest congregations, and they're definitely voluntary associations in form. The denomination, African American, historically black denominations are also extraordinarily strong.
[37:07] Fraternities and sororities, Jack and Jill, there's a whole network of those clubs or voluntary associations that are really still relatively strong. If anything, I would say stronger and more authorized maybe than some of their white counterparts. So I don't see it as, it's never been exclusively white. With that said, membership in a voluntary association is often what marked respectability. So it gets assimilated to a respectability politics that has been tied to norms of whiteness. And I think one place you see that is in, say, the movement for black lives being very ambivalent about religion and about even the involvement of congregations or anything like that. Part of it is because a number of folks have been hurt by those religious bodies that keep people in leadership, but also I think it's an aversion to the respectability politics that they see. So, yeah.
[38:07] The other thing I would say is that immigrant groups in the United States have a long history. Like what you do, and this is part of the strength of the voluntary association, hey, you come here and you just turn your religion into a voluntary association and you form your own and it's very conducive. Like they often become hubs of new Americans' identity, right? You've got the Polish parish, Catholic parish in Chicago, kind of is the hub for that whole community. So too with Korean American churches across the country right now, you know, on and on. So I would not say that it's being diluted by that the voluntary association is coming undone because of pluralism. At the same time, I do think you would see a historic alignment between the voluntary association and whiteness in the same way that whiteness kind of penetrated all of the powerful institutions of American life. That's not a very clear answer, but I think it gets at some of the things that I think are going on. Okay.
[39:16] Where do you see kind of the local congregation and denominations heading in the next, let's say, 15 to 20 years as we are moving towards this more expressive model? I think you've even talked about how that is moving towards a more, from a formation model to a more platform model. Model, to borrow actually from someone, Yuval Levin, has talked about that as well. Where do you see all of this heading? What are the good things that are going to happen, but maybe what are also the downsides? Yeah. Again, I want to be very wary about predicting the future, and part of that is just those are usually wrong, even if they're interesting empirically. And then theologically, Logically, I just want to hold open history as the theater of God's work, and I'm not going to presume to say what God will do.
[40:18] So I want to hold those things open. With that said, I think the trend lines that we're seeing, I think you'll continue to see chaplaincy grow. I think you'll continue to see the megachurch model grow, even if they're smaller, right? The mega is what's not as important there, and what's most important is the different kind of ethos. I think you'll continue to see those house churches and kinship networks grow. I also think within the voluntary association model, some of the ones that will really thrive are going to take on many of these expressive roles and space for expression for people. One thing a congregation, like I'm part of a 200-member congregation, it's exactly the kind That's on the endangered species list.
[41:12] But I think one thing we can do is to minimize the institutional overhead so that people aren't having to give time to that and then maximize the opportunities for expressive religious activity that I think that is genuinely connected to discipleship. Whether that's spiritual growth or work for social justice or care for the most, you know, the neediest members of our community, all those kinds of things, which is different than, you know, the finance committee and like all the things that just sustain the institution as a good in itself. So, to really thin that institutional side and build up the expressive side and then build it in ways that aren't narcissistic. Build it up in what, you know, it's not just, oh, I had this super great feeling today, but build it up in ways that really connect people to the work of God in the world. So, that's at least what I'll be hoping for. Sure. And I think denominations are going to get, we're going to see more of them. They're going to keep splitting. They're going to get smaller. But it's also, when you look at these splits, a lot of the churches that are leaving, they're not joining any denomination. They're going off on their own. And I think we're going to see more and more of that. And the other thing you're seeing is that even the churches staying in denominations are going off on their own, and the denomination is weaker and weaker vis-a-vis the churches. So I think all those things will continue.
[42:33] So if people want to learn more about you, how can they connect with you?
[42:42] They can connect. I'm at Candler at Emory. I don't do a lot on social media or really anything at all, but they can email me at ted.smith at emory.edu. And I think the book that is most about what you and I have been talking about is The End of Theological Education, and it's part of a series, Theological Education Between the Times, that I edited, and I'd commend all the books in that series. They're written from very different perspectives, and it's a lot of really amazing people. And I definitely do want to have you back to talk about, specifically, theological education, because I think that's also an important aspect of this. How does that work, in the model today. And I think that that's changing.
[43:29] I am a graduate from Luther Seminary, and Luther has changed a lot of how they are trying to, I think, respond to the current age. And I think that all of the seminaries are going to have to kind of figure that out, because the way that they did things 20, 30 years ago, it's just not working anymore. more. And the result is that you're actually seeing some seminaries closing because they weren't able to change in time. Yeah. And the seminaries that aren't closing are... My shorthand is I don't know of any seminary that isn't living on significant externalities. Whether that's an endowment or selling their campus or student debt should be counted as an externality, and so should adjunct labor. If you're running on adjunct labor, you're getting the externality out of your faculty. So some combination of those, uh, you know, you, if you have the endowment, you can, you can do a lot of things, but yeah. So all the schools that I know of are running on those externalities in one way or another. All right. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you for taking the time and, um, definitely hope to have you back again. All right. Thanks so much. All right. Take care.
[44:47] Music.
[45:21] So what do you think about the conversation? Is an affinity group better than a big tent denomination? Drop me a line. Let me know what you think. You can send me an email to churchandmain at substack.com. Also, if you are interested, you can consider donating via Venmo. You can give whatever amount you would like by going to at churchandmainpod. pod. Again, that is at church in Maine pod. And you can also donate via tip top jar. Again, you can leave a donation of any amount. Simply go to tip top jar.com backslash electric person. Your donation to either of these locations helps me to keep producing good episodes such as this one. And I hope that you will also pass this episode along to family and friends who might be interested. So that's it for this episode of Church in Maine. I'm Dennis Sanders, your host. As I always like to say, thank you so much for listening. Take care, Godspeed, and I will see you very soon.
[46:32] Music.
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