I have a new post up at the Colossian Forum blog (www.colossianforum.org/category/blog/. The entry notices the article published in late summer "No Money, No Honey, No Church: The Deinstitutionalization of Religious Life Among the White Working Class" (see www.virginia.edu/marriageproject/pdfs/Religion_WorkingPaper.pdf). One additional reflection on the piece written there: it seems entirely possible that one unintentional consequence from the church growth, megachurch movements, the Republicanization, and the suburbanization of North American evangelical Christianity was the abandonment of engaging the increasing social and economic diminishing of the middle class in the United States. The de-industrialization and two-tiered economy has not provided resources to sustain congregational life and support those who have been downwardly mobile in the past 30 years. Instead the consumerism of the neo-liberal structures has worked itself out in serial monogamy (with or without marriage), instability for children and alienation from the moral life embraced by the church, and being turned over to the relativism of the culture.

This group had been the mainstay of the Church of the Nazarene in the United States -- as the church embraced the church growth, they absorbed the ethos of the republicanizing, upper-middle class of those who could finance the church in its services. Of course, this led to the academics absorbing the democratic, bohemian bourgeois ethos of the educated elite in opposition to local congregations. Focusing on "personal needs" rather than the Christological center for the church, the last forty years has led to the church merely duplicating the overall cultural contradictions and tensions. The full results, however, are starting to emerge. I recently saw statistics about the loss of youth in the Church of the Nazarene over the last decade -- a statistic that is directly affecting enrollment at Nazarene Universities -- and even seminary.

As the economy continues to bifurcate and the commitment of the church to the laissez-faire economics of the wealthy, the church will continue to lose its witness among the bulk of the population in the United States. Unless economic and institutional means are available to support congregations within the "marginaliy educated" with their economic struggles, the church's witness will continue to have less and less impact among these people.

Still, remember that tomorrow a Russian Orthodox congregation in a "suburb" will celebrate the nativity of Jesus because of food donated through a witness of another congregation from urban San Diego. All sorts of surprises happen, even as the combination of state and market seem to work together to weaken the life of the church in the United States.