Now you can’t broad-brush the emergent movement. But I saw two big problems in the emergent world.

First, the emergents are so sensitive to issues of community, relationship, egalitarianism, and being non-utilitarian in their relationships, that evangelism has simply become a synonym for manipulation””a foul ball, relationally. If you and I were work colleagues and I built a relationship in which I could influence your journey toward Christ, that would be considered wrong in these circles. I cannot be friends with you if I intend to lead you to Christ.

Second, after 10 or 12 years of the emerging church, you have to ask where anything has been built. Evangelism has been so muted and the normal building of structures and processes hasn’t moved forward because there’s no positive, godly imagination for doing either evangelism or leadership. Such things are by definition utilitarian, and so they were made especially difficult.

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NG: I think what tends to happen is the course is representative of the area. So, for instance, most people who live in Islington are probably what you’ve just described as de-churched. But in China, most of the people who come on the course might be atheist. At a conference we did in Singapore, most of them described themselves as ‘free-thinkers’ beforehand. In different parts of the world there are different backgrounds. When we looked at the analysis of our own course here I think it was pretty representative of what the population at large is. I think 75% of the population of this country are probably still de-churched. It’s the younger end, the 25%, the merging generation, who have no church background at all.

AR: So the ‘un-churched’?

NG: Yes, if you turn that category de-churched in to the un-churched, I would say the make-up of Alpha here is probably like that: 75% are un-churched.

AR: What do you think the aspect of un-churched people is, if we can use that term? What is missing, or what are the questions that they don’t have answers to, which Alpha attempts to address?

NG: It’s very interesting because the un-churched are the new people coming in. The younger end tend to be the un-churched, the ones who’ve got no baggage at all. And in a sense they come at it with a great advantage, in some ways.

AR: What sort of baggage are you talking about?

NG: Well, experience of thinking of Christianity as boring, for example, because they’ve got no experience at all of Christianity. If you’ve had an experience where you’ve been at school or you’ve been involved in services and you’ve thought, ‘That’s so dull,’ yes, you’ve got some information but also it’s something that may have put you off, whereas if you haven’t got that experience at all you come to it with completely fresh eyes. So there’s a mixture of people, and there are advantages and disadvantages in both of those.

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In developed countries, including the U.S., England and the rest of Europe, membership and average attendance also are down. Fewer than one million attend church regularly in England, where the mother church is officially 28-million strong. “They just go to have the baby christened and never come back,” says Mr. Nicolosi.

In the U.S., the ranks of the Episcopal Church have thinned by 55 percent, dropping from a peak of 3.5 million in 1964 to 2.2 million in 2007.

Still, declining church attendance is not universal. Attendance at the Pentecostal, Baptist and Christian Missionary Alliance churches is growing. “Evangelicals don’t just study the Bible, they study the culture and then connect the two,” says Mr. Nicolosi.

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Young United Methodist clergy see the elephant in the sanctuary ”“ the fact more ministers are headed for retirement than the pulpits ”“ and they are grabbing the mops.

The concerned under-35 crowd is doing what comes naturally. It is using social media ”“ Facebook, Twitter and blogs ”“ to form an online community to search for ways to draw more young people into ministry and into the pews.

A core group of 10 young clergy met with the United Methodist Board of Higher Education and Ministry in February. As a result, hundreds of young clergy are now talking and creating relationships in cyberspace through their own Web site, www.umcyoungclergy.com.

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“The heartbeat of our Episcopal Church will forever be ‘mission, mission, mission.'”

This statement of “priorities” appeared in the published budget presented to the 76th General Convention in Anaheim, California, by the Joint Standing Committee on Program, Budget and Finance. There can be no doubt that mission is a central priority of the Episcopal Church. Sixty-two percent of our budget is expended on program and mission.

Sadly, the budget for the 2010-2012 triennium shows scant concern for what, in the absence of better language, I would label “branding,” “marketing” and “advertising” the Episcopal Church. Actually, I do have better language — evangelism.

In the upcoming triennium, the Episcopal Church plans on spending more than $3 million to preserve our past through our Archives Offices and another $3 million to communicate with our own members through budgeted communications expenses and such vehicles as Episcopal Life.

Nowhere is there evidence of an equivalent financial commitment to sharing the Episcopal Church’s compelling story of mission and ministry and our unique presentation of the gospel of Jesus Christ in a strategic, systematic and significant way to the millions of people in this country who are unchurched and who, according to reliable research, increasingly identify themselves as “not Christian.” In fact, in passing the budget for the upcoming triennium, the 76th General Convention skewered an exciting and carefully developed plan for strategic evangelism and growth among Hispanics and Latinos, the single largest-growing segment of our nation, allocating only $300,000 for the project instead of the $3 million originally requested by those ready to do the work.

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The Everybody Welcome package includes a leader’s manual, booklets for members, and a DVD of interviews and footage demonstrating the effects of a good welcome. The course gives tips such as: train a dedicated ”˜Welcome Team’ to look out for newcomers, analyse whether the service is sufficiently engaging, and check the quality of post-service refreshments.

The course has been designed by the Archdeacon of Walsall, the Ven Bob Jackson, and Lichfield’s director of Parish Mission, George Fisher. Archdeacon Jackson said: “The first hurdle for visitors is are we going to find friendliness when we turn up? And I think in most churches, and certainly the better ones, they do. The big problem is how to get in. Anyone can attend a service, but how do you start belonging to a church community?”

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As a bishop friend said to me in a personal email from Anaheim a day or two ago, the trend seems to be for TEC to become a stand-alone American denomination rather than part of the worldwide church. Clearly, the presence and advice of the Archbishop of Canterbury for a few days meant little or nothing to the majority of the House of Deputies. As the same episcopal friend also said, those who are for inclusion do not seem to realize that for a large chunk of us that means exclusion — although we certainly have no desire to be excluded from catholic Christianity through the Communion.

This whole exercise is not about sexuality or sexual behavior, but is fundamentally about what we believe the Christian faith to mean and be about. When it comes down to it, it is about our attitude toward Jesus as God’s Son, the nature of the Trinity, divine revelation, Christian obedience, and holiness of life. The cavalier attitude of the Presiding Bishop to the creeds and their recitation is evidence that she considers the likes of me as pedantic has-beens rather than those who are on the cutting edge — but the cutting edge of what?

Yet the truth really is, as you look around the world, that those who are pushing this worn out postmodern melange and calling it Christian are increasingly the has-beens. They seem to have tied themselves to the coat tails of the last dribblings of the least attractive side of the Enlightenment, and it is entirely likely that they will disappear down the drain with them. I say this as an Episcopalian who lives in England and now functions as part of the church under great pressure.

The church in England is wrestling to adapt to an altogether more secular and hostile climate than exists in most of the USA, and what is interesting, I don’t see postmodern Christianity standing up very well in such an environment. It is a limp and aging rag.

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The Episcopal Church is an institution in long term systemic decline. Just take a look at the 1997-2007 change in membership numbers documented here or really read thoughtfully the State of the Church report (especially the charts, page 14, page 17, etc.) there.

So: Where is the strategic discussion of evangelism and church growth? A parish involved in healthy evangelism has three things: a good newcomers ministry, a good ministry to the unchurched, and a ministry to the lapsed. In most Episcopal churches if you are very blessed you will find a somewhat adequate newcomer ministry. That is all. What about the unchurched? What about church planting?–KSH

Some conservatives who stayed with the Episcopal Church even though they disagreed on gay bishops and blessing same-sex marriage are concerned that sexuality issues interfere with the church’s missions and development in Third World countries. Since 2003, some African and South American Anglican archbishops have refused to take communion with Episcopal Church leaders or partner with the church on projects.

“There is a whole swath of the Episcopal Church struggling to make their way forward to do missions and the work of the church,” says Kendall Harmon, canon theologian for the Diocese of South Carolina.

He opposes gay bishops and gay blessings, but Harmon calls the current moratoriums a “fig leaf” that should be lifted so the church can be “honest” about its theological direction.

Still, both efforts may stall, says supporter Jim Naughton, canon for communications for the Diocese of Washington, D.C

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Sadly, many people are going to hear this [news of a recent survey showing many religious groups losing ground] and bemoan the losing of a Christian America. Regrettably, too many people are going to be so caught up in their political agendas that they miss what this means for real Christianity. Unfortunately, so many people are going to view this as Christians losing the fight for a Christian nation that they will forget God never asked us to produce a Christian nation. He asked us to get the message of forgiveness and freedom to one more person.

With that in mind, this doesn’t mean we’re losing the battle. Rather, it means the fields are more white than they’ve been in a long time. There are more people who aren’t religious. That means there are more people who are going to be recognizing something is missing, even if they aren’t going to be completely up front about it.

I remember the story of two shoe salesmen who were sent into a tribal country to try to expand sales. The first called home and said, “I’ve got bad news. We’ve made a big mistake. Nobody here wears shoes. I’m coming home.” The second one called back and said, “I’ve got great news. Nobody here wears shoes. Everyone is a potential customer. Send more shoes.”

Which salesman are you?

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For two decades beginning in the early 1950s, John McCandlish Phillips composed elegant newspaper stories under grueling deadline pressure for the New York Times, earning a reputation as one of his generation’s great reporters. In his 2003 memoirs, Arthur Gelb, a longtime editor at the paper, described him as “the most original stylist I’d ever edited….”

Mr. Phillips stunned the staff when he decided to leave full-time employment in 1973 at the age of 46. The New Yorker magazine much later called him “The Man Who Disappeared” and wondered why a figure with so much talent would “walk away from it.”

But Mr. Phillips did not disappear. He channeled his imagination into the church he had co-founded with Hannah Lowe a decade or so earlier, the Manhattan-based New Testament Missionary Fellowship, a small Pentecostal congregation. His dream was to spur a massive evangelizing campaign in New York City that would result in waves of born-again Christians.

“What everyone in this city needs, with scarcely anyone knowing of it, is the one salvation that God has provided in His son, Jesus Christ,” he told me in a recent interview. “My life was changed in a moment of time, permanently, by an act of evangelism [in 1950]. I know its power. And I have no chiefer desire than to see as many individuals as possible come to that same threshold and cross it.”

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We have to admit that evangelism is not our greatest gift. I say that because we have at least two situations where we have not been successful in evangelizing neighbourhoods and have rented space to other Christian fellowship groups who have gone on to do an amazing job and have quite large, healthy and vibrant congregations. Instead of thinking of the reasons why we didn’t manage it – there is no blame here – let’s find out how we could be more successful in the future. Don’t get me wrong, I am very pleased that through these other communities people have come to Christ, but I refuse to believe that we can’t be just as successful in our mission to make disciples.

Our proclamation is rooted in Christ where we find the power of life and change. Are we trying to keep Christ locked inside our churches? 2 Corinthians 5:17, So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! Do we consider ourselves new creations in Christ?

It is a risky business. I was talking to a young adult who has left the Anglican church about two weeks ago. He said that he liked the church but that he really didn’t know what we were about, so when he wanted answers and direction he felt lost. I was sad that he had not found the people to answer his questions. I have invited him to keep talking to me ”“ I don’t know if he will take me up on the offer but whether I have the answers or not I am called by my own baptismal promises to offer to talk.

In order to proclaim the gospel ”“ we need to know the gospel, to study it, to live it ”“all of it not just the parts we like the best or the parts that further our plans. We need an incredibly deep understanding of scripture. In fact, we need to wrestle with the scriptures ”“ it is meant to be work.

—The Rt. Rev. Jane Alexander, Bishop of Edmonton, Canada

“What if church wasn’t just a building, but thousands of doors?” asks a new website launched by the United Methodist Church. “Each of them opening up to a different concept or experience of church. . . . Would you come?” After watching its membership drop nearly 25 percent in recent decades, the United Methodist Church, which is still the nation’s largest mainline Protestant denomination, thinks it knows the answer. So it’s pouring $20 million into a new marketing campaign, including the website, television advertisements, even street teams in some cities, to rebrand the church from stale destination to “24-7 experience.”

“The under-35 generation thinks church is a judgmental, hypocritical, insular place,” says Jamie Dunham, chief planning officer for Bohan Advertising & Marketing, the firm that designed the United Methodist campaign. “So our question is: What if church can change the world with a journey?”

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Shrinking mainline Protestant denominations are turning to marketing to help stem decades of membership losses and stay afloat.

The United Methodist Church recently unveiled a $20 million rebranding effort aimed at attracting younger members to the large but diminishing Protestant group. The new ads will appear over the next four years as part of the denomination’s “Rethink Church” campaign.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has invested nearly $1.2 million over the past two years launching a similar branding effort based on the theme, “God’s Work, Our Hands.”

The denominations are trying to bounce back from losses that began in the mid-1960s.

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Nearly three million Americans are now aligning themselves with other religious movements, such as New Age and Wicca. And the number of self-declared Muslims has doubled over the last two decades from .3 to .6 percent.

Bishop Michael Curry of North Carolina’s Episcopal Diocese says America is going through a cultural change.

“I would argue that people are more profoundly religious and expressing it, but it’s coming out in new ways,” he said. “You hear it in language about ‘spirituality.’ You may not hear it as consistently in terms of institutional religion, but the spiritual quest (is there), the hunger.”

To feed that hunger, the Episcopal Diocese has launched a new ad campaign to help attract worshippers, particularly younger ones.

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Around half-a-million people are expected to attend Back to Church Sunday in the UK on September 29.

Billed as one of the largest co-ordinated evangelism events to take place in recent history, it is hoped that this year’s event will be the biggest yet.

Every one of the Church’s 44 dioceses is taking part in inviting someone they know who used to attend church.

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The first time Norma Freeman strayed from her Catholic faith, it was for love.

The second time, she was seeking new spiritual experiences.

Both times, Freeman came back. Now she’s 80 and volunteers her time to reach out to lapsed Catholics.

She’s one of the laypeople involved with the Catholics Returning Home program at St. Patrick Church in London in Madison County.

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Last weekend, Trinity celebrated its 10th anniversary. Its parishioners, numbering 500 to 700 every Sunday, attend prayer groups and take communion. But they do so while a band plays original works as well as contemporary songs based on traditional hymns.

Now, Trinity is at a crossroads. Mr. Mathes’s bandmate, Ian Cron, 48, is stepping down as lead pastor. At the same time, Mr. Mathes’s outside career is growing — he was the musical director for President Barack Obama’s pre-inaugural celebration. The church hired recruiters to search for a new pastor. Neither of the two leading candidates is a musician.

Trinity’s “season of change,” as Mr. Mathes describes it, is emblematic of the struggle that many religious institutions face as they reach a certain age: how to reach a new generation while remaining relevant to the needs of the congregation. But at churches like Trinity, which identify as Christian but deliberately choose not to connect with any denomination, the transition is especially challenging. These churches were founded by people in rebellion against established institutions. Ten years down the road, they have become the establishment.

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The Catholic faith is not simply a collection of doctrines and ideas, or a body of knowledge, or even a system of beliefs, although all those things are important. At its root, Christianity is an experience: a life-changing, personal experience of the risen Jesus Christ. Everything else in the writings of St. Paul, and everything else in our life as Catholics, flows from that personal encounter with Jesus Christ. If we truly seek him, then we will always find him. But when we find him, we need to be ready for the consequences, because nothing about our lives can be the same.

Let me share a story with you to explain what I mean. It’s about a young man named Franz who lived about sixty years ago in a small village in Austria. Franz was the illegitimate son of a farmer who later died in World War I. He was a wild teenager. Local people recall that he was the first one in his village to drive a motorcycle. And it’s not because he drove safely or kept to the posted speed limits.

Franz was the leader of a gang that used to fight rival gangs in neighboring towns with knives and chains. He was something of a cad, too, and a womanizer. He got a girl pregnant and was forced to leave town. People said he went to work for awhile in an iron mine.

For reasons nobody knows, Franz came back a changed man. He had always gone to church, even during his wildest days. But when he returned, he was a serious Catholic, not just a Sunday Catholic. He started making payments to support the child he had fathered out of wedlock. He married a good Catholic woman and settled down to become a good farmer, husband and father, raising three children and serving as a lay leader in his local parish….

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This is not the first time that Mr. [Brian] McLaren has singled out Anglican churches as perhaps best suited for worldwide evangelism in the 21st century. During his plenary address to bishops and spouses at the Lambeth Conference in July, he said the Anglican Communion, with its worldwide network of episcopally led, locally governed churches, is the prime candidate to bring culturally divergent people into a closer relationship with a church community.

But if that opportunity is to be grasped, he said this week, bold and critical action is needed by a cohort of creative and courageous bishops. These bishops must create “a zone of innovation and empowerment, a zone in which creative young and emerging leaders can be supported to plant new faith communities relevant to the needs of young adults.” Such a move, Mr. McLaren said, could do for the 21st century Episcopal Church what the Church of England failed to do for the followers of John Wesley in the 19th century.

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Survey research, most recently the Pew Forum’s United States Religious Landscape Survey, shows plainly that we and most other mainline traditions are losing ground. In our case, for every seven people entering an Episcopal church, 10 are leaving. That’s not a sustainable trend.

The survey points up an interesting countertrend worth pondering. The one bright light of significant growth in the mainline group of churches is ”“ are you sitting down? ”“”nondenominational.”

We might summarize the trends the report identifies in a simple statement: The denominational structures that we inherited, those traditions once central to shaping our identity and sense of community, are answers to a question fewer and fewer people are asking.

In this era of spiritual air travel, the giant ocean liners of our traditional denominational polities are seen as inefficient, slow and generally unpleasant means of getting to where seekers ”“ and even a good number of people born into our traditions ”“ want to go.

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Not everything people see on Twitter is gospel — but some of it is.

In an effort to spread its message in the world of social networking, Trinity Wall Street Episcopal Church married microblogging and social networking with the Gospel Friday when it told the Passion of Christ, the story of the crucifixion, in posts of 140 characters or fewer.

From noon-3 p.m., a church worker posted 18 tweets adapted from the Gospel of Mark. The story was largely told through the eyes of six characters: Jesus, Mary, Mary Magdalene, Peter, a serving girl and Pontius Pilate.

One tweet read, ”ServingGirl: is so tired. Caiaphas and the priests have been up all night questioning a man who claims to be the Messiah. And I wait on them.”

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Rick Richardson is a professor at Wheaton College and the author of a book called Evangelism Outside the Box. He tells the story of a pastor named Dan who realized that his preaching was getting stale. So, with the support of his pastoral team, he took a part-time job at a nearby Starbucks coffee shop. And before anyone even thinks to suggest it, I am NOT taking a part-time job at The Pampered Palate!

So Pastor Dan when to work at the local Starbucks. Much to his surprise, all 21 people he worked with believed in God. Not one of them was an atheist. They were all very positive toward God and toward spirituality.

Yet Pastor Dan was surprised to discover that while they believed in God and were interested in things “spiritual,” he also discovered that they were NOT interested in Christians, Christianity, or the church. No one wanted to hear Dan’s proofs for God, his invitations to church, or his ideas about salvation. Most of them thought they knew what Christianity was all about and had decided they didn’t want it. They were what some people call “post-Christian.”

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“The principle pain in hearing is that we just don’t want to hear some things,” [Fred] Craddock said. “We avoid things we don’t want to hear because they might disturb us.”

One of those things, Craddock implied, is the verbal sharing of one’s faith, a practice he said many have abandoned by letting others’ distasteful misuse and distortion of evangelism silence their own witness.

Too many Christians buy into the idea that a vocal witness is not important and “words don’t mean anything,” Craddock said, when the truth is that “words mean everything.”

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The Southern Baptist Convention, which is launching a new national campaign to bring unbelievers to Jesus, is up against a major obstacle: motivating its own members to evangelize.

But it may be the only effective way to reach people, according to a survey of 15,173 people by LifeWay Research, a Christian research firm.

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Leaving the Episcopal denomination (while remaining in the Anglican Communion) has given Mr. [John] Yates the freedom to plant churches in urban areas amid many Episcopal churches. (One is next door to Christ the King.) His goal is to plant 20 churches in northern Virginia before retiring. Christ the King was the third, and a fourth was recently planted in Arlington. Mr. Kurcina, 33, who is my son-in-law, is preparing to plant a fifth in Fairfax County.

For a growing number of young preachers like Christ the King’s Mr. [David] Glade, planting and then leading a new church is an ideal option. As orthodox Anglicans, they didn’t feel welcome in the Episcopal church. And they felt a strong calling to lead their own parish. Mr. Glade grew up as an Episcopalian in Jacksonville, Fla. After graduation from Florida State, he came to The Falls Church as an intern and spent four years as a youth leader before attending Trinity Seminary outside Pittsburgh. He returned to The Falls Church eager to lead a theologically conservative Anglican congregation. “In order to do that, you had to go out and do it yourself,” he told me.

“Every new church has an awkward phase, figuring out who they are and getting to know each other,” Mr. Glade says. That phase is over. Christ the King has also become financially self-sufficient. It aims to be a “healthy church,” like its parent. “A healthy church reproduces itself,” Mr. Glade says. Christ the King may soon do just that. Its assistant rector wants to plant his own church.

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“There’s some pretty solid evidence that shows church growth is countercyclical to economic growth, [Ed] Stelzer [President of Lifeway Research in Nashville, Tennessee] told Christianity Today, citing a 2007 study by Texas State University professor David Beckworth.

The “Praying for Recession” study found that the rate of growth in evangelical churches jumped by 50 percent during each recession between 1968 and 2004. By comparison, mainline Protestant churches continued their decline in numbers, though a bit more slowly.

—Christianity Today, March 2009, page 18

Evangelising could be legally regarded as harassment, should new European Union (EU) equality legislation be approved, warns the Church.

The anti-discrimination proposals, to be considered by the 27 EU member states this year, have also been criticised by The Law Society, who feels the law could cut both ways.

In an official submission to the EU, the Society illustrated the potential problems: “In a shop or shared lodging house, there may be a notice board on which is posted material that some of those who see it will find offensive on religious grounds (for instance, a poster for a film, such as The Life Of Brian).”

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Churches that look like cafes and serve coffee and offer guided chanting and meditation could become the norm as the diocese looks for ways to reach out to a wider group of followers.

Traditional pastoral models would be tweaked to include more of what was relevant to today’s community, Anglican diocese of Newcastle ministry development officer Father David Battrick said.

“We will reconnect with ancient forms of spirituality like chanting that engages all the senses and tap into older forms of the eucharist that was common practice in the church 100 years ago,” he said.

Research showed there was great interest in spirituality, as distinct from religion, prompting the church to look at ways of helping people in their spiritual quest.

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Take a look at the figures and see what you make of them.