Two Moves for the Mainstream Church to Get its Groove Back

A local pastor breaks down how liberals can reach the faithful and fight the aspiring autocrats.

The Rev. Dale Rosenberger is an associate pastor at San Clemente Presbyterian Church. He has written three books and led 12 Habitat for Humanity trips to Latin America, where he and his peeps have built 96 homes in seven different nations. We have been exchanging e-mails, and I asked if he would consider writing a piece on how, “Libs might reach the faithful.”

This gem is worth the price of admission …

Rev. Dale Rosenberger

The evangelicalist church always posed as the one, true church. Mainline churches were children of a lesser God. Born into the former, I ministered in the latter for 40 years. (FYI—evangelicalists sport a scorched earth theology, dooming to hell all unlike themselves; evangelicals, like in my church, dislike my references to their president but we remain side by side, ministering together.)

The evangelicalists asserted an exclusive, private link to Jesus with algebraic questions like, “Do you know Jesus as personal Lord and Savior, and take him into your heart?” Never mind this only remade Christians in their image rather than that of Jesus. Their power-seeking brand of church hardened not only into Project 2025 but into a prosperity gospel that forsakes the cross of Christ. They used insider buzzwords like anointed and saved in ways to serve and seal elitist legitimacy.

That was then, but this is now. Now Russell Moore, a discarded Southern Baptist dignitary, and current editor of Christianity Today, sees the proud self of his former denomination in deep crisis.

“It was the result of having multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically in their preaching—‘turn the other cheek’—only to have someone come up after to say, ‘Where did you get those liberal talking points?’” Moore told All Things Considered. “What was alarming to me is that is that in most of these scenarios when the pastor would say, ‘I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ,’ the response would not be, ‘I apologize.’ The response would be, ‘Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak.’ When we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we are in a crisis.”

That swing describes how the most fervent and purist churches in America hitched their star to an adjudicated rapist, a business swindler, a narcissistic liar, and a multiple felon. As stunning as that swing is, and the raw power grab behind it, our stunned silence is an inadequate response.

Will the mainline church seize the mantle of authenticity by mustering the will for God’s work on earth and fire the world’s imagination for what’s possible in a dark era closing in around our ears? The moment is ripe for this. But we’ll miss this opportunity if we proceed with business as usual. To make such a difference when it matters most, two foundational considerations are foremost.

First, mainstream (or mainline, if you like) churches have historically been the ultimate insiders. The Pilgrims and Puritans organized churches in ways that became the template for democracy. Nearly everyone signing the Declaration of Independence was Episcopal or Congregational. The church which ordained me also founded the Harvards, Yales, Darmouths and University of Illinois. As other churches migrated to America, dwarfing us in numbers, we retained outsized influence.

That day of the church favored with insider status is over in America, not just for us, but for any church. Getting coopted by worldly power is a slow death. For we lose prophetic leverage as we must cower to imperial whims. The Church has always been part congregation (a local gathering), part institution (widely unpopular, but allowing us to exist for 2,000 years), and part movement.

Now we recover faith as countercultural movement again. Picture Jesus ranging back and forth between poor, rural Galilean hills only to confront the Jewish-Roman-Jerusalem power nexus.

Picture 12 apostles infiltrating the known world, preferring to die rather than stop spreading a Gospel at once saving, transforming and liberating, for slaves and free, peasants and noblemen.

Picture the early Roman Christians wading into the Tiber River, rescuing and raising discarded infant girls whose only sin was not being male. Picture them feeding 15,000 starving souls daily, ignoring the bread-and-circuses of the corrupt empire advancing their cause by violent conquest.

One thing I cannot picture is apostles like Paul or Peter going to the Roman Senate and imploring their help in building God’s just new reign, as if their mission was impossible, except as insiders. That is the mistake the mainstream churches are making today. We who accustomed to being on the inside of the American empire must now step outside of ourselves as chaplains to the empire. We who are well-versed in activism must search our spiritual imagination for acts of resistance.

What acts of resistance? They are only revealed just now as birth pangs of God’s coming reign. Extraordinary spiritual imagination is required to discern them. Some San Clemente churches already wrap themselves around vulnerable local Latin Americans, getting them passports and other forms of legitimization so that the current powers-that-be will be unable to deport them.

They don’t go to their church’s ruling body. They don’t ask permission. They act as a movement.

Another example. Beginning as pastor in a Columbus, Ohio church, I learned of former grass roots efforts to resettle Cambodian escapees from the killing fields of Pol Pot for a new life in America. Many of them had beheld their parents’ murder. Determined members sought official sanction for this mission from the church governing body, but were refused. It seemed too big.

So, they became a movement and did it anyway. They helped them find apartments and taught them how pay their bills. They helped them obtain driver’s licenses and taught them how things worked in a strange new land. Children from two Cambodian families became high school valedictorians.

When the Church throws up its arms, hopeless about making a difference as coercion, injustice, and abuse multiply, how can the world hope? To seize that difference our transforming witness can make, we forsake privileged insider status to become more like peaceful guerrillas of grace.

We ditch tired corridors of conservative vs. liberal activism in favor of creative acts of resistance. As one hymn put it, resisting an ill-begotten war, “New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient truth uncouth; they must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.”