[Salvation]

**Only 31 percent of mainline adults believe they have a personal responsibility to discuss their faith with people who have different beliefs and a minority of them are presently involved in some type of personal discipleship activity. **

A very sad number.

[Patrick1]

You can't call a church mainline if it no longer preaches and teaches the Gospel of Jesus Christ. What the MSM calls mainline are political country clubs for the politically correct pagan and the faux religion of global warming. It should come as no surprise they are dying.

[MSF BU]

If the gray hair I see every time I’m in Church is any indication, I’d say there is going to be a huge decline in the need for church parking lots over the next 20 years.

[diverteach]

Real people aren’t going to sit in the pew for 20 years listening to heresy and stick around.

accepting homo’s for clergy positions and now this ;http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2402432/posts

I’d hate to be them come judgement day.

[Recovering_Democrat]

Mainline churches are declining, imo, because they are being so open minded their brains fall out.

Sarcasm aside, the essential problem is they no longer emphasize Sola Scriptura and Christ as The Way, Truth and Life.

What follows from that is the liberal social and economic policies we here at Free Republic disdain so much.

Don’t know if the United Methodist Church is considered “mainline”, but they are going that way, too.

A danger resides in stand alone evangelical churches: hobby horses, the danger of exclusivity, and some other problems. We in evangelicalism would do well to beware, even as we see the Christian churches of yesteryear go the way of the dinosaur.

[marron]

The "mainline" denominations aren't mainline anymore. They are dying.

The why is simple; when the spirit departs the body dies.

many Hispanics are found to be leaving Catholicism and joining Protestant churches, but they're mostly settling into evangelical or Pentecostal Protestant congregations.

There is an interesting dynamic. The fast growing churches are being flooded with people of catholic background. There is a kind of cross fertilization going on as mainline protestants become catholics and catholics migrate into especially the "non-denominationl" evangelical movements. The effects are seen not so much at the doctrinal level where doctrines remain pretty firm, but at the level of a kind of sensibility.

[opocno]

Regarding other comments about demographics, my church (a Christian Reformed Church [the more conservative of the two Dutch Calvinist denominations]) has bazillions of kids. I know because I sit in the back. It is amazing to see how many good [any generally well-educated, unlike the liberal stereotypes] folks are having 3-5 kids these days. Gives one hope. It doesn’t mean that our pastor is politically incorrect (he still hates the Iraq war; on the other hand, he did subtly slam the Lutherans for going gay), it just means that preaching the Gospel and holding up the Bible as a guidepost for all of us is an honest and attractive message.

[Opinionated Blowhard]

I agree with all of the above. Mainline “churches” are social clubs at best and, at worst, have been perverted into advocates for “social justice” and other statist causes. Good riddance to bad rubbish (and I say this as someone who grew up in a “mainline” denomination).

[Rosemont]

Thank you Evangelicals. The West needs strong Protestant churches.

[MWS]

This isn’t really all that surprising.

Evangelical Churches have a vibrant faith. They have faith in Christ, faith in the Scriptures, and faith in the workings of the Holy Spirit.

Mainline Churches, for the most part, have become little more than, “Let’s-Dress-Up-On-Sundays-And-Play-Happy-Feel-Good-Hour.” Sure, many of them, such as the Episcopalian Church, have wonderful liturgies but that means nothing when there is no substance involved.

I myself am fond of traditional liturgies, which is why I have not gone the Evangelical path myself. Fortunately, I attend an Anglican church in California - our diocese broke away from the ECUSA and is quite traditional in its faith. Were it not for this, I’d personally probably put aside my love of liturgy for my love of sound doctrine in Christ - outward forms must always take a backseat to living faith.

Catholics, along with Orthodox Christians, are in a unique position in that the nature of their views precludes the idea of the faithful departing the Church. Sedevancatists aside, the more faithful one is to traditional Church teaching the less likely they will be to depart from the Church itself due to Church teaching that it IS the One True Church of Christ. This has granted these Churches an advantage in being able to maintain their more faithful and zealous members. As Protestants, however, we do not believe this about our own denominations and thus the tendency to leave and form new groups when the old are found wanting.

[redgolum]

See it happening across the board.

I also have seen many of those who go to the Evangelical churches leave for nothing.

We are living in a post Christian age.