Reinventing American Protestantism

I just finished reading Donald Miller's Reinventing American Protestantism. Miller, a sociology professor from the Unversity of Southern California, applies his discipline to understanding three growing movements: Calvary Chapel, Vineyard Association, and Hope Chapel. All three of these movements are of the charismatic persuasion and have experienced tremendous growth in the past couple of decades while many mainline Protestant churches have been in decline.

Miller espouses the religious markets theory that compares churches to businesses. Some rise, others fall - much depends on a church's "polity, clergy, religious doctrines, and evangelization techniques.'

A quick summary: "New paradigm churches eliminated many of the inefficiencies of bureaucratized religion by an appeal to the first century model of Christianity; this 'purged' form of religion corresponded to the countercultural worldview of baby boomers, who rejected institutionalized religion; with their bureaucratically lean, lay-oriented organizational structure, new paradigm churches developed programs sensitive to the needs of their constituency; new paradigm churches offered a style of worshp that was attractive to people alienated from establishedment religion because it was in their own idiom; this worship and the corresponding message provided direct acces to an experience of the sacred, which had the potential of transforming people's lives by addressing their deepenst personal needs."

Miller's book is a scholarly look at the growth of these movements in a positive light. He also has some reccomendations for the revitalization of the mainline denominations -- some of these keys are worth looking at for our own church, too.