This is Keith, and this is Ben, and this is Main Street Lutherans. Today we're going to take on a word that is part of why we're named, the way we are mainline denominations. That's why we're Main street mainline denominations and what that means and why we think it's important. But before we talk about that, we're going to talk about how different churches relate to each other. And so I've been thinking about how towns with lots of churches, why don't they just have one big Christian church?

That's a really good question. You'd think it would solve a lot of problems, save a lot of money.

Yeah.

But it also makes me think of the town I grew up in, had three Lutheran churches. One was Lutheran church, Missouri Synod. It was way out in the country. It was celebrating one year. It was celebrating, I think, its 300th anniversary or something like that, maybe 250th. And then the church I went to was 51 years younger than that. So the next year we celebrated our, you know, whatever. 50, you know, it might have been 200, 150. And then it turns out that the Third Lutheran Church celebrated its, I think, 50th anniversary one year later. And so all these churches were branched off because that church didn't get along with itself and they had a family leave or several families leave and start a new congregation. And so if we can't even keep our own congregations together, historically, the idea of a bunch of separate churches recombining maybe doesn't make so much sense.

You know, the town that I grew up in, which is significantly smaller than the town you grew up in, is, you know, a little borough in Pennsylvania that's right about a mile across. And inside of town, there are three churches. There's the Lutheran church that I grew up at. There's a Methodist church and a Reformed church. And honestly, they get along pretty well. They've all got their. Their own financial issues and struggles at this point, but they used to pretty routinely, and not even like, you know, decades ago, but as far as I know, at least up until covet. I don't know how things have gone since then. They would still do combined worship services, you know, say for Advent or Lent. They still share an Easter sunrise service every year. They rotate it between the three because they all have their own cemeteries. So they rotate it between the three cemeteries. Every year it goes to a different place and they take turns leading it. And so, yeah, yeah, I don't know if they've ever considered sharing Ministers, since, you know, we're going to talk about this a little bit.

Yeah.

But all three of those denominations are in full communion with each other at this point. If they were to pool their resources, they might be able to say, share two full time pastors to serve those three congregations. Just thought. But I don't know if they've ever talked about that.

Yeah.

So in York, are there ways that congregations play nice together? I'm thinking of, I think the first Friday in December we have our downriver prayer breakfast where all the churches are invited to come and hear a speaker. Last year it was former chaplain for the Detroit Lions. So he must have been an unlucky chaplain because they've been winning since he was chaplain.

Actually in York. No, we used to. When I first came to St. Matthew, we had what was called the York County Council of Churches, which was, you know, the county version of, you know, this very ecumenically minded body that mostly what existed for the sake of networking and communication, you know, they had a monthly newsletter. They would occasionally sponsor, you know, an ecumenical event in the city of York or, you know, maybe one of the bigger churches out in the country someplace once in a while. And I don't remember the full story, but there was some kind of scandal in their leadership of rounds. You know, it was right around the time I came to St. Matthew, which at this point was 14 years ago, and they just fell apart. And since then, nothing has risen up in its place to even, you know, be able to say, communicate like I, I was mentioning to, to you before we started recording. There was a woman in my congregation who sent me an email last week saying, hey, I'm connected to this agency that's looking to honor nurses in our, in our city or in our county. And we've gotten in touch with all of the, the hospitals and the different, the city council and the borough offices and all of that. We like to get in touch with all the churches. Is there a way to do that? And I have to, I haven't replied to her email yet and I just have to tell her not really. Yeah, you know, I can put her in touch with the other Lutheran churches in the area. I could even put her in touch with, you know, the Methodist church next door to us and the Catholic church across the street because we all get along really well and try to share information. But in terms of getting in touch with the 400 plus congregations that exist in York county, no, there's not an easy way to do that anymore. And it's really unfortunate.

Yeah, this breakfast that we've got. I don't know who runs it. I don't know if there's an organization in the downriver communities that does this. It almost looks like it sort of seems to be like it may be put on by the banquet hall that has it as an actual money making thing for their business, but it's possibly as much organized by the chamber of commerce for the area. So it's hard telling.

Yeah.

I think on this line, I think back to a conversation I had with a friend who moved to a new area as a pastor. And one of the pastors that we both know, I asked if they'd talked and he said yes, but not as church stuff because he's afraid that his church, his parishioners will leave his congregation if they interact with other congregations because they're all afraid of getting too small. And so they're looking for more vibrant places to go. And so I wonder if there's more of that going on now that we're having this big church decline and as the churches get older.

So, yeah, yeah. I was in a conversation with a few other pastors a couple of days ago who were naming a colleague of ours a county over in Lancaster county where there's several churches that are having some struggles. Lutheran DLCA churches that are having some struggles. I'm not sure if a few of them are leaving the denomination or just beginning to run out of funding for full time clergy or whatever, but it turns out that this, this one colleague that we were discussing is reaping the benefits of these congregations losing members because they're all migrating over to his church because they've got, you know, some good things going on and it's stable and stable. And that's a draw.

Yeah.

And. Yeah, and that's unfortunate. It's certainly not the way, you know, we want our congregations to grow because that doesn't truly grow the church. It only grows our, our, you know, church family.

Yeah, yeah.

It probably helps us shrink faster.

Yeah.

Well, what we're going to talk about today is mainline denominations. So mainline denominations are denominations. There are officially seven of them. I don't know how official it is, but there are seven that are considered the mainline denominations, Protestant denominations, and they have some element of ideological pluralism. And that's theology. That doesn't exclude people. So it doesn't set up theology to say these are chosen and these people are not. The main lines distinguished themselves from fundamentalists in the 1920s. You had modernists and fundamentalists. The modernists were the mainline churches in the 1920s, and generally, the mainline churches were denied what the fundamentalists wanted, which was literal interpretation of the Bible or what they considered to be literal. And so the mainline denominations are influenced, at least by higher criticism of Scripture. And so that means things like taking into account historical context and history that we know from archeology and things, plus.

Modern understandings of sciences and, you know, psychology and learning that have happened since the time of Scripture that, that influenced the way we, we look at Scripture and apply it to today.

That's right.

So what are the, what are these mainline denominations of which you speak, Ben?

Well, obviously ELCA is one of those or else we wouldn't talk about it. Also, also the Episcopalian Church, the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church usa, or PC, the church that's called the Christian Church, or Disciples of Christ and American Baptists and the United Methodists. Excuse me, the United Methodists. So those are the, those are the seven. They call them the seven Sisters of American mainline Protestantism.

Yeah. And we should point out that we are in what we call full communion with a number of these. Full communion meaning that, you know, we've got some formal recognition of each other's. I don't know what exactly call it validity of our understanding of sacraments, for example, in scripture and clergy, to the point where we can even, you know, share clergy leadership from, from one denomination in, in another. And so among this list of seven, we're in full communion with and not, you know, not counting ourselves, of course, 1, 2, 3, 4 of the ones on the list.

So just not Disciples of Christ and American Baptists.

Right. But the Episcopalians, the United Church of Christ Presbyterian Church USA and the United Methodist Church we are in relationship with. I think it's also worth pointing out that, you know, even in our own United States, there are other denominations that have these labels. You know, we've talked about other Lutheran denominations in our country. There are multiple Presbyterian churches. There's now, you know, a large Global Methodist. Global Methodist Church forming of former United Methodist congregations.

And so I don't think there's a splinter of Disciples of Christ.

No, I don't think so. And the Episcopalians have, have held pretty tight.

There is. There are a couple splinters of that.

Yeah. Yeah.

But. But they don't participate in the, in the, the global episcopate.

Right. So why, why does this mainline designation exist? I guess, you know, I gotta say before, before we started researching this topic for this podcast episode, I've really used the term mainline in a way that's not inconsistent with what we're doing here, but it certainly wasn't as specific as what, what we've been reading and thinking about leading up to this. You know, I would have said that mainline Protestant denominations are the Protestants that like kind of split off or seeded from the Catholic Church directly in some fashion, you know, back in the like 15th, 16th, 17th centuries. And there's definitely some overlap there, but that's not entirely all true.

No, I mean it really, the history of the term comes from really the 1920s and this area of Philadelphia called the mainline suburbs where most of the population were, were Protestants. And these were the denominations or there were only I think four denominations at the time. But these denominations that existed there have lineage to these types of denominations from that point. Right. So you would normally think, I thought for a long time that it was just another way of saying mainstream. Right. Because when I think of downtown rural America, you've got, you know, First Baptist and First Lutheran and you know, First Methodist and whatever, you know, St. Paul's Episcopal Church or something like that. And those are the denominations I always thought of being right around the county square, right around the county courthouse, you had those. But it really has a very different history from that. But it's still somewhat true.

It's sort of like gotta a very specific kind of historical or academic meaning and then it's got a much looser kind of colloquial meaning the, that we use in just talking about denominations. And, and to some extent I think we, we do still use it to say, well, you know, we're the mainline Protestants, meaning that we are not the fundamentalists, we are not the charismatics, we are not the Pentecostals, we are not the Catholics or the Orthodox, we are the mainline Protestants. And so there is a lot of overlap in our understandings of what it means to be church. But there are some distinctions too, which gets back to the why isn't there just one big church in these towns? Because we do have differences.

Yeah.

And we talk about polity. So polity is how the church is governed, how decisions are made and whether often it's whether it's Congregationalist, whether the congregation gets to choose how it operates, or if there's a higher structure that passes things down. Catholic church is definitely a top down sort of thing, but Congregationalist churches, the churches have to come to an agreement on a national scale for the national organization to say something. And so you can have a wide array of what congregations believe. UCC has a lot of that. Now we've talked about it before that. The ELCA is made up of the three denominations. One was still sort of in its fledgling era, but the other two, one was primarily episcopate. It had a strong vertical structure with bishops and such. And then the other one was very congregationalist, and you had strong congregational choices made. And so we're still. And when we talked with Imran Siddiqui about that, still trying to merge that idea together. And so a lot of our internal struggles come from that. And I think when we eventually have our episode where we talk to a bishop about what being a bishop of a synod is about, we'll deal with a lot of that there.

This area is a little mushier, but as we look over this list, I'd say that we have fairly similar notions of, let's say, Holy Communion. You know, there might be some. The differences there are more subtle, but when you look at kind of our general practice and understanding of what it means to be a person of faith, you know, for example, the United Methodists have got a very strong emphasis on sanctification and their understanding of how the Holy Spirit works. You know, not in like a. In. In a chasmatic or a Pentecostal sense, but they've got a very different kind of understanding of that than, say, or maybe they even just have a mayor. Very more developed understanding of that than we do as Lutherans.

That's kind of it, isn't it? It's the focus.

Yeah. Yeah.

Denomination seems to have a focus, Right.

Yeah. I think that's probably a good way to put it. It's not so much differences. It's like, what do we really pay attention to? What do we really spend our energy on when we talk about a lot, you know, Episcopalians and Lutherans probably talk about communion again, more than any of the rest of the ones on the list. And baptism. The others might really talk about, you know, again, the movement of the Spirit or the communal worship aspect of who they are.

Yeah.

And we do practice sacraments a little bit different, you know, between the denominations, especially how we think of communion in particular, whether it's the. We talk about real presence. And Presbyterians and Methodists, certainly. I'm guessing Christian church Disciples of Christ do symbolic as well. So it's not as high church as, like an Episcopal approach to it.

Theologically charged. And they think of it as more of a. Yeah, like you said, a symbolic practice.

Yeah.

And yet we also. We still recognize the validity of each other's ways of thinking. That gets back to that. That ecumenical aspect of what it means to be considered a mainline Protestant. You know, we admit that we're not the only players in this game, which sometimes is a surprise to people in certain Christian circles that think that. Well, don't you all think all the same things that we do and. Well, not always, no.

Yeah.

There's variety and. And certainly the worship liturgy is different. I was. I was surprised. I hadn't. I didn't know much about Episcopalians, and I didn't realize that the Book of Common Prayer was. That's it. They don't have diversity in their worship liturgy now. They have songs. They can do all sorts of stuff with that. But when they change, when the Book of Common Prayer gets changed, that only happens every. I don't know, it seems like it takes 80 years or something like that, where we have what a new. We talked about in our last episode, a new hymnal every 20 years and a new supplement halfway through that. So.

And congregations that still use the old ones.

That's right. And they're allowed.

Yeah. The Episcopalians don't do that. You get a new Book of Common Prayer and you do away with the old Book of Common Prayer.

I was a member at a UCC church and a Presbyterian church, and the components of a worship service were not necessarily the same every week. Rarely had confessions in either of the congregations I was a member at. But sometimes you would. And so it just changed based on the history of those congregations. And so I can't imagine a Lutheran church not having a. It may not be the same as the one down the street, but it's consistent from week to week. And so I think Lutherans, over time have appreciated consistency but not required, like a mandatory thing. Just off the top of my head, it seemed like the Episcopal Church with the Book of Common Prayer. It seems like McDonald's. You could walk into any Episcopal church and you'll get the same experience. You'll know what book to pick up. And that. Whereas I wouldn't know whether I need to look for a hymnal when I walk into another Lutheran church, I'll look for the screen and see if it's up there. And then maybe they'll use it, maybe they won't.

Say. In a Methodist church, you can get widely varying practices from one Methodist church to another on any given Sunday, let alone from one Sunday to the next at the same Methodist church. There really might be some similarities. There might be a lot of variety, too.

Yeah.

So the similarities between these congregations are these denominations. We already talked about higher criticism of Scripture. That's a pretty important one. When we talk about the differences in theology, it's very important to note that inspired Word of God and not infallible Word of God is a very important theological point that creates a lot of similarities between them.

On the matter of LGBTQIA community, there's some overlap and there's some distinctions. Basically, what it comes down to is you've got some of these denominations are really out at the more liberal end of the spectrum, if you want to call it that, and denominationally have made stances, you know, say accepting gay marriage, trans pastors, you know, advocating for the LGBT community, et cetera. And some of them have not done that at the denominational level, but they've at least allowed some room for it at the congregational level. So you can come across some congregations in any of these bodies where there is some range of acceptance, even if you go down the street to another one, and they have a different stance.

And a lot of that's the congregationalist polity.

Yeah. I would imagine it's really hard to.

Convince the conservative churches to go along at the national level, whereas in the lca, our church council and council of bishops and our bishop can come to an agreement, and the folks that are voting at churchwide assembly can come to an agreement. That's harder to do when congregations sort of. They all have to come into agreement in some sort of unity on it.

So there's some beauty in either way of looking at it, you know, being able to let the community chart its own course. Some people think that's great. Others would say that, you know, they want the domination to make it, to take a stance and the congregations to tear the line, if you will. You know, I can appreciate the arguments.

Yeah, we're sort of in the middle. That's part of where we. Where we start to rip at the seams is that struggle between folks who want to have it declared from on high and for the people that want it to be a grassroots thing.

So, yeah.

Yeah.

Now we talked about full communion partnerships between the. The denominations, and certainly they're members in ecumenical groups. You know, we talked with Imran Siddiqui again about the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches, and so they're all members of those. So we can take action on a. You know, do lobbying efforts at government levels and that. Have you had any experience participating? Have you. Have you supplied at an Episcopal Church or a Methodist church?

Definitely not for Sunday worship? I have. I forget if I've mentioned this in the past before or not, but St. Matthew sits on a corner in the city next to a United Methodist church and across the street from a Roman Catholic church. And in the time that I've been at St. Matt's we've struck up pretty good friendships. Now, there's been some changes in clergy leadership at two neighboring churches, but we've always managed to kind of keep that relationship going. So, for example, in Advent, we're going to get together and do some joint worship services on Wednesday evenings, and we rotate the leadership and the hosting of those. So I have preached at the Methodist Church and the Catholic Church in those settings, and ministers from both of those have preached at St. Matthew and in each other's churches, too. But I think that's about the extent of my experience. It's in that kind of ecumenical setting, not in a. This Lutheran pastor is going to serve as the minister at this Methodist church or something like that. What about you?

Well, certainly I haven't. Since I'm not ordained, I'm not eligible for any of that stuff. And that, by the way, anybody who's been paying attention, I have finished my internship as a licensed lay minister, and we'll probably start doing active things with that here in the coming weeks. But I think where I saw those partnerships really come around was when we went to the Festival of Homiletics in May and how all the congregations or all the denominations came together. We had speakers from many different denominations that preached and lectured, and they weren't distincted, they weren't made distinct. You know, they didn't say, I'm from this place and I represent this viewpoint. We were all in one together. When we had communion, it was one communion. Well, it was lots and lots of one communions. But there wasn't a line for Presbyterians and a line for Episcopalians and a line for Lutherans. It was one body communing together with pastors from all those denominations that hosted.

Us were from various backgrounds. I remember the big, big one that we were at was a Presbyterian church.

And the other one is Episcopalian.

Yeah.

And the Episcopalian church hosted a couple other congregations, one of them being Tree of Life Synagogue.

That's right.

So. So why is it important to know about mainline churches?

I guess, you know, simply at a, at a personal, at the level of personal experience, you know, someone might say, well, you know, I've moved away from my hometown. I used to go to a Methodist church. I find that there's not a Methodist church in the town that I moved to. What do I try next? And if you want to find something that's, you know, at least going to have a somewhat familiar feel. Maybe one of these mainline denominations would be next on your list to, to check out.

You know, it's like a cheat code.

Yeah, yeah, I've, I've encountered that with folks that have moved into York, for example, and, you know, they come out of a different denominational background, but they've, they've come to check out St. Matthew and, and felt at home and either joined or at least worshiped with us consistently for some spell. And that's been really cool.

And I think it's interesting to know that there are Baptists who are not like Southern Baptists, pretty much the name brand evangelicalism, but that American Baptists are not that necessarily. They also have some congregationalist lean. So there are some evangelical folks in that mix, but. But not entirely or not Baptist style.

So it's just another way of, you know, just kind of helping identify these people. Can be my people, too.

Awesome. Well, you know, I've got some great news. We have another winner for our catechism question last week. Last week's episode had the question how many worship settings does the ELW have? And we had some great answers potentially there. One, many lots and 10. And the correct answer, of course, is 10. And Naomi Graves from St. Paul Lutheran Church near Elk Point, South Dakota, which is not anywhere near me or Keith. And I'm so glad you sent us in the answer there, Naomi, congratulations. There are indeed 10 worship settings in the ELW and it was mentioned in the episode. So.

Right.

Yeah.

If you're listening closely.

That's right.

You found the way. Yeah. Speaking of the way. So this week's question is about the word synod, which we didn't really discuss in this episode, but every, every one of these bodies either uses the term synod for something or has some function that looks like what we Lutherans call synod. And so we thought we'd do a question around the actual meaning of the word synod and ask where that comes from. It comes from two words in Greek, syn and odos. I'm not going to tell you what they mean because, well, that would give away the answer now, wouldn't it?

It'll be in the next episode, right?

Yes. So the question is, what is the literal meaning of the word synod? Your options are A, people to complain to, B, bonded by the word C on the way together, or D, singing the same hymns. And we will have the opportunity for you to respond to that into our email, our social media, or even our phone number. All of which are listed in the episode notes.

So be like Naomi and tell us the answer to that and we'll be happy to share your name and where you're from. All right, so Main Street Lutherans is hosted by Keith Fair and Ben F, and the show is produced by F Media Productions. Find all our contact info, links and a transcript in these episode notes. Also, you can go to our website and share these episodes if you want to share these with your congregation or your friends and family. Until next time, go in peace, Serve the Lord.

Thanks be to God.