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Overview The Fifth Church

"The Life of the Mainline after the Death of the Mainline
A living conversation, soon to be a book."

By Rich Melheim

“Bring out your dead!” the Monty Python actor cries as he wheels the muddy wagon through the plague-filled streets.

“I’m not dead yet!” says the old woman being placed in the cart.

“Lie still. You will be in a moment,” the actor responds. Then he hits her on the head.

The mainline church is dying. Its traditional givers are being buried faster than you can say “institutional loyalty.” The Boomers who follow them will use their inheritances to buy SUVs, face-lifts, and tummy-tucks. The Busters who follow them will spend their share to pay off credit cards and luxury vacations. Their children will use whatever scraps are left on flat-screen televisions, psychiatrists and their share of national debt. And all the while, as trillions pass from hand to hand to hand, the mainline institutions are busy arguing over adiaphora, rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, and complaining that someone moved their cheese.

Can anything be done to change the tide that’s pulling out to sea? Or is the fate of the proud mainline church already sealed?

Can these bones live?

The Good News & the Hard News
The first thing you need to know is this: God will build the church. No question about that. The Holy Spirit doesn’t need us to protect the church, the truth, or the future. The only questions are: 1. Will the new church look anything like the church we have known in the past? 2. Will we recognize God’s new church when it appears? and 3. Will we have anything to do with shaping it?

Here’s the hard news: The church that you think of as "church" is not the church of the future. It is a church of the past -- of a modern era that no longer exists. This church can not and will not be the First Church in the post-modern world. It can not and will not be the Second Church, the Third or even the Fourth Church post-Christendom. If the mainline church is to survive in any form other than a museum or concert hall, the church that you think of as "church" must intentionally transform itself into the Fifth Church or it will soon fade from the screen of near-relevance and disappear into the graveyard of cultural irrelevance along with the rest of America's modern institutions.

I’m calling that something different “The Fifth Church.” See if you agree.