Greetings and salutations. This is Life and Books and Everything. I'm Kevin DeYoung,

and I'm reading a piece from a world opinions.

My piece entitled Lessons from Mainline Decline.

The PCUSA is literally dying.

I grew up in the Mainline Church,

and it won't be until I'm nearly 80 years old

that I will have spent more of my life outside the mainline church than inside it.

I was born, baptized, confirmed, and ordained in the Reformed Church in America, a smallish,

originally Dutch denomination that, with its roots dating back to 1628 in New Amsterdam,

boasts of being the oldest Protestant denomination with the continuing ministry

in the United States. I'm thankful for the many good people, good churches, and good pastors in the

RCA. I met Jesus in the RCA, so there will always be reasons for gratitude. But somewhere in my

college years, at an RCA school, I realized that the denomination I grew up in was considered a part of the mainline tradition.

So named for the affluent suburbs along Philadelphia's main railroad line, the term mainline Protestant, came to be synonymous with the old denominations that broke toward modernism instead of fundamentalism,

and often wore the label ecumenical, even though some of them still claimed to be evangelical.

If you aren't a baby boomer or a student of religious history, it can be hard to fathom the cultural

influence and social cohesion that once resided in mainline Protestantism.

At its height in 1965, mainline Protestant churches counted 31 million members out of a U.S. population of

less than 200 million. Most Protestants were in the mainline denominations,

and the country's cultural norms were set, for better or for worse, by the old-school

Protestant establishment. Almost 60 years later, all of that has changed. In its recently

released demographic report, the Presbyterian Church USA, announced it lost another 51,584 members.

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