In 2015 when Matt Anderson first handed me the keys to Mere Orthodoxy, after he had spent ten years building the site, our second child was only a few months old. I was working full-time as a copywriter for a small locally owned marketing agency.
In the years since, our family has grown from four to six and that newborn baby is now a few months shy of ten years old and has an advanced red belt in taekwondo. I'm also no longer working at that marketing agency. For three years now, I've been able to dedicate all my time to Mere Orthodoxy. Not only that, but this year we were able to add a second full-time employee: our publisher, Mark Kremer.
Much else has changed in the years since as well: When Matt wrote his resignation letter, our Supreme Court had just redefined marriage. The Trump 2016 campaign was one month old, though at that stage few were paying any attention to it. AI technology was far less developed than it is now, and the media producer economy looked quite different–newspapers were not as decimated and the Substack model had yet to emerge. National media outlets still were figuring things out, in fact, as the Times had only had a paywall for four years. Other outlets, most notably The Atlantic, were still free to read online.
Additionally, the fracturing dynamics that have riven evangelicalism over the past decade had barely begun to emerge. We were still years away from the Harvey Weinstein story as well as the #MeToo and #ChurchToo stories that would so radically change so many institutions. The murder of George Floyd was still five years in the distance, as was the COVID pandemic. Moreover, the Great Dechurching, which has seen 40 million Americans quit going to church, including 13 million evangelicals, was not nearly so advanced as it is now. I suspect we are still only beginning to reckon with the fallout from many of these changes.
Yet even as so much has changed, our core mission hasn’t. What began as a small group blog in 2005 run by several Torrey Honors Institute graduates from Biola University with the goal of talking about the things that matter most (and doing so in an engaging, elegant way) has now become a media project reaching half a million people annually.
I do not know what exactly I expected to come from this work back in 2015, but I do not think it was this. I just wanted to write things that would aid our readers as they sought to make sense of the world and to understand how reckoning seriously with Christian truths might change both them and the world as well. God has been kind to us.
What we are embarking on now, however, is something new, compared to where we have been. We now have two employees with designs on adding a third in the new year. We have an email list that has grown by a factor of ten since launching our e-wall earlier this year. Our paid membership program has doubled in size in that same window.
Suppose we kept growing at that rate: How might the American church look in three years or five years?
A Renewed Christian Movement in America
Due to the fracturing of the past ten years, too many pastors (and churches!) as well as nonprofit institutions and marketplace leaders seem to exist on an island. They haven’t been able to find the band of friends that will support them as they do the work God has called them to do.
This is what happens when large movements fracture and decline, as has been happening for the past quarter century in the American church. The people who remain at the end are more isolated.
Arresting this decline and laying new foundations for a renewed Christian movement will require work across many fronts and, ultimately, require creating a new networks of friends and institutions who together make up a new Christian ecosystem in America. What would such an ecosystem look like?
Local Work
Local Churches
On the local level, pastors would meet together regularly for prayer and encouragement. They would be aware of dynamics in their city and local church that create both challenges to faithful discipleship and opportunities for growth. They would fill each other’s pulpits and also have enough trust to consult meaningfully with one another in cases of church discipline, which will also have the effect of fighting corruption and strengthening the moral witness of the local church.
For a small minority, their denominational structure may already provide much of this. But on the far side of the great dechurching, it is unlikely that this will be the norm. Instead, pastors will need to reach out across denominational lines and build relationships of trust and shared work built around geographic bonds rather than denominational boundaries.
Local Extra-ecclesial Ministries and Institutions
Alongside the ecclesial work there will need to be extra-ecclesial organizations that fill out the work of Christian ecosystem building beyond the narrower confines of church life, which should be devoted primarily to the work of preaching the Word and administering the sacraments.
These groups should be devoted to questions of faith and work, the life of the mind, and works of mercy. The web of institutions and ministries (and relationships!) built in New York through the ministry of Tim Keller and described so powerfully by Stiven Peter should serve as a model going forward.
Such ministries not only help their communities directly by doing their specific work. They also aid local churches because they allow local churches to focus on the work of the church. Ideally this will mean that local pastors are free to focus specifically on the work of Word, Sacrament, and pastoral care.
National Work
Alongside the local work, we will also need more nationally oriented groups and ministries to provide resources that local ministries cannot simply by their nature as a geographically constrained group. There are three general types of organizations that fit here.
Denominations
While denominational life in America seems to be in decline, a healthy Christian ecosystem is immensely helped by strong denominations. Denominations provide theological and institutional accountability and structure for local churches. (One need only witness one catastrophic case of severe moral failure that was handled well by a presbytery or diocese to recognize the value of such oversight.)
Additionally, national level denominations can gather together financial resources that make larger forms of ministry possible in ways they simply are not otherwise. Consider this graphic from Ryan Burge, a preeminent sociologist on religion, that shows the generational breakdown of major American denominations.
The Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) is one of the only traditionally white and non-Pentecostal denominations in which a quarter of the denomination is under 35. While the rest of America’s denominations are rapidly graying, the PCA is young. Why?
Because they had the resources needed to invest significantly in campus ministry through their national-level campus outreach organization Reformed University Fellowship. In particular, the ongoing health of the Southern Baptist Convention, Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, Presbyterian Church in America, Anglican Church in North America, and Evangelical Presbyterian Church are of vital concern, for they are really the only large-scale denominations we have left. The fate of the Protestant Mainline denominations with their ample endowments, real estate, and institutional resources will also be worth watching closely.
Christian Study Centers
Though they are located in specific cities or university campuses, Christian study centers can have a more national impact because their graduates will scatter across their states and even across the country and go on to lead other larger endeavors. This will also often mean that study centers have relatively direct access to elite culture-shaping institutions.
Such ministries have a unique chance to not only represent a healthy Christian presence at universities, but also can shape the students in their programs in the faith by exposing them to great Christian thinkers and ideas and even practices through on-campus programming.
Christian Media
A friend recently described Mere O as an open window in the intellectual attic of our audience. This is the role Christian media in particular can play in this broader work. We are the people who "consider the future and the past with equal mind," as Eliot put it in "The Dry Salvages." We serve as the map-makers of the movement, the trip planners. We survey the cultural and intellectual landscape and, drawing on our reading and thinking, help our readers plot the way forward.
This is a vital work because anyone who has been in a leadership role for any institution of size will be able to tell you that their time for reading and thought is limited. That’s normal, of course: Any leadership role comes with extensive responsibilities that can’t be neglected and which limit one’s time to read and think or simply step back enough to get a bird’s eye view of the work.
This is why healthy, faithful Christian media is valuable. The problem, of course, is that virtually all media institutions now live online and the online media space is profoundly unhealthy and teaches media producers to care about all the wrong things. The problem is described well by Oliver O’Donovan, who has said, “There is a folly of opinion, which finds satisfaction, as the proverb says, not in understanding but in expressing one’s mind (Prov. 18:2).”
To be a media organization seeking understanding rather than constantly chasing traffic, scandal, and shock, that doesn’t simply “find satisfaction in expressing one’s mind,” is to be a bit of a dinosaur, as C. S. Lewis once described himself. It is to be a bit like Mr Smith in the once famous and now mostly forgotten Mr Smith Goes to Washington. (Indeed, isn’t it telling that finding a cultural reference point for the principled leader resisting a corrupt institution requires citing a film from 1939?) If you want media that cares about truth more than traffic and principle more than power and faithfulness more than attention… well, the incentives of the media industry right now are all wrong.
As currently constructed, media producers are rewarded when they publish attention-chasing hot takes meant to inflame readers and attract negative attention. The outcome is that media, which could help define the path forward for their audience, too often contributes instead to the fracturing that is hurting and isolating their audience. As long as the business incentives are what they are, however, it will be hard to escape that.
This is why small nonprofit magazines like Mere Orthodoxy matter. We draw air from outside the atmosphere of terminally online media. We choose to step away from the outrage cycles, and take the long view on the events of the day, constantly setting contemporary ideologies of both the right and the left against the testimony of the church passed down through the ages. We are not concerned with what is politically advantageous, but with what is true. Our goal is not to make compromises in order to work within what exists now, but to imagine what might be, should God bless our endeavors, and work toward that end.
The opportunity in front of us, in short, is to become the preeminent Protestant ideas magazine, the destination for Christian leaders who are concerned not with building their own kingdoms, but working for the kingdom of God. Taking this next step in our development, however, will require financial resources as well as intellectual. Given our current growth, we are confident that with sufficient time we will be able to help shape the rising generation of Christian pastors, writers, and leaders. But as we continue to grow, we need generous financial partners to join with us as we build.
Will you join us in this work?
This is about more than Mere Orthodoxy. This is about coming alongside the church and resourcing her to be faithful in a world that wants to pull her in every direction except heavenward.
The best way to support Mere Orthodoxy is to become a Member. A Basic Membership is just $5/month or $60/year. This is how most people choose to support us.
Many people also choose to become Solidarity Members for $10/month or $120/year. As a thank you, we send Solidarity Members a beautiful, letterpress print of a compline prayer from the Book of Common Prayer.
Mere Orthodoxy is a reader-supported endeavor. If you have been blessed by the ministry of Mere Orthodoxy and would like to see us produce even more media for Christian renewal, will you join us in this work?
Will you help us model faithful clarity in a fractured and confused world?
This wouldn’t be possible without you.
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