While reading one of my favorite books from last year, How to Use the Book of Common Prayer (review here), I was surprised to learn that the 1662 Book of Common Prayer's Ash Wednesday service does not include ashes. You can read Bray and Keane to get the full argument as to why that is. But it was striking to me to realize that if you were a 17th century Protestant Christian in the modern-day United Kingdom, your options with regard to Ash Wednesday were basically restrained to "churches that dispense with it altogether," or "churches that hold an Ash Wednesday service but do not do the imposition of ashes."
I thought of that again earlier this week as we marked the beginning of Lent and as I considered the options for Protestants here in my home town of Lincoln, a city of 300,000 people, many of whom self-identify as evangelical Protestants. We still have plenty of churches that dispense with Ash Wednesday (and Lent) altogether. What's funny, historically speaking, is that we also have Protestant churches which offer an Ash Wednesday service, including the imposition of ashes, but amongst evangelicals those churches are mostly... presbyterian.
I am not here commenting on whether or not Presbyterians should practice such things; I am merely noting that as Protestant piety has changed over the past 400 years some practices have endured (simply ignoring the Lenten fast) while others have shifted quite significantly. Today many Anglicans and Presbyterians both hold an Ash Wednesday service that includes the imposition of ashes, something which would have been largely unheard of in past eras.
There are any number of directions one might go from here, beginning with that observation. (One thought is that we would all do well to read Andrew Walls's essay "The Gospel as Prisoner and Liberator of Culture.") I want to make a point, however, concerning the way individual Christians relate to the idea of "church tradition" and how that shows up in our churches and our relationships with each other.
As the above indicates, the practices of individual members of a church communion can change dramatically across time and so can the practices adopted or encouraged by the larger denominational body. How you relate to those changes, or even simply how you think about them, will go a long way toward defining what your Christian life and church life look like. And if we aren't clear about the fact of these changes and what is driving them, it will make our denominational life much more complicated (if you're part of a denomination) as well as making the lives of individual congregations much more contested and complex.
To take a more recent example, if you consider white American Protestantism in the 1950s, as Ross Douthat does in his essential Bad Religion, you can see two very obvious streams: the Niebuhrian Mainline and the Billy Graham-shaped evangelical movement.
In the 1950s, both were discernibly Christian movements with viable institutions and lively congregations. However, in the 75 years since that time, much has shifted: The Mainline is far smaller, for example, and the obviously Christian liberalism of Niebuhr has largely though not entirely been supplanted by a political progressivism with a vague sort of moralistic and therapeutic Christianity lingering in the background. That said, it still boasts a number of elite institutions that have notional relationships to mainline denominations.
Additionally, what you might call a kind of sociological mainline culture still exists in several denominations. This is most notable in contexts like the three largest presbyterian denominations aside from the PC(USA), the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC), and the Evangelical Covenant Order of Presbyterians (ECO). You can also see ample evidence of it in the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). In each of those four denominations, you will find many congregations that have either retained mainline sociological sensibilities, were still part of mainline denominations until the past 10-15 years, or both.
So if you're thinking about sub-groups within American Protestantism, one bloc would be the sociological mainliners. They're comfortable in positions of cultural influence, generally believe in institutions and institutional processes and procedures, and prefer to work through organizational channels when problems arise (where they are, predictably, active and engaged).
Meanwhile, evangelicalism basically split into two distinct groups. Though this is a somewhat reductionistic approach, one segment broke off into a more northern and Anglophile expression of evangelical Protestantism while the other was more defined by southern, democratized sensibilities.
The evangelicalism of the midwest and northeast is all downstream of the former. Think of institutions like Christianity Today, Wheaton College, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Gordon-Conwell, or, more recently, the Gospel Coalition and City to City.
The evangelicalism of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and the SBC more generally as well as the Sun Belt evangelicalism of non-denominational right-wing Christians in southern California and Texas would belong to the latter category.
The first group will often have an interest in pre-19th century forms of Christian belief and practice and tended to read figures like J. I. Packer, John Stott, C. S. Lewis, and Francis Schaeffer in older days. More recently, they have gravitated to thinkers like Tim Keller or Andy Crouch, all of whom represent a more internationalist, cosmpolitan expression of Christian faith that routinely confronted or challenged the more deeply Americanist tendencies of American Protestantism.
The second group is less concerned with "tradition" in Christian faith and practice and tends, instead, to try and approach Scripture as directly as possible, without the mediating influence of tradition. (Whether such a thing is possible, of course, is one key point of contention between the two groups.) In past days, this group would have identified more closely with figures like W. A. Criswell or J. Vernon McGee. More recently, it is defined by figures like John MacArthur and R. Albert Mohler and, to a lesser degree, people like Paul Washer or Owen Strachan.
Where this leaves us, then, is with three core blocs in white American Protestantism:
A few examples of these dynamics from contemporary issues in church life:
First, all four of the denominations mentioned above routinely have disputes between the sociological mainliners and the northern evangelicals within their church bodies.
This is because the sociological mainliners have a relatively fixed relationship to their tradition, tend to treat their tradition as a simple thing (rather than a compound thing made up of distinct parts which can be treated discretely), and tend to value stability and institutional processes as means of addressing problems in church life.
The northern evangelicals, meanwhile, are virtually all converts to the tradition, having come to it because it addressed some specific question, problem, or longing they had. Usually they have read or listened their way into their new church home, which means they tend to relate to it in the terms that it first appealed to them in their media consumption. This also means the churches through which they enter their traditions tend not be congregations that have marinated in a specific tradition for a century but rather are often church plants or younger congregations which are, not infrequently, led by people very like themselves who are just a bit further along in their relationship to their ecclesial tradition. They also tend to think of being Presbyterian or Anglican less in terms of adopting a simple and comprehensive system of theology, liturgy, and piety and more in terms of a center set tradition with somewhat looser boundaries and parameters. This is also why they tend to be less concerned with institutional procedures and processes and sometimes look down on those who place a greater emphasis on such things.
If you have heard a PCA member from the sociological mainline wing of the church describe someone from the northern evangelical wing as "an evangelical who baptizes babies," then you've encountered this fight in the PCA. It also shows up, for example, when northern evangelical types speak dismissively about the importance of General Assembly or adopt a kind of indifferentism toward the Book of Church Order. You can find similar fights in the ACNA around everything from job titles to the Sunday morning liturgy to the relative importance of spending ample time being shaped by the tradition before beginning to speak for it.
One obvious recent example of this concerns the current discussions in one of the largest ACNA dioceses, Church for the Sake of Others (C4SO), which is currently in the process of selecting a new bishop. One of their two finalists was part of the PCA for many years and only came into the ACNA in 2022.
For sociological mainliners the idea that someone who was a Presbyterian minister until three years ago could then become a bishop so rapidly after joining the ACNA is a scandal. For northern evangelical types, it is much harder to see the problem because the overwhelming majority of their social circle in church is likely made up of people who are very new to Anglicanism themselves and they are far more comfortable (too comfortable, some would say) with changes of mind.
That, then, is a sketch of the messy ways in which denominational churches now relate to their theological tradition.
Meanwhile, if you step outside of the denominational world and into the non-denominational church space, the problems manifest in even sharper ways because there are fewer controls that limit the range of viewpoints you'll find in a community.
For example, suppose you have a congregation that was part of Acts 29 in the early 2010s but left several years ago. Within this one church you are virtually guaranteed to have both northern and southern evangelicals because the young reformed space of the early 2010s included both. But depending on the congregation, its location, relative level of wealth, and so on it is also possible, even probable, that some long-term members have gradually changed and now align more with sociological mainliners. It is similarly possible that new members have arrived at the church who have left actual mainline congregations in search of a younger, more energetic church. They too will tend to have more mainline cultural sensibilities.
So you have one congregation with three very distinct sub-groups all existing together. Their media consumption patterns are quite different from each other. The things they fear or react negatively toward will also be quite distinct. And, in many cases, the things they desire for their day-to-day piety and communal life will be different too. Now: Put all of them together in a room and raise a question like what the Sunday morning liturgy should look like. Or raise the issue of small groups and Bible studies or what family discipleship should look like. It's not even necessarily that the resulting conversation will be defined by fierce conflict. More likely, it will be shaped by a sense of incomprehension across these groups.
Sociological mainliners will be annoyed by the earnestness and cafeteria style relationship to tradition and institutional life of the northern evangelicals. They will find the southern evangelicals kind of boorish and gauche. The northern evangelicals will think the sociological mainliners are snobbish and uptight while disliking the politics and posture of the southern evangelicals. And the southern evangelicals will think the northern evangelicals are naive and precious while agreeing with them that the mainliners are snobs.
Of course, it's one thing if you are aware of these differences before starting the conversation. One ministry I worked with for a summer missions trip actually required all the team members to take the Myers Briggs months before the trip began for similar reasons: They wanted to give us analytic tools to make sense of our differences and help us have better conversations and be prepared to navigate disagreements in healthy ways. It's something quite different if you don't have this context for understanding each other. And this, I suspect, is the problem most of us face.
Sadly, this is a relatively predictable outcome for local churches given the centrality of digital technology today and specifically how digital life shapes us. On the one hand, we often know far too little about the day to day lives of members of the other sub-groups. On the other, we know too much about the online profiles of those same individuals. Digital tech makes it incredibly easy, after all, for us to learn about the latter while doing virtually nothing to help us become aware of the former.
Indeed, in as much as an unfavorable online profile can discourage us from forming relationships with people, digital tech can actually discourage us from developing that kind of face-to-face, relational knowledge of other people in our churches.
What is to be done about all of this? Well, we know what often happens in practice: Each bloc becomes more entrenched over time until whichever group has the greatest power in the relevant institution seizes control and either alienates or converts members of the other blocs. This isn't a terribly satisfying resolution, however.
The reason why is somewhat similar to the reason Brad East rejected the idea that there is a single correct model of the church's relationship to "the culture":
As I see it, there is no one “correct” type, posture, or model. Instead, the church has four primary modes of faithful engagement with culture. They are inevitably overlapping and essentially non-competitive with one another. Which mode is called for depends entirely on context and content. Rare is the time when the church would forego any of them; typically they are all at work simultaneously, whether in the same community, in different communities, or in individual members of the larger church. Each mode applies in every possible historical and political context: premodern and postmodern, established and disestablished, privileged and persecuted.
Something similar applies to these three sub-groups within American Protestantism. If your movement or church or denomination is made up of only one of the three then it will lack the strengths that the other two groups can offer. Minimally, you probably need two of the three blocs represented within an institution to stay healthy. Including all three is much more complex but can also be worthwhile if you have sufficient trust internally.
But how do we do that in practice? I don't think the answers to that question are terribly complex, but they are surprisingly difficult to do.
In denominational contexts, consider exchanging phone numbers with people who represent other sensibilities within your denomination. When something comes up that concerns you or that you want to talk about, don't tweet about it or post something passive aggressive in a Facebook group. Text your friend instead and ask what they're thinking about it. (Of course, if the person is going to be a friend, that also means that you're reaching out at other times as well—asking them how church is going, how their family and friends are doing, and so on.)
Consider, also, reading or listening to the best media popular with respected people in the other sub-groups. The point here is not to abandon discernment or uncritically affirm things that are genuinely bad. We should always practice discernment. But part of discernment means that one can distinguish between good and bad actors, between people sincerely pursuing truth and coming to different conclusions than your own and people who are actually indifferent to what is true and are driven instead by vibes or social media posturing.
There are more specific bits of counsel that can be offered to each individual sub-group too. The sociological mainliners would do well to remember that traditions change and are not infallible. Probably they themselves believe a thing or two that older members of that tradition from past centuries would have loudly condemned. Northern evangelicals would do well to value stability and clarity more than they sometimes do and to be less willing to ad hoc their way to a bespoke religious identity based on a grab bag approach to Christian thought and practice. Southern evangelicals would benefit from greater modesty about their own ability to read the Bible without the aid of the church that has gone before us.
The point here, rather like the point East made in the essay linked above, is that we actually do ourselves a disservice when we pit these schools against each other because the reality is they need each other in order to be healthy.
A story might illustrate this point well: It concerns the various reformed denominations in the US, but one can easily imagine very similar things occurring in other ecclesial or denominational settings.
Years ago I was at an event with Reformed Christians from virtually every smaller Reformed denomination you can think of in the United States. As often happens at such gatherings, the various denominations represented all had their different jokes about the PCA, which I laughed at being the only PCA member in the room.
That throat clearing accomplished, the conversation began to settle down as we got to know each other. One of the men present came from a denomination that has a quite pronounced Dutch identity. This man, however, was not Dutch and so he was sharing the story of how he came into the denomination.
Amongst other things, when this man expressed interest in joining a church that belonged to this denomination, the pastor was caught off guard because the church literally had no process of receiving new members. The church had been around for many years, but they had never had to receive a new member from outside of the denomination before in all that time. So they essentially created the process on the fly in order to receive him into the church.
I remember laughing at the absurdity of the story but also caught myself thinking, "say what you want about the loosey goosey PCA, but when a new person shows up at our church and wants to become a member, we know how to help them."
My point here is not to cast aspersions on the other people in the room that night. Much of what they said about the PCA was true enough, or at least not that far from the mark. Indeed, if more people in the PCA took their jokes seriously it would probably be to the good of the church.
That being said, while many of my friends in these smaller denominations tell me that they see, maybe, one adult convert every 10 years (or even every 25 years!), the parts of the PCA I have known best see such things far more often. Indeed, the first new plant we had in Lincoln is now pastored by a man who came to faith as an adult through the ministry of that church. And, if anything, I'd say the PCA is still not particularly good at evangelism when compared to many non-denominational churches or Pentecostal congregations.
That said, we can only learn from each other if we know each other as something other than internet avatars whose posts annoy or infuriate us. The first step, then, may simply be pushing past the dominance of the online in so many churches and movements and, instead, seeking to build relationships built on trust, face-to-face interaction, and patient endurance.