Jason Byassee - View on Denominations

Jason Byassee penned a helpful conversation on the place of denominations. My friend, Adam Phillips, sent Byassee’s comments to me, and his pen is quite appealing and his voice winsome. He argues clearly that mainline denominations (I can assume he was intentional in not naming all denominations) are withering, but they are neither lost nor unnecessary, namely on familial claims. He rehearses a powerful story of one man, in one denomination, doing work of relief for congregations around the world. The claim that denominations are collective agents for common work is both needed and encouraging. Denominations, as crippled and bureaucratic as they are, have a collective identity to hold diverse congregations together. When worship in America is a segregated hour, denomination’s have collective power to bring our racism, classicism, and myopia into a room and break out our prejudices….denominations are social networks of wealth (see The Wealth of Networks by Benkler). Sidenote: The Evangelical Covenant Church began in exactly this manner - a collection of inter-dependent congregations for the sake of worship, fellowship, education, and mission.

I might use networking metaphors more than Byassee’s familial grammars, yet none-the-less, he is thinking about denominations in a way that is constructive not repulsive. He sees denominations in a redemptive posture not one of death. His hermeneutic of ecclesial organizations is one to watch, and I would say transfer to other such places, including local congregations and structures, seminaries and divinity schools, and even American political mechanisms (the last one is more difficult to admit).

In the end, Byassee is creating a helpful trajectory, a theological one that recognizes God is alive, he is risen, and God can make once withering denominations resurrected collective agents of the Spirit. Byassee’s trajectory for denominations desires life where many have decried death. I think it's worthwhile, especially since like it or not, The Covenant Church is, as Byassee writes, "the only family you've got."