The Generation That Walked

Why Denominational Ministry Is Not What It Was | Re-imagining the Baptist Denomination within the African-American Tradition. A FOUR-PART SERIES

Not long ago I sat toward the back of a district association meeting and counted the gray heads. There were many of them, faithful and dignified, the mothers of the church in their white and the veteran deacons in their dark suits, the men and women who have kept the machinery of denominational life turning for the better part of a century. What I could not find, no matter how carefully I searched the room, was a face under forty that looked as though it wanted to be there. When I asked one young pastor afterward why he stayed away, he gave me an answer that has not left me since. He said he wanted the partnership, but he could not stomach the politics.

That sentence deserves to be sat with, because it is not the complaint of a rebel. It is the lament of a loyalist. The young ministers drifting from denominational life are not, for the most part, cynics who despise the old fellowship. Many of them love it. They were baptized in it, called out of it, ordained by it. What they cannot abide is the machinery it has become: the endless jockeying for office, the boards that meet mainly to plan the next meeting, the sense that the annual session has hardened into a pageant that consumes enormous energy and returns very little to the local church that sent them. They long for covenant and are handed a campaign. They come looking for a family and they find a franchise.

THE GREAT DISAFFILIATION

This is not merely a Baptist problem, and it is not merely a Black church problem, though it presses on our tradition with particular weight. It is a symptom of something larger. The sociologist Robert Putnam taught a generation to see that Americans have been quietly withdrawing from the bowling leagues and the Rotary clubs and the union halls, from the whole dense web of voluntary association that Alexis de Tocqueville once called the genius of the republic. The church has not been spared that erosion. The same younger generation that will not join the Elks and will not run for the school board is also declining to give its best years to the district association.

We can date the shift with some precision. Beginning in the late 1980s and accelerating through the early 2000s, a great many believers, and a great many gifted young preachers, walked out of the ordered world of the historic Black denominations and into the sanctuaries of the charismatic non-denominational and Pentecostal movements. For most of the twentieth century, to be a serious Black Christian in America was, by default, to be African Methodist Episcopal or to be Baptist. Those two houses were the gold standard. By the turn of the millennium that was simply no longer true, and everyone in ministry could feel it.

The numbers have caught up to what our eyes already knew. In the early 1970s, fewer than three percent of Americans described themselves as non-denominational Christians. Today the figure is roughly thirteen percent, which means that if “non-denominational” were itself a denomination it would be the largest Protestant body in the country, larger than the Southern Baptist Convention and the United Methodist Church combined.¹ Between 2010 and 2020 alone, the United States Religion Census recorded that non-denominational congregations grew by some two million attenders and roughly nine thousand new churches.² Over the same span the older houses bled members: American Baptist bodies declined by nearly a fifth between 2000 and 2016, the United Methodists by about a sixth, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) by more than forty percent.³ The share of Americans who call themselves Christian at all fell from roughly seventy-eight percent in 2010 to about sixty-four percent in 2020.⁴ A whole scaffolding of institutional loyalty came down in a single generation.

It would be comforting to blame the exodus entirely on the seductions of the culture, on lights and screens and prosperity preaching. Comforting, but dishonest. A large share of the responsibility belongs to us. The Baptist denominational apparatus, and especially the denominational organizations meant to serve the churches, too often failed to notice that the world had changed, and failed still more to adapt. While the independent churches were mastering media, planting aggressively, and building leadership pipelines that put twenty-eight-year-olds to work, many of our associations and conventions were running the same program they had run in 1975. Institutions do not usually die of scandal. They die of irrelevance, of a slow refusal to ask what the churches actually need. That refusal, more than any fog machine, emptied our seats.

WHAT THE BIBLE TEACHES: THE BODY AND ITS MEMBERS

Before we propose any reform, we had better be sure the thing we are trying to save is biblical and not merely traditional. It is. The New Testament church was never a scatter of sovereign congregations with no ligaments between them. It was a body, and bodies are, by definition, connected. Consider first the plain wisdom of the Preacher, who understood that isolation is not strength but exposure:

Two are better than one because they have a good return for their labor. For if either of them falls, the one will lift up his companion. But woe to the one who falls when there is not another to lift him up. … And if one can overpower him who is alone, two can resist him. A cord of three strands is not quickly torn apart. (Ecclesiastes 4:9–12)

A denomination, rightly understood, is nothing more and nothing less than a cord of three strands: churches lashed together so that when one falls there is another to lift it up. Paul gave this instinct its deepest theology when he refused to let any congregation imagine itself self-sufficient. “For even as the body is one and yet has many members, and all the members of the body, though they are many, are one body, so also is Christ” (1 Corinthians 12:12). And lest a strong church look down on a weak one, he added the warning that “the eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you’” (1 Corinthians 12:21). The megachurch has need of the storefront. The storefront has need of the megachurch. Connectionalism is not Baptist bureaucracy; it is Pauline anatomy.

The earliest believers made that anatomy visible. They “were continually devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer” (Acts 2:42). That word for fellowship, koinōnia, is never a vague warmth; it is partnership with skin in the game. And when the young movement faced its first genuine crisis, it did not leave each congregation to improvise alone. “The apostles and the elders came together to look into this matter” (Acts 15:6). That gathering in Jerusalem was the first association meeting, the first convention, the prototype of every gathered body of churches seeking the mind of Christ together. The model is apostolic.

WHAT THIS SERIES PROPOSES

Our framework rests on three tiers, each invented for a reason: the local association, the state convention, and the national convention. Each is now in partial disrepair. But when Nehemiah set out to rebuild what lay in ruins, Scripture records the secret of the work in a single line: “for the people had a mind to work” (Nehemiah 4:6). The stones are good. What we need is a people with a mind to rebuild. In the installments that follow, this series takes up each tier in turn and asks the only question that matters: what can the churches do together that none can do alone, and how do we build the structure that lets them? We begin, as we must, with the body closest to the local church.

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NEXT IN THE SERIES · PART II: BEGIN AT THE ASSOCIATION

NOTES & SOURCES

Scripture quotations are taken from the New American Standard Bible (NASB). Sources are listed in order of first appearance.

1. Ryan Burge, “The Future of American Christianity is Non-Denominational,” Graphs About Religion; and “The rise of the ‘nondenominations’: the largest, quietest trend in American Christianity,” The Washington Times, January 29, 2025.

2. Tracy Simmons, “A ‘Postdenominational’ Era: Inside the Rise of the Unaffiliated Church,” Religion Unplugged, November 2022, citing the 2020 U.S. Religion Census.

3. “A Movement Away from Denominationalism: What’s It Mean for Us?” Christian Standard, May 2023 (denominational membership change, 2000–2016).

4. Pew Research Center, “How the Global Religious Landscape Changed from 2010 to 2020” (released June 9, 2025); U.S. Christian identification declining from 78.3% to 64.0%.

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RECLAIMING ORTHODOXY

A Publication by Orthodox Baptist

Re-imagining the Baptist Denomination within the African-American Tradition

Part I of Four · Written by Z.M.D. McGregor