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Churches are also searching for new ways to minister to an increasingly mobile population. In Philadelphia's West Mill Creek redevelopment project, 3,200 residents are served by a young Presbyterian minister who has no church, preaches no sermons, collects no contributions. Instead, the Rev. Eugene Turner simply moves among the development homes, offering his help, and only incidentally guiding the religiously inclined to the church of their choice. "Mine is a ministry of mobility," he says. "I can most successfully meet these people without the traditional institutional forms." In Denver, pastors are worrying about how to reach families living in the anonymity of tall new apartment buildings. "They are sealed in their apartments," says Dr. Paul Noren, the Augustana Lutheran pastor who is president of the Denver Area Council of Churches, "but they are a responsibility of the church." To reach these hidden Christians, many Denver churches play down Sunday worship in favor of midday services during the week.
Believer from Pagan. Church leaders readily grant that all is not yet apostolic. The suburbs remain a center of concern, and some ministers feel that a vast majority of Christians still have no sense of commitment at all. "When I look out into the market place." complains one Catholic priest, "I can no longer distinguish the believer from the pagan. I can distinguish the Jehovah's witness; I can distinguish the followers of Father Divine —but not the followers of the traditional faiths." A majority of clergymen gloomily accept the guilt of the churches for failing to administer to the Negro, the workingman, the drug addict, the divorcee—to nearly everyone, in fact, but the prosperous middle classes. Too often, says Stanford's Brown, paraphrasing the time-honored description of the Anglican Church in Britain, U.S. Christianity "is simply the Republican Party at prayer."
Yet even as they criticize, these clerics note that since the church-going boom ended, the nation's great religious bodies have begun to face up to realities. Many pastors believe that their churches will be more relevant, and accomplish more good, with a committed core of true believers. "The church is moving inward," says Dr. Blake Smith, pastor of Austin's University Baptist Church. "There are a great many experiments, little trailblazers, to rediscover the reality that lies beneath the outward structure."