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FOREIGN MISSIONS. Spreading the gospel abroad was once a quintessential mainline activity, but today evangelical agencies sponsor four-fifths of American Protestant missionaries. Mainline strategists play down proselytism and insist that foreign countries should recruit their own workers. Similar woes affect the N.C.C.'s most successful agency, Church World Service, the overseas relief and development arm. Its expenditures have fallen substantially, and are now exceeded several times over by those of World Vision, the leading evangelical agency.
RADIO AND TELEVISION. Broadcast religion was once a mainline monopoly, but since the 1960s it has been dominated by evangelical aggressiveness. In the wake of the squalid televangelism scandals, mainliners last fall launched an interfaith cable network called VISN. It is potentially their most strategic project in many years, but so far programming has been dull and dated. Significantly, it was a secular cable company, not mainline agencies, that came up with the idea for VISN.
Because of population and demographic shifts, long-established mainline churches often find themselves struggling along in unpromising locations. On a typical Sunday in downtown Pasadena, Calif., for example, only 80 mostly elderly worshipers attended services at the First Congregational Church, a cavernous old citadel built to hold a thousand people. The sparsely populated pews contrast dramatically with the overflow crowds that regularly jam the ultramodern Church of the Nazarene, situated on the fast-growing outskirts of town.
Whatever the location, though, the Evangelicals are handily winning the game of enlisting members. Most mainline churches do not consider it their mission even to compete. Despite mainline emphasis on racial justice, conservatives in , the Southern Baptist Convention and Assemblies of God are more adept at recruiting urban blacks and Hispanics, just as they are more successful at planting new churches in growing suburbs. When John Vaughn of Southwest Baptist University compiled a list of America's fastest-growing Protestant congregations, 445 of the 500 were outside the mainline.
In their book American Mainline Religion, Wade Clark Roof of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and William McKinney of Hartford Seminary pin much of the blame for decline on long-term demographic trends. As with higher- status groups generally, the authors report, birth rates in traditional Protestant churches dropped below replacement levels in the 1960s, and future trends are alarming because of the rising average ages of members. Moreover, note Roof and McKinney, while liberal congregations never excelled at converting nonbelievers, they used to attract a steady flow of "switchers" from other churches. Social-climbing gains by high-prestige mainline churches began to dwindle in the 1960s.
Most damaging of all is a doubling of "back door" losses since the 1960s, especially as younger adults bred in Establishment churches drift into irreligion. "Most Episcopalians who have left have not gone over to the conservative churches," says Presiding Bishop Edmond Browning. "They have gone nowhere."