Liberal Protestantism

Albert Mohler links to an article in the New York Times about the Riverside Church search for a new pastor. The search won't be easy and that fact is partly related to the decline of liberal Protestantism. From the NYT article:

Since being founded by John D. Rockefeller in 1930, Riverside has often and justifiably been likened to the Vatican for America’s mainstream Protestants, the theologically and politically liberal segment of the faith. The church’s first minister, Harry Emerson Fosdick, and successors like William Sloane Coffin, used Riverside as a national pulpit from which to preach social justice, civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War, among other causes.

Yet now, as Riverside prepares to search for a new senior minister for only the sixth time in its history, mainstream Protestants are struggling to reverse a decades-long pattern of losing numbers, vitality and influence to their evangelical Protestant competitors. Between 1990 and 2000 alone, mainstream denominations like the Episcopal, Presbyterian and United Methodist Churches and the United Church of Christ lost 5 percent to 15 percent of their members, according to the Association of Religion Data Archives. Riverside is interdenominational but is affiliated with the United Church of Christ and the Baptist Church. ....

“Riverside’s next minister needs to make a coherent case for liberal Protestantism, and that’s been missing for a long time,” said Randall Balmer, a professor of American religious history at Barnard College and an ordained Episcopal minister. “You need someone who has solid theological understanding and can articulate it speaking to a popular audience.

“The standard conservative criticism,” Professor Ballmer said, “is that the mainline Protestants lost their theological moorings, that they got too far out ahead of the people in the pews. But I think the larger issue is that they were not communicating to the masses.”

Source: Riverside Takes On the Task of Rebuilding a Church - New York Times