In Search of Growth
Spend any time in the church-focused corners of the internet and you will discover that Christians across the spectrum—from Roman Catholics to Pentecostals—share one thing in common: the Great Anxiety. Everyone is anxious about what it means to be the Church in a world experiencing rapid cultural, technological, and political upheaval.
How involved should parishes be in contemporary political issues when America’s social fabric is pulling apart? What role should technology play—not just in livestreamed worship and Zoom Bible studies, but in AI sermons and prayer chatbots? What will happen when the last baby boomers are gone and communities can no longer afford to maintain their aging buildings? And will the “quiet revival” of some in Gen Z revitalize Christianity?
There are countless ways churches might answer these questions, because there are many ways to “do church.” What we believe Christians cannot do is simply ride the waves of cultural and theological faddism. If we do, Christianity will slip from its true bearings, borne along by whatever currents run strongest, rather than guided by the Spirit toward the horizon of faithfulness.
Our parish in the suburbs of Louisville, Kentucky, has spent the last year developing a strategic plan for this very purpose. From the beginning, we knew this had to be more than a long-range plan for our parish. It could not just be a list of changes we want to make, facilities we need to improve, or programs we want to start. Our strategic plan is about how we are going to be church, and it requires making intentional choices about our future.
As we began discussing and discerning, we asked ourselves: What if there was a way to opt out of the Great Anxiety? Søren Kierkegaard once said, “Anxiety can just as well express itself by muteness as by a scream.” Many churches have lost their voice or have responded by screaming ever louder. What if we could be a church in a way that was courageous and confident but not combative—confident without being triumphalist? What if we could offer people a vision of beauty, rest, and unity in a world that is increasingly hostile to those things? How might we cast a vision of the church as polis, as longing for the city of God and resistant to serving kingdoms other than the kingdom of God? And what if, most significantly, the answer to culture’s questions does not require novel innovation but a return to a traditional inheritance?
You probably don’t need us to tell you about the crisis of religious decline in the West. It is one of the primary drivers of the Great Anxiety in the church. For years, mainline churches have sought to address this decline by becoming more user-friendly: softening on doctrine that seemed judgmental or alienating, glossing over hard teachings in Scripture, failing to offer robust formation that might require busy people to do homework or ask challenging questions, opting instead for book clubs or social gatherings. And as they did, they continued to shrink.
Meanwhile, many megachurches sought to attract new members not by changing doctrine but by changing the worship experience. They sought a larger share in the market economy, often invading and pillaging the Great Tradition, leveraging any resources that provided utility for unfettered growth. Liturgies were projected on screens so that no one would be put off by the onerous task of opening a paper book.
They invited people to “come as you are” with casual attire and cups of coffee. They made worship accessible through technology, offering highly produced livestreams and sermon casts long before COVID sent mainline Christians scrambling to ask “How do I do Facebook Live?” Surely many of those leading these churches had good intentions, and while some of these churches often kept robust teaching and an emotionally engaging experience, they left people hungry for deep relationship, ritual, and rootedness.
In Quietly Courageous, Gil Rendle observes that anxious parishes such as these will almost inevitably become battlegrounds for two competing narratives: the revolutionary and the reactionary. The revolutionary imagines a radiant future brimming with possibility—if only the church would fully embrace change. The reactionary, by contrast, looks back on a splendid past and rejects what it sees as the lies of the future, insisting, “We were once strong, and this is how we did it.”
If the revolutionary represents a commitment to novel change, the reactionary embodies a naïve return to “what we’ve always done.” Neither story, however, contains the whole truth. Reactionaries can obstruct necessary transformation, but revolutionaries, left unchecked, can wreak havoc. History’s great upheavals—including the French Revolution—offer sobering reminders of how visionary zeal can quickly descend into chaos.
We believe there is a better path for churches that find none of these approaches compelling. It is a way that steps outside the Great Anxiety altogether by drawing on wisdom that long predates it—a way of life we call Great Tradition Christianity. This is not a retreat into sentimentality or mere nostalgia. Rather, it offers a grounded, life-giving alternative to the restless, often miserable forces shaping modern culture.
In an age when many Christians hop on the highway of fast and convenient spirituality, this approach represents an earthy pilgrim path worn smooth by centuries of disciples who have walked it. And while Great Tradition Christianity is often not in the lexicon of many Episcopalians or laypersons, it must not be mistaken as a blunt instrument for beating down other ideas or forms of piety.
It is an invitation to inhabit “joyful orthodoxy,” precisely so we can say that Anglicanism is part of a larger story but is not coterminous with it. The premise is straightforward: the church responds to the challenges of our age not by reinventing itself, but by recovering and reinhabiting the deep wisdom of the historic faith. Churches seek to follow and serve Jesus, making disciples of all nations; Great Tradition churches simply do so in a distinct way. They recognize that countless historic churches of the Great Commission (Go make disciples) and the Greatest Commandment (love God, love your neighbor) grew organically within the seedbed of the Great Tradition and lack vital nourishment without it. In our work, we discerned five characteristic markers of churches shaped by this vision:
Scriptural: They hold to Scripture interpreted through the Church’s historical wisdom and ancient ecumenical consensus—councils, creeds, the Church Fathers, and centuries of community reflection.
Apostolic: They emphasize the continuity of authority and teaching preserved through bishops connected directly to the apostles who were sent by Jesus, thus ensuring faithful transmission of doctrine, practice, and ever-expanding witness.
Catholic: They affirm unity and fellowship that transcend cultural, geographic, historical, and denominational boundaries, recognizing a shared, ancient Christian heritage.
Sacramental: They believe the sacraments—particularly baptism and the Eucharist—are genuine encounters with transcendent reality that form and nourish the Christian life.
Liturgical: They practice structured, historically rooted worship enhanced by sacred music, art, architecture, and rituals that engage the senses and draw believers deeper into divine mysteries.
Churches that are part of the Great Tradition are not just identified by these markers, but guided by them in their worship, formation, and witness. Once you commit to a vision of Great Tradition Christianity, everything else changes. You can begin to make decisions about how you want to be. It has implications for everything from Sunday worship to parish formation.
A Great Tradition youth ministry, for example, would invite young people into a vision of life that emphasizes universal truths (Catholic) and the importance of their embodied lives (Sacramental), gives them a structure on which to hang their faith (Liturgical) and a teaching that may never show up on TikTok, but which has been handed down all the way back from those initially sent out by Jesus (Apostolic), the crucified Messiah of Israel. A youth ministry like that, if carefully implemented with pastoral charity, energy, and a capacity for fun, would provide teenagers a place of richness, rootedness, and stability in a world that is constantly shifting, flashing, and changing.
People today have had enough of unlimited choice and change. We as a culture are not freed by more options and innovations. We are stifled by them (read The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz). We are longing for rest and rootedness. We want something that doesn’t merely respond to modern problems but transcends them. The hope of churches like ours, churches that cling to the Great Tradition, is this: Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever, and his Church—those men and women who lived in times at least as difficult and dangerous as ours—have given us a gift: a tradition worth preserving, and a call to be free.
The Rev. Barbara White serves as associate rector for worship, formation, and communications at St. Francis in the Fields Episcopal Church in Louisville, Kentucky.
The Rev. Clint Wilson is rector of St. Francis in the Fields Episcopal Church in Louisville, Kentucky.
