Church attendance amongst the under 40s is on the rise. A good chunk of those young men and women don’t even describe themselves as believers. Belief, I think, is almost irrelevant. Twitter and the twenty-four hour news-cycle is no place for a creature with a soul.

Evensong at Manchester Cathedral attracts a disparate crowd. There are people you wouldn’t expect, like a young mother, all blonde highlights and dry shampoo. Several older couples. A younger man, in jeans and a tweed jacket, with a rucksack at his feet. The air smells mildly of disinfectant, and I look around, as writers do, avoiding eye contact and making mental notes.
The cathedral is old and beautiful, a brooding mass of stone and slab, arch and point. It sits, a great Gothic hulk, amongst the gleam of modern Manchester, not far from Victoria station. It is a landmark and, during the pandemic, provided somewhere to head during my long and pointless lockdown-busting walks around the anaesthetised city. Naturally, I started going in. The epic space and the vast, numinal nave roof called me back.
I am one of many Millennials who, if not reconnecting with Christianity, are disconnecting from the brutal nihilism of the modern world. Church attendance amongst the under 40s is on the rise. A good chunk of those young men and women don’t even describe themselves as believers. Belief, I think, is almost irrelevant. Twitter and the twenty-four hour news-cycle is no place for a creature with a soul.
“Aha!” chimes in Professor Alice Roberts, and the various self-styled “humanists” who have spoken so regularly and listened so rarely in recent years: “There is no evidence people have souls.”
That is bollocks, of course. We are all more than a mere mass of chemicals. Every maladroit teenage declaration, every fretful sleepless night, and every group of mates laughing in a pub at a salty, unrepeatable joke is proof of that. There is no need, on this issue, to “trust the science”. I don’t care about the science. We’ve spent two years trusting the science, and created a car crash of suffering unheard of in peacetime.
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This is the essence of the social construction of reality: objective facts can matter less than intersubjective consensus. Since other people’s perceptions are an objective fact, you had best conform to their expectations—no matter how radical or irrational they might be.

America’s major institutions have gone woke the same way that someone goes bankrupt: slowly, then all at once. How is it that so many of us have had the experience of being in a diversity-training session divided into racially segregated “affinity groups” or reading yet another sackcloth-and-ashes statement from management and thinking: They can’t possibly believe this, right? Any answer should begin with the dominant theory from the sociology of organizations: neo-institutionalism and isomorphism. The theory explains that organizations go beyond their core competencies to imitate market leaders and to meet the demands of their trading partners, the regulatory state, and key employees.
Based on his study of a Stone Age culture in New Guinea, Bronisław Malinowski argued that when people face uncertainty, they turn to magic to propitiate the capricious spirits responsible for their incomprehensible misfortune. Being ever-so-sophisticated people who attended business school, corporate executives don’t hire shamans to replenish fisheries or to avoid a storm. Instead, they bring in consultants to help the firm embrace best practices. But as Charles Fain Lehman explains, John Meyer and Brian Rowan’s 1977 paper in the American Journal of Sociology, “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony,” argues that this distinction is a farce—that much behavior as practiced by modern corporations, NGOs, and government agencies is not about technical efficacy that rationally orients means to ends but ritual, vaguely intended to elicit good fortune by achieving legitimacy with the firm’s “environment.”
Following Meyer and Rowan was Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell’s “The Iron Cage Revisited,” published in 1983 in the American Sociological Review. DiMaggio and Powell fleshed out the theory with three specific pathways for why organizations adopt similar practices—or, in their language, become isomorphic.
Consider, first, coercive isomorphism—when an organization adopts practices because the state or its trading partners demand that it do so. As Frank Dobbin and John Sutton noted in the American Journal of Sociology in 1998, affirmative action began as a response to executive orders that applied not to all firms but specifically to federal contractors. However, since most large firms sell, or aspire to sell, something to the federal government, this mandate applies to much of the economy. Similarly, most federal higher-education policy takes the form of putting strings on federal money. A college can ignore those Department of Education “Dear Colleague” letters if it is willing to forgo access to federally subsidized student loans and NIH grants, but that’s an expensive declaration of autonomy. And as Richard Hanania has argued, civil rights legislation is enforced through torts with the presumption that imbalances are malicious, giving organizations a vague but powerful mandate to err strenuously on the side of avoiding anything that might validate that presumption.
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 The Evangelical church must address the plank in its own eye. And that plank is…that we are failing to be the body of God in the world. The church must be re-embodied in neighborhoods so that it may once again enact the love of God through the love of neighbor. The church must transform lives by offering new patterns of being, rather than simply changing minds by offering new information. Therefore, participation in the body and spirit of Christ must happen extremely locally, with the very small and specific group of people that are…our actual neighbors.

Two central streams run throughout the Bible in seemingly opposite directions. I do not say these are the only two streams, nor the only important streams. But they are central and unavoidable. The first I’ll call holiness; the second, inclusion. Ultimately, these two opposite-flowing streams run together in Christ and in his church. But it is not immediately clear how this works. Holiness means “set apart.” Inclusion means “bringing in.”
The two can easily be pitted against each other. Very often they are. For instance, the modern debates between “liberal” and “conservative” Christians regarding sexual ethics, heaven and hell, how to read the Bible, etc, tend toward a “holiness versus inclusion” paradigm, where conservatives argue for some form of holiness and liberals for some form of inclusion.
At the risk of oversimplifying some very complex topics, the basic problem with this paradigm is that if your God is all about inclusion, what are people being included into if not holiness? Likewise, if your God is all about holiness, who then can enter in? Thankfully, the Scriptures do not force us to choose one way or the other. On the contrary, the Bible is the story of the patient reconciliation of opposites. In the very first scene, God creates the heavens and the earth. The heavens and the earth. Separation, or set-apartness–light from darkness, waters above from waters below, “each according to its kind,” etc–is perhaps the central theme of the creation account. Fast forward to the final scene of the Bible and what do we find? The heavens and the earth, which seemed insurmountably estranged…are now being wed. The Holy (Set Apart) City comes down from heaven to be the place of ultimate inclusion, where God and man may dwell together for eternity.
To express this same notion of cooperation between God’s holiness and inclusion, the Church Fathers often used the image of God’s left and right hand. With his left hand, it was said, he judges, separates, casts out. With his right hand, he brings in and has mercy. You see this in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, for instance. The “two hands” of God is a helpful analogy, because it proves that opposite purposes, like opposite hands, are not always ultimately opposed. Our own bodies depend on the integration of left and right. Having or being able to use only one hand is a major handicap. Sadly, the body of Christ in the world has often suffered from this handicap. The church has tended to swing the pendulum from holiness to inclusion and back again, each time tying one of its hands behind its back. So that should be our first point: Let’s not be a one-handed church. Holiness and inclusion are both needed now.
And yet…
The “both-and” solution, while true in the abstract, does not always solve the problem on the ground. Some tasks require one of our hands and not the other. Insisting on using both hands in every instance because “both are good” would be silly. Likewise, obedience to God, in the Bible and in our daily lives, is usually quite specific, concrete, and contextualized. We reach a fork in the road, where we must choose a way, even if, theoretically, both ways could be good. In the history of the people of God, there have often been such forks in the road. Prophetic movements in Scripture have often called God’s people to focus on one good thing at the seeming cost of another. The calls of Nehemiah and Jeremiah were in opposite directions. One honored God by returning and rebuilding Jerusalem; the other by settling down in a foreign, unholy land. The point is…both exile and return can be blessed, depending on what God is doing in that particular moment.
Perhaps an even more fundamental example of this phenomenon is the juxtaposition between the stories of Joseph (at the end of Genesis) and Moses (at the beginning of Exodus).
The Joseph Movement (Inclusion)
Joseph, the favorite son of Jacob, is sold into slavery in a foreign land by his murderous brothers. However, during his Egyptian exile, God seems to bless everything Joseph touches. Thanks to his wisdom and ability to interpret dreams, Joseph overcomes extreme trials and winds up being the right hand man of Pharaoh himself. When a famine strikes the land, he not only saves Egypt, but also saves his own starving people who venture into the foreign land in search of food. The newfound riches of Egypt (thanks to Joseph) strangely bless the sojourning people of God (thanks, again, to Joseph). Joseph even marries the daughter of an Egyptian priest, and their two sons become two of the twelve tribes of Israel (foreshadowing Gentile inclusion for not the first time in the first book of the Bible!). In a word, every way that Joseph seems to embrace the unholy people of Egypt leads to unexpected blessing. His multi-faceted union to a foreign nation blesses the foreign nation and the people of God.
At the very end of Genesis, Joseph’s father Jacob is brought before Pharaoh and even pronounces a blessing–yes, a blessing–over him (Gen. 47:10). But this Joseph Movement does have an expiration date. By the end of Joseph’s story, Pharaoh has amassed a great deal of power and wealth, thanks in no small part to Joseph. And the people of God have found themselves in close proximity to Pharaoh’s rule. By the time we reach the opening chapter of Exodus, the people of God have become slaves in Egypt, and the new Pharaoh is calling for the killing of every newborn Hebrew boy. This is no proof that the Joseph Movement was unwise or mistaken. Again, the Joseph movement was unquestionably blessed. And yet, now the blessing has reached its saturation point. “Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph” (Exod. 1:8). The moment is ripe for a new movement of God.
The Moses Movement (Holiness)
From the very beginning of Exodus, it is clear that Moses will be a leader on a very different track than Joseph. As opposed to Joseph, Moses begins his life in Egypt. In fact, he is raised in the same royal courts into which Joseph earned his way. But unlike Joseph, not all his actions in the foreign kingdom are blessed and prosperous. His first major act in the story, the (seemingly just) killing of the Egyptian, does not, like Joseph, lead to further admiration and promotion for Moses. Rather, it leads to further fear and suspicion. This ultimately leads to Moses’s exile, which ironically amounts to a kind of reverse exile (or mini-Exodus), since it is an exile toward his true home. It is there, at Mt. Horeb (the future Mt. Sinai) that God reveals himself to Moses in the burning bush and tells him that he shall lead his people out of Egypt. Thus begins the Moses Movement…away from the powers and influences of unholy Egypt, toward a new, holy (set-apart!) future.
Importantly, Moses’s story begins much as Joseph’s story had ended–being delivered from danger early in life into the blessing of Pharaoh’s court, enjoying a place of honor there, taking a foreign wife, and leading a mixed multitude. Moses’s life is not a contradiction of Joseph’s life. Rather, he is a new embodiment of Joseph, the seed of Joseph now headed in a new direction. The rest of the story of Moses (and the story of the Torah) is about holiness…about what it will mean for the people of God to leave behind the ways and the gods–even the seeming blessings–of Egypt, in order to assume a new identity as the set apart people of Yahweh. The removal of his sandals at the bush, the circumcision of his son, the plagues, the exodus, the Cloud, the theophany on Sinai, the Ten Commandments, the tabernacle, and the law all point to the same theme of holiness.
And yet, notice, this holy path does not leave inclusion behind. Just as Joseph, though in exile, remained a holy man, Moses, though leaving Egypt for the Holy Land, brings with him a mixed multitude and a foreign wife. Even the Law, which required set apartness, spells out ways in which God’s people must welcome outsiders. The necessity of inclusion remains. But holiness has taken center stage for a time. There must be separation before there is reconciliation; separation for the sake of reconciliation; holiness for the sake of love.
Where We Find Ourselves
Without going into great detail, I believe the 20th Century in America experienced the blessing of a Joseph Movement.[1] What we now know as the Evangelical Movement reached its climax with men like Billy Graham, who not only filled stadiums and TV screens across the country, bearing the fruit of millions of conversions, but also sat at the right hand of literal Presidents. I believe this was the blessing of God. We have this phenomenon to thank for the conversions of many of our parents and grandparents–whether in a Billy Graham crusade or a Young Life meeting (my mother-in-law was the former; my father-in-law the latter). Indeed, many in our own generation met the Lord outside of the church in ministries like Young Life. This is perhaps why many of our contemporary Evangelical churches look and feel more like Young Life meetings than traditional worship services.
To be clear, I am not calling the modern Evangelical movement into question. As with any movement, I’m sure we could retrospectively poke holes in it if we chose to do so. I believe that would be a waste of time and possibly an inappropriate exposure of our spiritual fathers and mothers. My purpose, rather, is to propose that the American Evangelical Movement, which was and is a Joseph Movement, a movement of inclusion toward an unholy world, has now reached its saturation point. It is time for a Moses Movement.
Recently, an article on The Gospel Coalition website revealed the findings of a recent study on American church attendance.
We’re living in the largest and fastest religious shift in U.S. history. Some 40 million adult Americans who used to go to church at least once per month now attend less than once per year. This shift is larger than the number of conversions during the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening, and the totality of the Billy Graham Crusades combined.
The authors go on to make a number of deep observations, challenging major misconceptions about why these changes are taking place. For instance, one would assume highly educated, liberal-minded, white collar Americans would constitute the vast majority of the drop-outs, and that their reasons for leaving the church would be ideological in nature (e.g. Wokeness, etc). Not so. The vast majority of the drop-outs were blue collar, politically-conservative Americans who left for casual, non-ideological reasons (e.g. no deep connection to pastor or community, left during COVID and never came back, listen to sermons online, etc). Though the authors give us a deep glimpse into the problem we now face, their own concluding exhortation ironically reveals a commitment to the same Evangelical paradigm which may now be the cause of the problem, rather than the solution:
Our local churches can grow institutionally to be bolder and clearer with our doctrine, religious affection, and cultural engagement. We pray that God uses our book and study to encourage church leaders and give them actionable ways to engage unchurched people.
What’s wrong with “being bolder and clearer with our doctrines” and “engaging the culture/unchurched people?” Nothing, of course…in the abstract. But we live in a particular moment in time. In a Joseph Movement, we can expect God to bless our participation in and engagement with an unholy paradigm. The sons of Jacob had no other choice but to bless and be blessed in Egypt. Yet, once the Joseph Movement had run its course, it became problematic to continue with the same plan. By the time of Exodus, anyone who was still saying something like, “Let us stay and be blessed among the Egyptians” (Exod. 16; Num. 14) was clearly in the wrong.
The Moses Movement had a different emphasis: not engagement with the unholy culture, but departure from it. And this, it turns out, was the best possible form of evangelism. When Moses leaves Egypt, all sorts of “unchurched” (if you will) people come along for the ride. Even unbelievers, who had once enjoyed the blessing of Egyptian food, wealth and protection, could now see that they had become its slaves. On the other side of the Red Sea, many of them would eventually be circumcised into the family of God.
Again, engaging the culture is a good thing. We should invite the unchurched in. But…if we are not a holy people, then what are we inviting them into?
“Come as you are,” is the modern Evangelical gospel at its core. And it will always be a valid gospel invitation, especially in a Joseph Movement. But it is not the only gospel invitation. There is also, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself, pick up his cross daily, and follow me.” Normally, of course, we save this latter invitation for later, or as the case may be, never bring it up at all. After all, it feels like more of a demand than an invitation, and demands don’t tend to feel very gospel-y to us Evangelicals.
As strange as it sounds, I believe we are now living in a moment where outsiders might actually prefer to be asked to pick up their crosses rather than merely come as they are. In a moment absolutely rife with mental health crises, meaning crises, identity crises, broken marriages, substance addictions, online addictions, and deaths of despair, people do not so much want to be “welcomed as they are” as shown what they could be. They actually want a truth that demands something of them. That is what they want to be invited into. In a word, holiness.
At this moment, I guarantee you can generate more curiosity, concern, and genuine conversation in a room full of strangers by quoting, “Be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect,” than “For God so loved the world…” That is not to say one is more true than the other. Jesus said them both. It simply reveals the moment we are in. We live in a parched and unholy land. The only water that will quench our thirst is holiness. It’s no longer “religion versus relationship” (a phrase Tim Keller wielded with great success at the height of the Joseph Movement). No, in the 2020’s, give me religion. In fact, give me a religious relationship, because every non-religious relationship–including my teenage relationship with Jesus–is running dry.
This is where we find ourselves. The age of the supermarket, with its millions of options for every consumer “need,” is in decline. The age of Trader Joes is on the rise. “We have one type of vanilla ice cream. Do you want it or not?” Turns out people do. And they’ll pay twice the price, thank you for saving them the time, and go and tell their friends to do the same. We no longer have to cater to everyone’s individualized consumer preferences. Consumerism has exhausted and enslaved us all, and we now know it. Only mention you’re leaving Egypt, and the modern mixed multitude will grab their jackets and meet you at the door. The best evangelism today…is holiness. But how do we do that?
A Parish Movement: Four Characteristics of the Future Church
Parishes
Our churches should be neighborhood-based, encouraging people to re-embody their faith, worship, and obedience where they live, alongside their actual neighbors.
Background
A parish is an old word for a neighborhood (from the Greek paroikos, “to dwell beside”). Particularly, it means a neighborhood under the care of a priest or minister. Catholic, Orthodox, and Mainline Protestant churches (Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Lutheran) have all traditionally functioned according to ministerial districts or parishes. A group of adjacent parishes is often called a diocese, which in most of these traditions is overseen by a bishop.
This is the ancient–and, I believe, biblical–structure of the church: highly localized, moderately hierarchical. In the 21st Century, the parish structure is still evident in Catholic and Orthodox churches, but among American Protestants it has almost become extinct. This is in large part because, in the 20th Century, the influence and membership of Mainline Protestant churches, where the traditional parish structure was still assumed, began to fade drastically just as modern liberal theology was becoming commonplace amongst its leadership.[2]
During this time, many Protestants left the church entirely.
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