When does losing your balance become a trip, then a stumble, and finally a fall? And how many times can you go through the whole process a second time, then a third, and a fourth, until you realize that walking is no longer an option without a cane, a walker, then finally a wheelchair?

American Protestant Christianity was headed for a wheelchair 100 years ago, when mainline denominations split over what those departing viewed as Fundamentals of the faith. Without those Fundamentals, the mainline denominations declined over the next fifty years, replacing the life enriching exuberance of those who left with good works, important, significant, but emotionally uninspiring.

Those who departed splintered into a myriad of denominations and sub denominations, always with a tendency to value independence in hearing a particular message from the Holy Spirit. Those groups fell into two general classes over this past Century, those who felt the Christian message could never be appealing to those outside the Church, and those who adapted a fundamentalist view of Biblical inerrancy and miracles to fit into a cultural form more closely resembling the world in which they lived.

Both groups flourished throughout the 20th Century, but increasingly those who held to views which separated them from the activities of the culture became more assimilated, and increasingly the difference between these groups was a developing conflict about theological purity. Although both groups held mostly to the same general beliefs about the Divinity of Jesus and the Biblical narrative, pressure in the culture to conform to changing attitudes about sex and gender roles inched these culturally assimilated believers towards positions regarding these changes that seemed to be outside what was taught by the Bible they said was infallible.

Some of this drift was hidden by a mini revival in Protestant Christianity during the turbulent 1960s and 70s, when mainline denominations showed some life during a renewed emphasis on the ministry of the Holy Spirit, during a so called charismatic movement, which, ironically, although it benefitted all those holding to traditional Christian theology, caused separation among those who had battled over cultural accommodation in the past, but now battled over the validity of the movement itself.

The renewal of that period was spurred on by a new found emphasis on teaching that Jesus was coming back to the earth, to rule and deliver the planet from the precipice of nuclear war and ecological disaster. Unfortunately, He didn’t come back, and there began a decline in Christian faith that has continued to this day, accelerated over the past ten years in a way no one could have imagined during the heady times of the Charismatic Revival.