Grant Us Courage: Travels Along the Mainline of American Protestantism.

Splendid narratives about twelve American Protestant congregations and their careers from the middle toward the end of this century carry implicit lessons. If nothing else, Randall Balmer's stories ought to remind Christians that they are a pilgrim people and that nothing lasts except the eternal World. If everything written for Christians by "Church Growth" experts encourages them to think and build big, the same stories ought to serve as cautionary words. Those who see, or rather sightsee, empty churches across Europe, old Christendom, may very well find a shock of recognition in these (mostly) emptying churches that prospered at midcentury but languish or--says this Christian hoper who is looking over Balmer's shoulder and beyond his lenses--have to find new missions today.

Stock in Church Growth, a movement that employs market techniques to tell planners how to grow churches, might well turn bearish, if pastors and lay people read these accounts. The congregations whose careers are here condensed were but two generations ago nominated as "Great Churches" by readers of the flagship mainstream Protestant magazine, the Christian Century. They were not all large or wealthy or rich in prospect, but these parishes had something about them that spelled fulfillment and led readers to want the editors to find out and tell more about them. One or two of them still bustle and thrive; the others would be overlooked by nominators today.

Catholics who care enough to mourn, and some do, as tearful hierarchs close dozens of once thriving "Great Churches" in the former Catholic Ethnicdom of our metropolises, will find confirmation here of their impression that nothing lasts. Evangelicals who think their surge of these years is resulting or will result in stable, ever-prospering, congregations, will find reasons for caution in the same stories. The subtitle, which finds Balmer traveling "Along the Mainline" is unintentionally misleading; at least five of these churches did not belong to the cluster later dubbed mainline.

There is Washington Prairie Lutheran Church of Decorah, Iowa; few would have called it "mainline" back in mid-century. Those few who would, would have been making a category mistake. They certainly would not have considered Trinity Lutheran Church of Freistatt in Missouri and its Missouri Synod "mainline." And Olive Chapel Baptist Church in Apex, North Carolina, belonged to what the mainliners of 1950 thought of as a nadir denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, a church body that is now having its "Great Churches" hour.

Condense the plot of ten or eleven of these church stories into a line or two? You'll find it in the word of the Southern Baptist interim pastor at Olive Chapel, when Balmer phoned her about a visit: "Oh yes, this church had its real heyday during the 1950s. We've fallen on hard times since." Of course, you can balance that with the story of one of the two statistical winners, Bellevue Baptist Church, a hardline boomer that "won" by having lost--and having moved. Deserting downtown Memphis, it now owns a 376-acre "campus" and a $34 million (in (1989) building complex in the "hightech faux colonial" style. It is led by harder-line pastor Adrian Rogers, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, and a leader in its fundamentalist takeover. The bottom line of Balmer's mildly disapproving but restrained story of Bellevue? Take the money, and the remnant, and run. Then grow, for another round.

Credit the other prospering parish, Mount Olivet Lutheran Church in Minneapolis, with having stayed in its middle-class neighborhood, and with having come up with the right mix of continuity (even in the blood line of the Youngdahl pastors) and innovation or enterprise. Its story is a rare one in this company.

So five of the twelve "Great Churches" at midcentury were at best located at the Lutheran-Baptist margins of the mainline then and hardly represent it now. Those evangelical or conservative Catholic relishers of Schadenfreude (the sin of rejoicing in others' misfortune) who blame "Mainline Follies"--which means adaptation-to-culture--for the church's problems, have few reasons to rub their hands together in glee. The remaining seven churches--Presbyterian, Methodist, Congregational, "Community"--do not for the most part give evidence that they were folly-filled. Balmer shows that most of them have tried hard, tried everything. But demography, population changes, cycles of history, participation in religious games played by innings, occasional unpreventable misfortunes (for example, pastoral lapses and scandals), hit them all hard.

Round up or resurrect their pastors and lay leadership from a half century ago and listen to them; expect to hear regret at statistical dreams unfulfilled; reference, in many cases, to heydays and good old days; repentance for falling to have anticipated some changes and for having complacently ridden some crests. But they would like to go on and warn the Bellevues and the "Church Grown," megamall congregations that while they are enjoying batting in their half of the inning, not to enjoy Schadenfreude too much; not to make fun of "the mainline" and its "follies." They would do better to read Balmer and ask whether their boasts and brags and swaggerings--as they are doing the adapting-to-culture--are not setting them up for a future ironic traveler to visit. He or she might have to dredge up a title from an earlier Balmer work, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory. Or "My Eyes See What Once Had Seen the Glory of the Lord." Or the glorifying of humans.

If this review, which first beckons readers simply to enjoy an elegant if elegiac book, and to find the drama in quotidian existence, as Balmer does, is turning into a sermon, it has to have a point. The point is not: avoid hubris; make only small plans; don't try anything. It is rather: recognize the mission to and through and among people who, for a brief moment in time and a little spot in space, witness to the acts of God wherever, and erect buildings as momentary stays against chaos. Watch them as they there celebrate the divine mysteries and from which, no matter what their size or market possibilities, many engage in the works of love, as thousands of the people who have come and gone and, sometimes, stayed as the Grant Us Courage churches have done.