© 2000 Meredith Sprunger
© 2000 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
Donald E. Miller, executive director of the University of Southern California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture, made a study of new churches springing up around the country that appealed to the unchurched baby boomers. As a result of this study he wrote Reinventing American Protestantism (1997) in which he argues that a reformation is transforming the way Christianity will be experienced in the new millennium.
These new paradigm churches have discarded many of the attributes of establishment religion. He believes they are the harbingers of postdenominational Christianity. The pastors of these churches are not required to have a seminary education. They are individuals whose lives have been radically transformed by God. The focus is not on theological doctrine but on spiritual experience and service. The pastor is a teacher, visionary, and trainer, but the people do the basic work of ministry. These churches tend to be tolerant of different personal life styles.
Miller observes that innovation in religion occurs at the local and grass-roots level. He was struck by the fact that the new clergy within new paradigm churches are almost always first identified within the ranks of active laypeople. These individuals are then mentored and trained within the context of the local church. The fastest growing churches are cell-based-with all of the church ministry flowing out of small groupings of people and engaging in highly imaginative service to people in their neighborhoods.
All of this indicates, I believe, that our world is being conditioned for new paradigm religious organizations. One could hardly imagine a more perfect set up for the advent of new religious fellowships originating in Study Groups and Societies inspired by the Fifth Epochal Revelation. “You see for yourselves that the harvest is plenteous, but the laborers are few. Let us all, therefore, pray the Lord of the harvest that he send forth still more laborers into his fields.” (UB 150:4.1) “The time is ripe to witness the figurative resurrection of the human Jesus from his burial tomb amidst the theological traditions and the religious dogmas of nineteen centuries.” (UB 196:1.2)