Amy Butler could be America’s pastor closest to heaven.
Her new office in Riverside Church’s steeple — the tallest in the country — towers within Manhattan’s skyline. But more than six months since she was installed as senior minister of a heralded pulpit, Butler faces significant challenges, including the church’s decades-long membership decline.
As mainline Protestant churches struggle with membership losses across denominations, Butler is looking for ways to infuse some of what has made evangelicalism thrive into a more progressive form of Protestantism, two forms of Christianity usually seen at odds with one another.
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While some individuals like Sojourners founder Jim Wallis have worked to make evangelicals more progressive, Butler seems to be trying to make mainline Protestants more evangelical.
Mainline Protestants can learn from evangelicals about populism, or helping explain theology to the masses, said Randall Balmer, a historian at Dartmouth College. And evangelicals, who tend to focus more on their personal faith, can draw social action strategies from mainline Protestantism, he said.