The Church Has a Boundary Problem

The American church has lost a clear sense of itself and its boundaries. A series of factors have eroded the church's unique place in society influencing the marginalization of disciple-making and catechesis. If we understand discipleship as the church's coordinating mechanism, the means by which all of God's people develop a shared knowledge and understanding of what it means to follow Christ and how following Christ transforms the way we participate in the world (e.g., shifting from luck to blessing, from nature to creation, and from pride to gratitude), the loss of discipleship results in an awkward church without the sort of fluidity of movement it needs to proclaim the gospel, discern good and evil, and persevere without compromise in the face of negative social consequences let alone persecution.

These factors include, but are not necessarily limited to: (1) amplification, the multiplication of individual voices through widely accessible technologies, (2) assimilation, the drawing of the church and its members into ideological positions¹ that diminish the church's distinctiveness through the adoption of social, economic, and political logics that American civil religion labels "Christian" or "biblical," (3) fragmentation, the divided authority structure of the Protestant church, in which convictions about how to read and practice Scripture split the body and allow for a high degree of independence from any authoritative way of reading and teaching it, (4) inversion, the subtle exchange of a given interpretive system for God's word, so that interpretations take on the authority that rightfully belongs to Scripture; and (5) transaction, the fetish of institutional preservation that comes to be defined as faithfulness and success even when preserving the institution requires compromising faith.

The Church in America

The broad American context in which the church in the United States has existed for 250 years has its own doxa, the set of beliefs, values, and assumptions that it treats as self-evident, natural, and unquestionable. For many years, the overlaps between the doxa of the United States and the church, combined with American civil religious language and ritual that often borrowed from Christianity, were sufficiently large that the church could settle for wholesomeness instead of pursuing holiness without being able to tell a great deal of difference between the two.² A series of fields (semi-autonomous social arenas of competition) were established that incentivized a particular way of life and sense of the way the world works. While God may have been allowable in these fields, their ways were ultimately at odds with "the way, the truth, and the life" (Jn 14:6) that is Jesus Christ. However well-conceived and -intentioned these ways may have been at the beginning, they would inevitably bend away from God's order because of human self-interest incapable of being held back by the law of the land or, in many instances, the theology of the church.

For example, historian Mark Noll argues that the Civil War left the American church facing significant problems in practical theology: "the enduring reality of racism," which persisted "almost as virulently through the mob and the rope as it had in the chain and the lash," and "the expansion of consumer capitalism," in which new wealth was matched "by large-scale alienation and considerable poverty." Though the evangelical tradition that had shaped American society before the war possessed theological resources to address both, the faith retreated into an increasingly private expression that had more marginal public effects. After the Civil War, theological arguments "have only rarely been able to overcome the inertia behind institutions and practices sanctioned by the evolving usages of a voluntaristic, democratic consumerist culture."³ The church became entangled with its economic systems and could offer little more than arguments for personal piety.⁴ The Black church, at many points since the Civil War, has been an exception. Shut out from the Protestant institutions, it formed a gathered body whose faith was neither private nor publicly powerless.⁵

Highlighting these challenges is not intended to demonize the church. History presents "what is" and we should be cautious about assuming that "what is" can or should be translated to "what ought to be" or "what ought to have been." The church, wherever it is located, is always situated within a rival sacred-social order. Cultures, according to philosopher Philip Rieff, "transliterate" societal conceptions of sacred order into social order. As such, "cultures are what they represent: 'symbolics' or, in a word that represents what it is, 'worlds'."⁶ Because culture's transliteration of the sacred order is an expression of human understanding selectively embracing aspects of the biblical text, the social order gestures toward a sacred realm that is not trued to that of the Triune God. The church's reception of God's self-disclosure is intended to root its social life in the sacred order conveyed through Son, Scripture, and Spirit. The church, then, affirms goodness, truth, and beauty within a given culture even as it seeks to correct, reject, or expand the culture's understanding of the good, true, and beautiful by pointing beyond them to the God who is their source. It is the correcting and pointing beyond that the church surrenders by settling for the wholesome ideals of a culture's notion of goodness, truth and beauty.

The church accommodates to a rival sacred-social order rather than resisting it by patterning its life on Christ.⁷ To solve the problem, it must begin to recover a Christian sacred-social order within itself (bonding social capital) so that it can faithfully navigate and influence the world (bridging social capital). The aspects of sacred-social order include: (1) the patterns of God's order, (2) place, (3) time, (4) appropriate interaction with God, (5) powers and principalities, (6) nations and race, (7) male and female identity and relationships, and (8) the transmission of a Christian sacred-social order to the next generation through discipleship.

Individualism

Charles Taylor describes this era as "an age of authenticity," in which the religious life a person joins must not only be chosen but must speak to them and fit their own spiritual development.⁸ He suggests, "the dark side of individualism is a centering on the self, which both flattens and narrows our lives, makes them poorer in meaning, and less concerned with others in society."⁹

Taylor goes on to describe an older American arrangement in which belonging to God was bound up with belonging to the nation. He argues that the age of authenticity dissolves that arrangement, decoupling the spiritual from any shared body, church or nation. The church is caught between a pull toward fusing Christian identity with national identity (e.g., modern-day Christian nationalism; ongoing adherence to Christian civil religion), dissolving it into private spirituality, or, increasingly, embracing policies of togetherness that seem to cultivate community, address inequities, and provide for the vulnerable in society (e.g., socialism). None of these options yields a gathered people with its own Lord, boundaries, and practices. Without spiritual transformation, the nation's laws, however good they may be, are incapable of restraining evil forever, nor can they provide the necessary means of atonement and forgiveness that would allow for a perpetual nation.

Individualism was too often accompanied by corruption. While there is a great deal of hand wringing (sometimes rightly) about feminism, the machismo of unaccountable men supported by an institutional structure unwilling to risk negative press has been linked to disinterest in the church.¹⁰ Studies have demonstrated that young adults who see religious institutions as stifling, hypocritical, or marginalizing often leave them while reimagining spirituality on their own terms, which researchers call the individualization of American religion. Individualism and institutional failure feed each other, which is why structure matters as much as teaching.¹¹

Early American Christianity democratized authority, elevating each believer's reading of Scripture over clergy, creeds, and tradition. In doing so, it cultivated resilience to falsehood while also opening the door for errant, undisciplined interpretation.¹² Today that shows up as a commitment to diffuse, local, and individual authority, in which each believer's conscience governs the reading of Scripture with little accountability except in cases of gross immorality. The problem is not individual conscience. It is conscience left unformed and unaccountable to the body.

As these movements toward individualism were occurring, the church's role in society was changing due to technologies like the automobile and, later, the internet, as well as the institution of new public policies that put the church in competition with retail in much more significant ways. While the automobile and movies had begun converting the Sabbath into a Sunday holiday, the repeal of "blue laws" restricting retail on Sundays pulled people away from gathered worship, with consequences researchers now link to the rise in deaths of despair (i.e., suicide, drug overdoses, and alcoholism).¹³

From Individualism to Tribalism

As strong as the impetus to individualism is, humans tend to form bonds. Multiple studies have suggested that individualism tends to produce tribalism.¹⁴ Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, explains the phenomenon through the description of two different forms of social capital: bridging and bonding. Bridging social capital is more inclusive and "can generate broader identities and reciprocity." This sort of capital looks outward to encompass people of diverse groups and perspectives who may be facing similar problems. Christian political participation fits within this realm. Christians often partner with non-Christians with similar aims or sense of a societal problem. Bonding capital is more exclusive and builds a more coordinated, homogenous sense of identity, though it is not without diversity. It "constitutes a kind of sociological superglue...by creating strong in-group loyalty," but can also result in "strong out-group antagonism."¹⁵

The church needs "bonding social capital" though without the antagonism it can so often produce. We are, after all, not struggling against flesh and blood but against the principalities and powers (Eph 6:12). Putnam worries about the hardening of bonding social capital into tribalism, and we see that antagonistic tendency in the church. But the church faces the opposite danger as well: so much bridging that its own identity is no longer anchored. Without the bonding social capital that comes from a shared identity in Christ, the church will almost certainly drift. The individualism can, then, produce tribalism; however, when the church is not sufficiently engaged in discipleship, God's people tend to find a tribe other than the church.

In the United States, we see this in virtually every realm: race, sex (e.g., feminism and so-called "biblical manhood"), sexual orientation, gender identity, political affiliation, denominationalism, classism and status, etc. The lack of Christian discipleship does not simply leave Christians without foundation, but vulnerable to the formation of rival sacred-social orders. As political commentator George Will writes regarding the formative power of the state, "Men and women are biological facts. Ladies and gentlemen (citizens) are social artifacts, works of political art. They carry the culture that is sustained by wise laws and traditions of civility. At the end of the day, we are right to judge society by the character of the people it produces. That is why statecraft is, inevitably, soulcraft."¹⁶ Discipleship is crucial to developing the sort of bonding social capital necessary to accumulating bridging social capital without marginalizing our identity in Christ.

The Diagnosis

The church's deepest problem is not political, technological, or informational. It is formational. The church has a boundary problem. It has lost its sense of itself, and its edges are set less by God's self-disclosure than by the anxieties, rhythms, and rewards of the rival sacred-social order. The result is that inconspicuous patterns have become dominant across every area of the church's shared life: time, place, interacting with God, nations and race, male and female, powers and principalities, discipleship, and the patterns that shape all of them. A faith understood solely as personal decision, private morality, or consumer choice cannot perceive the patterns forming the body as a whole and cannot resist them together. The church needs to have a shared understanding and a coordinated witness, drawn out through discipleship.

While most discipleship research measured individuals, there is good reason to think the gathered church is crucial to formation. When states repealed blue laws and opened Sunday to commerce, weekly attendance among middle-aged adults fell by 5-10 percent, and deaths from suicide, drug poisoning, and alcoholic liver disease rose by about 2 per 100,000. The authors estimate that falling attendance accounts for roughly 40% of the early 1990s rise in these deaths. What remained constant is just as telling. Prayer did not drop significantly, and neither did time with friends and neighbors or membership in other groups, including sports leagues. Private devotion and secular community continued, but they could not replace what the gathered church provided.¹⁷ As other research has found, the benefits of religious participation are difficult to replace through other kinds of social engagement.¹⁸

If we assume that discipleship is the task given to the church, we must ask what the church is doing in the realm of discipleship. Based on various studies:

• Only 30% of churches have any method of measuring whether discipleship works, and just 11% rank discipleship as what they do best, last of six church functions. (Lifeway Research, State of Groups)
• Two-thirds of churchgoers (66%) say their church provides no training for the people who lead its groups. (Barna, Discipleship in Community, 2025)
• Faith-sector giving to spreading the gospel and discipleship fell from 26% to 17% between 2024 and 2025. (CSS Fundraising, 2026 Philanthropy Pulse)

As Artificial Intelligence becomes more accessible, practicing Christians are adopting it faster than most Americans. In a November 2025 Barna survey, 44% of practicing Christians said they use AI often or very often in their personal lives, compared with 31% of U.S. adults and 29% of non-practicing Christians. At work the gap is similar: 39% compared with 26%. Barna concluded that practicing Christians are "outpacing nearly every population segment on AI adoption, including pastors." Only 24% of pastors use AI often at work and just 12% feel ready to offer guidance on it. Note the following:

• 48% of practicing Christians say they would trust AI with their spiritual growth, and almost a third of practicing Christians say AI's spiritual guidance is as trustworthy as a pastor's. Only 12% of pastors would trust AI with spiritual growth. (Barna and Gloo, May 2026)
• The same practicing Christians are uneasy: 83% worry about AI misinterpreting Scripture and 72% worry about it replacing pastors. Pastors are even more concerned about misinterpretation (94%) (Barna and Gloo, May 2026).
• About 40% of practicing Christians say AI has helped them with Bible study, prayer, or spiritual growth, and 31% want their pastors' guidance on AI. Barna described their views as largely uninformed by their pastor. (Barna and Gloo, 2026)
• Most church leaders think churches need AI policies, but only 5% of churches have one. (Barna and Pushpay, State of Church Tech 2026)

For a worked example of how AI can get interpretation wrong, see "When AI Abbreviates Scripture: Why 'Right' Answers Can Still Mislead."

The goods of the Christian life are carried by a gathered people who share time, structure, and boundaries. When that body weakens, individual piety does not make up the loss, and other loyalties fill the space. AI is the newest place this shows: people are, potentially, retreating to individual formation by seeking out guidance from easy, highly convenient tools rather than the church.

The Answer: Discipleship as the Coordination of the Body of Christ

If the church lost its definition through a faith understood as individual and voluntary, the answer cannot be more individual effort alone. Personal repentance, friendship across difference, and private devotion are necessary, but they are the very tools that proved insufficient. The church needs a re-norming toward being and making disciples, understood as the coordination of the body of Christ: *teaching those committed to the Triune God through baptism to observe all that Christ commanded, together*. That discipleship attends to three things.

• Structure: how a congregation actually forms people week to week. Gathered worship, Sabbath, and the church year are shared rhythms the market and the nation do not set. Members are given real roles in the body's common life rather than served as consumers, and the ask stays modest enough not to exhaust them.
• Authority: recognized teachers, accountable beyond their own congregation through associations, shared confessions, and peer networks, who help the body form a shared understanding and judge faithfully. Authority rests with Scripture; teachers serve it. This is not a call to control, and accountability belongs in the definition, because authority structures can harm the people they govern.
• Coordination: the body acting as one body. Congregations that hold together across race, class, and political difference, with belonging set by Christ rather than by preference or the majority's terms.

The aim is not scattered individual growth or a better spokesperson, but the formation of enough members in each congregation to hold its boundaries together, so that a steady pastor becomes representative of the body rather than an outlier within it.

Edwin Friedman's diagnosis of an anxious system that has lost its definition fits the church, but his remedy requires expansion.¹⁹ His notion of self-differentiated leadership that is capable of steadying a small group or family is unlikely to have a widespread influence on a body of hundreds or even across institutions. When people identify strongly with a group, influence flows to whoever best embodies the group's shared self-image. A leader who departs from an anxious congregation's self-image becomes less influential, not more. To change what a group is, a critical mass of members embodying a new way of being is required.²⁰ Experiments on social conventions suggest that a committed minority of roughly a quarter can overturn a group's established norms.²¹ While that is a laboratory finding, it illustrates the necessity of critical mass. Meanwhile, the church's most visible voices are often anxious and alarmist, and platforms that reward moral outrage help them remain prominent.

A church formed this way does not withdraw. Its faithful life is already its engagement with the world, and its participation in politics, work, and every other sphere grows out of discipleship. That participation is not defined by partisan loyalty. It affirms what is good, true, and beautiful wherever it appears, critiques what falls short, and points beyond both to God, with Christ and Scripture as the measure. The church keeps its prophetic voice by speaking truth regardless of who holds office. And while such a church blesses its neighbors, that is the fruit of faithfulness, not its goal. The church does not make disciples because it will fix the world, but because Christ has a claim on it.

Notes

1. Ideological capture is not limited to liberal or conservative (left or right). For instance, American civil religion construes the United States as a "Christian nation" effectively co-opting Christ in service of a national agenda (see Robert N. Bellah, "Civil Religion in America," Daedalus 96, no. 1 (1967). Similarly, socialist economic and cultural paradigms that deemphasize the doctrine of sin and assume that love of neighbor can bring about a utopian vision promote ideological capture. Capitalism and liberalism have become the "firmware" to which all software is required to adapt. To the extent that the church understands itself as an "American church" instead of a church in America, it tends to construct itself to "fit" with the firmware.

2. As Bellah writes, "The American civil religion was never anticlerical or militantly secular. On the contrary, it borrowed selectively from the religious tradition in such a way that the average American saw no conflict between the two. In this way, the civil religion was able to build up without any bitter struggle with the church powerful symbols of national solidarity and to mobilize deep levels of personal motivation for the attainment of national goals" ("Civil Religion in America"). Though Bellah describes American civil religion in this manner, the basic dynamic applies to culture as well. The affinities between Christianity and culture (the shared conceptions of goodness, truth, and beauty) tended to be sufficient to cultivate a misordering of the church's loves that produced a general approval for one party or another without a corresponding critique. The practical effect was that one political party became closely associated with "the righteous kingdom" so that the church identified with it in ways that diminished its distinctiveness. See Karl Barth, "'The Role of the Church in War-time' (A Letter to American Christians)," in The Church and the War (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock).

3. Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

4. Findlay notes, "economic dependency made it difficult for evangelical leaders to criticize the business community, even if they so desired, in any terms other than through judgments on personal morality and individual actions" (James F. Findlay, Jr., Dwight L. Moody: American Evangelist, 1837-1899 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). See also Timothy Gloege, Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). For a more recent treatment of the consumerism problem, see William T. Cavanaugh, "The Unsplendid Idolatry of Consumerism," in The Uses of Idolatry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024).

5. The "invisible institution" of slave religion becomes more visible after the Civil War. See Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) for a discussion of the religious practice of slaves prior to the war. For post-war discussions of the Black church, see C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990) and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Woman's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

6. Philip Rieff, My Life Among the Deathworks (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006).

7. See The Sacred-Social Order.

8. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007)

9. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

10. Patricia Homan and Amy Burdette, "When Religion Hurts: Structural Sexism and Health in Religious Congregations," American Sociological Review 86, no. 2 (2021)

11. Landon Schnabel, Ilana Horwitz, Peyman Hekmatpour, and Cyrus Schleifer, "Breaking Free of the Iron Cage: The Individualization of American Religion," Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World 11 (2025).

12. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (1989).

13. For the impact of automobiles see Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929), as well as Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1937). For the analysis of blue laws see Tyler Giles, Daniel Hungerman, and Tamar Oostrom, "Deaths of Despair and the Decline of American Religion," Journal of the European Economic Association (2025).

14. See Michel Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society trans. Don Smith (London: Sage, 1996), and Pascal Bruckner, The Temptation of Innocence: Living in the Age of Entitlement, trans., Amanda Pingree (New York: Algonquin, 2000).

15. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).

16. George Will, The Pursuit of Happiness and Other Sobering Thoughts (New York: Harper Collins, 1979). See also Stanley Hauerwas, "A Story-Formed Community: Reflections on Watership Down," in A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).

17. Giles, Hungerman, and Oostrom, "Deaths of Despair and the Decline of American Religion."

18. Chaeyoon Lim and Robert Putnam, "Religion, Social Networks, and Life Satisfaction," American Sociological Review (2010).

19. Edwin Friedman, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix (New York: Seabury, 2007).

20. Michael A. Hogg, "A Social Identity Theory of Leadership," Personality and Social Psychology Review 5 (2001): 184-200.

21. Damon Centola, Joshua Becker, Devon Brackbill, and Andrea Baronchelli, "Experimental Evidence for Tipping Points in Social Convention," Science 360, no. 6393 (2018): 1116--1119.