Photo courtesy of Michael Lindsay

March 16, 2010 | Editor’s note: As the Christian landscape changes, leaders must ask and answer a new question: What’s the future of denominations? This interview is part of an occasional series that offers the thoughts of people across American Christianity on this vital issue. To see the entire series, click here.

To hear selected excerpts from the interview with Michael Lindsay, click the play button on the audio player at the right of this screen.

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Although its 19th-century bureaucratic structure is outmoded, the church has the “nimble capability” to adjust to the needs of the 21st century, said Michael Lindsay, a sociologist at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

Lindsay specializes in issues surrounding leadership, religion and culture. He is the author of several books, most notably “Faith in the Halls of Power,” a study of how evangelicals have made inroads into American politics, popular culture, academia and business. He has recently completed the first phase of the White House Fellows Project, which is the most systematic survey of top American leaders conducted in nearly 40 years.

He spoke to Faith & Leadership about the role of the church in American society and his interviews with national leaders. The following is an edited transcript.

Q: Why is it important for Christian leaders to be interested in the broader culture?

There is a recognition that leaders play a significant role in shaping institutions. I’m less convinced that individual people make a huge difference in changing society. It’s largely done by significant institutions -- government, business and the nonprofit sector. But those institutions can be steered. They change slowly, with lots of institutional inertia that an enterprising leader will face. But leaders can make course adjustments that can have long-term effects.

The church has, in large part, been on the sidelines of shaping society for, let’s say, the last 40 years. It wasn’t always that way, but it has become that way. Particularly among the evangelical Christians that I’ve interviewed, there’s a sense of nostalgia for the past, when their forebears had more cultural influence. There is also a desire not to have to divide their lives so that their faith has to be separate from the kind of influence that they wield in the marketplace. And they want to bring faith-based sensibilities into the organizations that they lead, recognizing that it’s a pluralistic world and that they can’t evangelize in the same way that maybe somebody who was living in 1850 could.

Q: The mainline seems to have lost the entrepreneurial impulse it once had when it founded institutions such as hospitals, colleges and other social benefit organizations. You quote one source in “Faith in the Halls of Power” who says “evangelicals are the new Episcopalians.” Have evangelicals inherited this impulse?

Evangelicals are very much entrepreneurs. That entrepreneurial energy drives a whole range of things, such as starting and developing media ventures, nonprofit organizations and parachurch ministries. They also look for new ways to do business in the church.

Scholars have understood religious organizations as either modalities or sodalities. A modality is like a parish church which serves all the constituents in a particular geographical area. A sodality is more like a Catholic order or a Methodist hospital. It is not all things to all people in a specific locale. Instead, it specializes in things like youth ministry or health care. A modality, like a parish church, doesn't have the freedom to specialize because it serves everyone in a particular area.

The future of religious life in the United States will be a combination of those two. The megachurch does that. You take the skilled specialization of youth ministry, singles ministry, ministry to 20-year-olds, and you combine it with an effort to serve folks who live in the same area.

That’s what I think the future will look like. The entrepreneurial energy that many evangelicals have long brought to bear on evangelism they’re now bringing to social justice causes and wider cultural influence.

Q: Can the mainline imitate or recreate that? Or is it mostly relegated to the sidelines now?

No, I think the mainline is not relegated to the sidelines. The traditional bureaucratic form of religious organization is dying off because most bureaucratic organizations are. Our institutions that are growing are doing things in different ways. So eBay is growing by leaps and bounds; Sears is not.

And it’s because of the way that they understand the relationship with their customers and their relationship with their vendors, and the way that they get their products out to market. The church has that sort of nimble capability.

If you take the long view, the church is a very flexible, durable institution. But if you take a view of, say, the last 200 years, mainline denominations have been the largest endorsers of a traditional, 19th-century bureaucratic model. That doesn’t have much of a future.

Q: What are you learning about raising up leaders from your research on the White House Fellows Project? What does the church have to learn there?