What is the church’s true crisis of decline?

For the better part of a year, I’ve been toting an Andrew Root book around in my knapsack. First it was a library copy of the sunny yellow Faith Forma­tion in a Secular Age, followed immediately thereafter by my own copy of the blue-hued The Pastor in a Secular Age. (I realized partway through the first book in the trilogy I needed my own set so I could mark up the margins.) I intended to continue on to the green The Congregation in a Secular Age, but then I learned that the series was unexpectedly becoming a tetralogy with the imminent publication of this orange book on crisis. I’ll no doubt double back to catch the volume I missed, but Root’s latest is worth leapfrogging over whatever book is next on your to-read list. This is the book we need now.

Root is a professor of youth ministry who has been immersing himself in the work of Charles Taylor, particularly his influential brick of a book A Secular Age. Like Robert Joustra, Alissa Wilkinson, and James K. A. Smith before him, Root places Taylor’s concepts in conversation with practical theology to great effect. It’s as though Root gathers up an armload of theological quandaries, pastoral anxieties, and cultural observations and runs them through the wash on hot, letting the whole load get thoroughly colored by Taylorian philosophy.

With Churches and the Crisis of Decline, Root adds another major material to the mix: the life and legacy of Karl Barth, particularly his early years as a pastor. Root acknowledges that his approach is somewhat atypical; for one thing, he anachronistically reinterprets the early writings of Barth in an explicitly Taylorian structure. He does this not for the sake of ivory-tower Barthians but for local pastors who are trying to figure out how to keep their declining congregations afloat.