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It is hard to imagine a Wesleyan Christian Advocate or a Lutheran Digest showcasing a beauty-pageant winner. More secure in its status, the mainline has better learned how to cast a critical eye on the seductive claims of contemporary middle-class culture.

Scholarship. The important point here is not that mainliners have more scholars, but that they respect their scholars' wisdom. They suppose that persons who have devoted their lives to studying the church's traditions should be consulted. The mainline assumes that their academics have earned the right to speak. They know perfectly well that academics have their own foibles and quarrels, but they are willing to take the bad with the good in order to gain the benefit of disciplined expertness.

Commonality. In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln made clear that the Civil War lasted as long as it did because the North, no less than the South, had profited from the slave driver's lash. Americans, he effectively said, were all in it together, and all had to pay. Mainliners too know that Christians are all in it together, and all have to pay. If any part of their group falls into sin, or teaches a heresy, the whole group is affected and must shoulder some responsibility, sometimes for the failing and always for the resolution. Sharing the name means sharing the burden.

Humility. Mainliners call their institutions denominations. Historically the term denotes, among other things, a group of Christians who see through a glass darkly. Each tradition, it suggests, must recover an aspect of the great body of Christian teachings and practices that others have underplayed or overlooked. (The sect, in contrast, assumes exclusive responsibility and privileged knowledge.)

Mainliners, who have been around for the better part of five centuries, know that the magnitude of the task and the limitation of the resources mean that everyone's hands are needed.

Music. Hear it! Who can forget a robed choir soaring with "O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing" in the amber glow of a Gothic nave?

Fuller Theological Seminary president Richard Mouw once told a story at Duke about a northerner who attended a conference in Durham, North Carolina. Eating breakfast at a mom-and-pop diner, the traveler requested eggs, sausage, and toast. When the server, a local woman, brought the order, the northerner saw a little knot of white stuff on the plate. "What's that?" he asked.

"Grits," she said.

"What is a grit?" he asked.

"Honey," she drawled, "they don't come by themselves."

So too with Pentecostals and mainliners. They do not, or at least should not, come by themselves. Together they can learn from each other's experiences and profit from each other's wisdom. If Pentecostals have given us the gift of tongues, mainliners have given us the gift of ears. Together they witness to the full gospel held by the whole body of Christ.

Grant Wacker is professor of church history at Duke University Divinity School. He is the author of Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Harvard University Press, 2001).

Copyright © 2005 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

A CT review and an excerpt of Grant Wacker's Heaven Below is available on our website.

Our sister publication, Christian History & Biography, also reviewed the book.

More about Wacker is available from his Duke University page.

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March 2005, Vol. 49, No. 3