Just as the superstar pastor model can have its problems once the superstar pastor gets old or has a scandal or something, the house church model... there's a reason that the house churches of the New Testament era grew up into a more institutional faith down the road.

The fact that institutional churches have gone into decline doesn't mean that we're going to enter some purely secular age. Secular people need to be aware of that.

Every young writer, I imagine, has their first intellectual magazine, whose essays and articles are devoured all the more greedily for being slightly over one's head. Mine was First Things.

The decline of institutional Christianity over the last 40 or 50 years has empowered a side of American religion that has always been there. The sort of do-it-yourself, "create your own Jesus" kind of faith. But, the forms that faith takes do have a real reason they are so appealing.

I do think that evangelicals in general need to think seriously about how you pass on your faith across generations and over the long haul.

Every Christian in every time and place is going to be tempted by certain forms of heresy. I'm sure I'm tempted by my own.

It's just silly to look at the incredibly steep decline in the mainline and the clear institutional weakening of Catholicism in the 1960s and 70s and pretend that something really big didn't change then. It did change. There really was a significant institutional decline.