What a healthy church needs, a healthy political party needs too This message from a retired minister in Knox County, Tennessee has wider application than southern churches: God may not be dead, but his church is headed for hospice if we don’t get our heads out of our ecclesiastical backsides. My wife and I visited a mainline church on a Main Street in a deep red southern town last month and found … the audience from a 1972 episode of Lawrence Welk. Every hymn sounded like a dirge from the funeral I feared we had stumbled in on. But, no, the only thing dying was this church. We couldn’t count five people under the age of 50. That is a problem Democrats have as well in many places. Political life in this country is dominated by a gerontocracy. That is one reason so many younger people are rejecting political parties and opting to register to vote unaffiliated. If they register. If they vote. Churchgoing is on a steady decline. Buzz Thomas suggests that if churches don’t evolve, they will die. That’s why things like the Southern Baptist Convention’s recent decision to oust churches that have women on their pastoral staff makes me think Charles Darwin may have the last laugh. A church foolish enough to discriminate against the gender that does 90% of the work doesn’t deserve to survive. Thomas offers some suggestions. First churches should stay in their lane and out of politics. That will be a hard sell…