Mainline megachurches?

A trend piece from Mark Pinsky--turns out mainline churches aren't dying out as much as you might have thought. Some of them are even getting pretty big!

Of course, 1,000 or even 5,000 members doesn't put you in Saddleback/Lakewood/Willow Creek league. More importantly, he doesn't get into the question of slippage between mainline and evangelical labels--are these large, thriving denominational churches LIBERAL, or do they represent the conservative-to-moderate (arguably, the EVANGELICAL) branches that exist in each of the mainline bodies?

This hole in the piece becomes especially evident when Pinsky points out that, while evangelicals have one of their own in the White House right now, both Democratic candidates are mainliners. In a sense, this may be true. However, Bush and Clinton belong to the same denomination (United Methodist). Defining the mainline in terms of denominational affiliation is only useful as far as it goes.

(The evangelical-mainline binary is a sociological and journalistic minefield, and Pinsky, a smart and insightful writer, has been simplistic about it before. Here's my review of his book on U.S. evangelicalism.)