According to polling, "the percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 points in the past two decades," and many experts believe it will decline further still.

Will Christianity continue to decline, or will it, through change, reverse the trend?

One of the frontiers where that question might meet its answer is, according to the Baltimore Sun, their city:

One of more than a dozen such startups in the area, the Garden Community is at the vanguard of a push by the Southern Baptist Convention into Baltimore, targeted as a "strategic focus city" by its North American Mission Board. Eleven churches have begun to hold worship services here in the last two years, two others are set to open in September, and organizers see as many as half a dozen more forming by the end of the year.

Does the new strategy herald a political and cultural shift as well?

Here, as in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and other cities on which the denomination has concentrated its efforts, the focus has been less on political activism than on community service.

"We didn’t want to be known strictly for what we were against, but we wanted to be known for helping people in need," said Rich Carney, a strategy coordinator for the mission board. "It’s one of those situations where, as followers of Christ, we need to put hands and feet on what we say."

So New Hope Community Church has given away furniture and sent volunteers to a local soup kitchen. Infinity Church, which is due to hold its first Sunday service on Sept. 13 in Northeast Baltimore, has held sports camps for local youth.

"It’s just kind of getting out to meet the neighbors, casting vision, sharing with them what we’re trying to do, loving on the community," Infinity pastor Aaron Pankey said.

In May, members of the Garden Community walked what they called the Trail of Tears, visiting the sites of the five most recent murders in the neighborhood and stopping at each to lay a rose and pray for peace in the city. The church, which bills itself as a "creative community of Jesus followers," is gearing up to paint a local elementary school, mentor students and help their parents complete high school diplomas.

At the meeting in the brownstone, [Pastor Joel] Kurz opened the New Testament to the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans and spoke of the sacrifices made by the early Christians living in a hostile empire.

"We live in an empire as well," he said. "It’s an empire of consumerism and I would say it’s an empire of individualism. And the thing is that we end up giving in to the lie of the empire without even realizing it.

"Money, cash, becomes our god. Climbing the corporate ladder becomes our ministry. Wal-Mart is our worship center. It’s OK to try to get all that we can for ourselves and walk over those who don’t have anything and not reach out to help."

It may not be the Southern Baptists’ intention, but the kind of churches the article describes remind me of the little I know about the "emergent churches" movement – smaller, primarily younger, and community-oriented churches that are attracting and producing a different kind of Christian. It’s probably just coincidence that one of the major leaders of the emergent movement, Brian McLaren, is based in Maryland, but that reinforced the parallel in my mind. And (again based on my limited knowledge) these folks are harder to pigeonhole, politically, than the Jerry Falwells of yesteryear.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the coming years witness the, ahem, emergence of large numbers of Christians who are either apolitical (in the narrow sense of not being partisan, though engagement with community welfare is also a form of politics) or perhaps even progressive. As homophobia declines, voluntarism takes new forms, anti-consumerism grows, and concerns about poverty and climate change intensify for younger Christians, we may see the religio-political equation in America altered profoundly. Baltimore’s Baptists could be examples of that.