The mainline church is besieged today, caught between a secular society on one side and the evangelical far right on the other.
Can it survive - and if so, in what form?
Likening the situation to the seventy-year captivity of Judah by the Babylonians, Bayer takes up themes he originally raised in his 1991 work, Hope for the Mainline Church.
Clearly and persuasively, he explains how we wandered into this wilderness in the first place, what it will take to find our way out, and how we can teach our children to sing the Lord's song in this very strange land.