*This Rambling runs long. Lest it be said I can’t be brief, here’s the summary for anyone who doesn’t want to scroll through all of it: We are the Body of Christ, and as it’s possible in the weeks to come, it’s time for us to come back together to worship as the full body. We’re not complete without each other. Read on if you want to know more!
In my role as Dean I convene a monthly meeting of all the Episcopal clergy in our convocation, a meeting we call Clericus. It’s a time of sharing and fellowship that can include communication to and from the Bishop’s office, and is also used for seeing how things are going in individual parishes. This month’s gathering included an inquiry from one of the rectors about how others were dealing with the slow return of Sunday attendance. Many churches are seeing somewhere between one half to two thirds of their pre-pandemic attendance. The related questions were about how we reconnect to our flocks and invite people back to church, as it becomes safer and safer with the exit of the omicron variant.
This is not just a southeast Georgia, or even an Episcopal Church set of questions. The pandemic has shifted much in our culture, including participation in church. Said another way, it has reshaped the practices of Christian community. Some of the changes will be permanent when we look back several decades from now. We may not be able to pinpoint all the pandemic effects, given that trends change constantly anyway, pandemic or not. Regardless, even before we have the benefit of a rearview mirror to look in, there is much debate about current and future impacts on “the Church”.
There are several factors at play that the pandemic didn’t cause, but certainly brought to the fore. For now, the three biggest dynamics I see at play are: Goldilocks worship, virtual community, and the decline of communal commitment. None of these has come out of the blue, and yet the shift has been so great and so quick that most of Christendom wasn’t ready to deal with it, and certainly not all at once. How we navigate these shifting realities will have a lot to do with what we’ll see when we look back on the post-pandemic era.
Virtual church participation may be the easiest to understand. In the spring of 2020, almost every church suddenly went online in one form or another. Some churches, like ours, had already been streaming live video every Sunday, and took it relatively in stride. Others had to find platforms and technology and learn how to use it in a matter of days. Many parishioners didn’t know how to use the technology either, so it was a steep learning curve. The majority of leaders and worshippers were grateful for any kind of connection while the world was shut down, even as some were excluded. Many decided they didn’t like online worship, whereas others found a new preferred form of engagement. Couches and PJs count for a lot, as it turns out!
Fast forward two years, and churches are struggling to know what to do about online worship. Some have said online streaming of church services should end altogether, even if it is beneficial to shut-ins and those who can’t be present for in-person worship. There is a sense of loss around the importance and value of coming together in prayer and worship, to hear scripture and share sacrament, to pass the peace and make small but important connections before and after worship. Is that because online worship can send the message that it’s equally as valued as in-person, just another consumer preference, rather than a last resort?
Which leads into the larger issue of the rise of the Goldilocks worshipper. Many worshippers have gotten a lot more particular about the conditions required before making the effort to worship in community. It has been a growing issue over time, and COVID mitigation gave it a whole new shape and breadth. It used to be true that participation in worship was something we did regardless of the weather, whether we were tired, independent of the kids’ eagerness, or so many other things. Now, there are an abundance of factors to be considered before deciding whether to tune in on-line instead of coming together or just skip worship altogether. Increasingly, it seems everything needs to align just right before we engage. (Goldilocks worship has also increased in response to the partisan divide, but I won’t address that here; I’ve written about the dangers that reality poses for the larger Church elsewhere.)
Weather, for example has always affected attendance to a degree (no pun intended, but it does work!) What many of us have noticed now, is that it has an even greater impact than it used to. I used to joke that all the mail carriers go to the early service. In every church I’ve been a part of, the early service has had the steadiest attendance of any other service on the schedule, regardless of outside factors, like weather, football schedules, or indoor/outdoor services! The early service post-pandemic participation, as a percentage, leads all others by a fair margin, which fits the trend even now. It may very well be a generational issue, given that the average age is highest at that service, too.
This generational factor is probably related to another shift that accelerated during the pandemic, namely, the decline of communal engagement. We already knew that our society was becoming less and less likely to fully engage in institutions, particularly the church. This region has lagged a couple of decades behind the trends in other parts of the country in this regard. Pew Research has long reported that Southerners are much more likely to go to Church on Sunday than in other regions. Nonetheless, the forces that have driven the decline elsewhere were already showing up here as our culture continued to evolve and shift. Throw a pandemic into the mix and we probably just caught up a decade or so, if not more.
Taken together, we might be asking, so what? Do such things matter, and if they do, why? For the shepherds, like me, such questions must always be parsed to ensure that the answer isn’t purely about numbers. So much of ministry is hard to quantify, so church leaders have often put a lot, probably too much, stress on things we can measure, like dollars and attendance. Unhealthy church systems engage in chasing numbers instead of doing ministry for the sake of the Gospel. Even healthy churches are wondering what to do now, though. Should we care about attendance numbers? Of course we should. Here’s why:
Attendance numbers aren’t just statistics, they are people, and we care about people. We care about the person who is seeking God, the person who has a broken heart, the person who is lonely, the person who is in need of healing, the person who finds their center in worship and community, the person who is young and still getting to know God and the love of Jesus, and many more persons. If the Church is the place where we meet such needs, and I pray that it is, the Church will always be the best place for those things to be addressed, and the only place some of them can be addressed. The pandemic didn’t change those realities. We also care about people with whom we have a relationship, even if it’s “only” a church relationship.
The Church is a place of relationships. Building off what I preached on our Annual Meeting weekend, we are called together into community to be the Body of Christ. Church has always meant people, even when we’ve confused it for buildings or institutions. It is Christ himself who calls us together as his followers and those who proclaim him Lord. It is not an optional part of being a Christian. Paul knew this and addressed it most fully in his first letter to the Corinthians, just before he spoke of love, which we also heard on our Annual Meeting weekend. He described the body of Christ to set the stage for understanding love. Two thirds of chapter 12 are devoted to understanding the people as the body of Christ.
I won’t reprint all those verses here, but they start, “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.” He continues by describing parts of the body as examples before adding, “The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.”” We are in this together, and we need one another. Coming to church is not about us as individuals, it’s about us as a community. There’s no “I” in the body of Christ. …ok, so there is an “I”…but there’s no “me!” If I decide “I” don’t need to go to church, I’ve basically suggested that the rest of the body of Christ is somehow separate from me or that. Me has replaced we. Have we fully lost the sense that our participation in the gathering of the body of Christ is a central part of our love and concern for others?
Reclaiming our sense of the body of Christ should be our theological center in these days. Sure, there will be instances where we’ll miss church, but those need to be the exception instead of the rule. The folks at Pew have also been reporting on the gradual shift as “regular” attendance at church moved from weekly to monthly over the last decade. It’s having an effect on the Church, the world we live and move in, and the next generations of the faithful(less). Hearing the call to be a part of and reaffirming our identity as a part of
the body of Christ will be the determining factor around what the Church is and will become.
Convenience and comfort should not dictate our participation in communal worship, at least not to the Goldilocks level. When Jesus told us to take up our cross and follow, and warned us that we would suffer in his name if we chose to follow him, I don’t think he would have included getting up on Sunday morning on the list of suffering. Aren’t we blessed that the suffering bar is set that low!? We need to recommit to Christ and his Church, and the discipleship that comes with it. This past Sunday, we were all reminded to drop our nets and follow and to become fishers of people. He wasn’t kidding.
We will continue to offer live-streamed worship. Frankly, we don’t offer it as a convenience, it’s offered as an outlet for those who have no other way to participate because they are ill, shut in, or traveling, or because it is the best option during the pandemic for those with serious risk factors should they contract COVID-19. Everything I’ve said here about participation is assuming the relative safety of gathering in groups, which is quickly returning with the departure of the omicron wave. When transmission levels are low again, most who are vaccinated and boosted have very little to fear if proper precautions are taken.
I hope that our motivation to come to worship alongside our brothers and sisters is one of love and affection for them and for Jesus. It’s not meant to be a shame-avoidance tactic. I’ve never played the guilt card with folks about coming to church – it’s not our style in the Episcopal Church. I do think, however, that our common identity (why we worship from the Book of COMMON Prayer) is extremely important. I think it matters that we engage our sacramental faith in first-person ways. Our worship is about seeing, touching, tasting, and hearing, some of which are hard to do when we’re not here or only present via one-way screen. And how can we literally embody care of one another if we don’t make it a point to even see one another? As we come back into a period (however brief) of normalcy, I hope we will see the body of Christ taking its full form again. We are a people of community. We often say as much when we send out the eucharist to shut-ins after communion: “We who are many are one body because we all share in the one bread, one cup.” Like the priest I know who used to close the invitation to communion by saying, “Receive what you are, the Body of Christ.”
For now, I will just say, “Be WHO you are, the Body of Christ.” I’ll see you in Church.
Tom+
PS: There is more to say about being the body of Christ and thinking through how we do that in ways that are meaningful and motivating. I’ll save that for later! Stay tuned…
Almighty and everliving God, ruler of all things in heaven and earth, hear our prayers for this parish family. Strengthen the faithful, arouse the careless, and restore the penitent. Grant us all things necessary for our common life, and bring us all to be of one heart and mind within your holy Church; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.