One year later, the big question for churches: What's next? - The San Diego Union-Tribune

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As she worked on her sermon for last night’s Easter vigil, the Very Rev. Penny Bridges kept thinking about the Gospel reading for the service.

It was from the last chapter of Mark, about the women who made their way to Jesus’ tomb, only to find it empty. They ran off, too frightened to tell anyone what they had seen.

The dean of St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral smiles as she recounts the passage. There is no proper ending, she is saying. They simply fled and said nothing.

“It is up to us to finish the story,” Bridges suggests. “It’s up to us to proclaim resurrection, to live resurrected lives, to live the difference that event made.”

But on this second Easter of COVID-19, there is another story that remains ominously unfinished: the future of the church that grew out of that resurrection event more than 2,000 years ago.

Last Monday, as Christians made their way through Holy Week, a new Gallup survey revealed that church membership in America dropped below 50 percent for the first time since the polling began eight decades ago.

Even before the pandemic first shuttered in-person worship 13 months ago, the numbers were steadily slipping. In the 1960s, membership was 73 percent, according to Gallup. In 1999, it was 70 percent. In 2020, 47 percent of Americans said they belonged to a church, synagogue or mosque.

Bridges isn’t ready to wave a white flag.

“The church has kept going for 2,000 years through wars, famines, persecution, corruption, schism and reformation,” she says. “Even when there seems to be death, we believe that resurrection follows.”

“Don’t count us out,” agrees the Rev. Harvey Vaughn III, senior pastor San Diego’s oldest Black congregation, Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Vaughn offers this challenge: wait a year after churches are allowed to fully reopen. “Then gauge the numbers.”

As COVID went viral, houses of worship were flailing, racing to pull together online services, hold their congregations together while keeping them safely apart and transform social platforms into spiritual ones.

But amid the pain and loss, they say some pretty amazing things happened along way.

Richard Lief, 81, washed the feet of his wife, Carolyn Lief, 78, during the Maundy Thursday held in the courtyard of St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral on April 1, 2021.

(Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune)

‘Not closed’

From the start, Bridges says St. Paul’s was resolute: “Our consistent message throughout this year is that the church is not closed. The buildings are closed, but the church is not closed.”

They mobilized telephone chains — “circles of love” — in which volunteers called other members each week to check in with them.

“People made new friends on the phone,” she says. “People I wouldn’t have thought of as coming close together found things in common and prayed for each other and cared for each other.”

Bridges penned handwritten notes — about 600 so far — to members, donors, leaders, newcomers and others.

They launched an online book study to tackle the tough conversations about race in America.

They put their morning prayer gatherings on Zoom and watched as a growing number of people rolled out of bed and signed on to participate.

In addition to their livestreams, they used Zoom for various services, which she says actually brought people closer together.

“On Zoom,” she says, “nobody gets to sit in the back row. You’re right there in front of everyone. So there’s an intimacy to it.”

St. Paul’s plans to slowly reintroduce indoor services later this month, with limits and modifications.

But Bridges shakes her head at the notion of getting back to normal.

“I think it’s a new normal,” she says, “and I think it needs to be. I think the church has been offered a great opportunity to do things a little differently. It’s kind of nudged us along on a path we were resisting.”

One such change is a pretty big one: courtesy of a special donation, the pews will be removed from the staid cathedral and replaced with chairs, turning the sanctuary into a flexible, moveable space.

“This is in large part so we can serve the community more,” Bridges says. “Large spaces are going to be very helpful when we come out of the pandemic because people need to be more spread out. A chamber music group that would before had played for a small audience in a small space might now want to have a bigger space so the same audience can spread out.”

Virtual blessings

Vaughn, Bethel Church’s pastor, doesn’t try to curb his enthusiasm for what going online has accomplished.

“This is the beauty of virtual worship,” he says. “We have more people watching and even contributing to the ministry of Bethel Church financially.”

YouTube, Facebook and even the church’s website have become evangelists, of sort, for people sheltering in place.

“It has really increased the profile of Bethel Church. Not just in San Diego but we’ve even been blessed beyond San Diego.”

In addition to streaming Sunday services, Bethel also streamlined them. They were just too liturgy heavy, Vaughn says. Among the things they took out was the ritualistic, word-heavy call to worship.

He also became even more persuaded of the need to go outside the walls. “I certainly have to shepherd the people that God has given me and that’s my local congregation,” Vaughn says. “But I also have an obligation to shepherd the community in which our church is located in.”

Bethel became a COVID testing site and a COVID vaccination site. They also distributed food.

“We’ve been feeding the community and the congregation. How can a person hear you talk about Jesus when they have no food in their stomach?”

When the stay-home order was first issued, Vaughn asked church members to pull out their membership directories, pick several people they don’t usually talk to in church and start calling them regularly.

“I actually think this pandemic has made us be even stronger spiritually,” he says. “We’ve had to find new ways to be our brother’s and sister’s keeper.”

Which brings him back to technology: “The genie is out of the bottle. My prayer is that we will build upon what we’ve been doing and continue to a whole other level. If you want to be a relevant ministry, you have to be in the cyber world.”

Online fatigue

Father Boom Martinez can’t imagine that either the students or the local residents who attend the Newman Center Catholic Community at the University of California San Diego wouldn’t rather worship in person.

“I think the more we can do in person, the better,” Martinez says. Like other Catholic churches in this diocese, the Newman Center has begun offering limited outdoor and indoor services. Depending upon the number of COVID cases and the vaccination rate, he says the diocese is hoping for a “return to normal” around September. “I don’t anticipate, at least us at the Newman Center, streaming at that point.”

People are really tired of going online, Martinez adds.

“Everything I’ve heard from people is that it’s so nice, even if you’re not really interacting with people, just to be there in a place where you can see people,” he says.

For Catholics, especially, “we worship as a community.”

Faith Chapel, an Assemblies of God congregation in Spring Valley, worked hard to bring people back together in worship as soon as they could — first with a drive-in church and, more recently, with a socially distant indoor service.

“We know that digital is important, and we’re so grateful for that,” says associate pastor Josiah Elias. “But there’s nothing quite like physically seeing people. So we are trying to do our best to provide that.”

On the other hand, being a Christian is about more than singing songs together on Sunday morning, Elias says. It’s also about practicing the faith the rest of the week.

“I think a lot of churches are going to realize we’ve done a great job of entertaining people and a poor job of equipping people and that really needs to change.”

Following services held in the courtyard of St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral on April 1, 2021, parishioners helped return items back to the cathedral.

(Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Unfinished story

The jury is still out about the future of the church.

“I think what Amazon did to retail, in general, the coronavirus is going to do the same kind of thing to worship attendance,” says David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Group, a Ventura-based church research group.

Before the pandemic, the typical churchgoer was attending just 1.7 times a month, he says.

“The coronavirus has sort of reminded people they can still worship or opt out of worship and not feel guilty about it.”

Kinnaman says research indicates about half of American churchgoers are going to prefer either online-only or hybrid, combination forms of worship.

“I think that’s going to be a fundamental reset.”

His advice?

First, digital and hybrid services are here to stay — so harness that technology.

“The second is look for ways of being effective in ministry that go beyond just worship.” Get back to the core character of Christianity, he suggests, like serving the poor and pursuing justice.

All of this — the research, advice, online services and in-person makeovers — has been done against a year-long backdrop of death, illness, joblessness, loneliness, depression and exhaustion.

“People are just struggling right now,” says Katy Sensmeier, a licensed marriage and family therapist who staffs the counseling center at Community Lutheran Church in Escondido.

She’s noticed that clients who have a religious faith seem more resilient. “They are still struggling. But when you have a relationship with God, there’s a resilience that allows you to put the cap back on the thing — and say I can do this because God has me.”

Sensmeier also has noticed that the more people are forced to be apart, the more eager they are to get back together. Even introverts “are wanting community now.”

“So I think we may see kind of a revival coming out of this. People are desiring to be in community — with a community of believers.”

Remember Pastor Vaughn’s challenge to the pollsters? Come back a year after churches fully reopen and gather a new set of numbers. Because on this second Easter of COVID-19, the story of the church is not yet finished.

Dolbee, who writes a biweekly column for this paper’s Sunday Arts+Culture section, is the former religion and ethics editor of The San Diego Union-Tribune and a former president of the Religion News Association. You can reach her at sandidolbeecolumns@gmail.com

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One year later, the big question for churches: What's next? - The San Diego Union-Tribune
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