From the Study...

Dear Friends,

By this day two years ago we had all heard of this new virus that was emerging. It had been circulating around in the orient and a few cruise ships seemed to have a few cases, but no one knew enough about it to be particularly alarmed. There was a good bit of curiosity and speculation, and we were all waiting to see where it would go next. It was one month and one week later, March 15, 2020, that everything shut down. This, which began as a curiosity, had bloomed so rapidly that on that Sunday afternoon school systems were cancelling classes and people were being told not to come to their offices. Instead, they were being told to work at home if they could. On that day life changed dramatically. Words like N-95, transmissibility, social distancing, and virtual were being added to the common lexicon, stores were setting aside special shopping hours for those more vulnerable to infection by the virus, and life began being conducted by ZOOM. We were entering a wilderness that no one alive had been in before and we didn’t know what the pathway out was. Even the Church, where so many people flocked in times of crisis like 9/11 and the beginning of Desert Storm, was no longer available except by live stream. And live stream is a poor substitute.

The next day, March 16, I began writing a piece to church members and friends which I called “From the Study” since that’s the perspective it looked like I was going to have on the world for the foreseeable future. It was a way of trying to reach out to the community at a time when the idea of community was suddenly in need of redefinition. It was also a way of trying to keep us together when everything had to be at a distance. But things began to open back up by the end of that first year. Even though we were trying to stay that magic six feet apart, we began going out in public again. Life began to look something like it had before COVID came to town … except for life in the Church. The Church in our culture was not rebounding as we had hoped it would. It was not only Providence Church. The Church in our culture had taken a hit by the virus that it was having a difficult time moving through. After reading lots of articles by church people who saw the same thing in their communities and after many conversations with colleagues going through the same sort of discoveries, there has emerged a reason for this.

In the last half of the 20th Century the part of the population who claimed a church membership was around 70% and it stayed that way until the late 1990s. Then something happened around the turn of the 21st Century and that number began to drop. By 2008 62% said they were church members, and by 2018 the number was 49%. According to a Gallup poll published in March of last year that number had dropped to 47%. I want to lift up two things from those findings: first, that fewer than half of Americans now say they are members of a church, synagogue, or mosque and second, this trend began long before anybody knew what a COVID virus was. People have been wandering away from the church for 20 years. Then a pandemic came along and exaggerated a problem that was already here. When we look back over that time, we can see it. We are wandering in the middle of a wilderness and we need to be reminded of two things. First, God is present and trustworthy. Second, God is growing us into something new. And isn’t that the task of wildernesses, to grow us into who we are supposed to become? It was for Abraham. It was for Isaac and Jacob. It was for Israel. It was for Jesus, and it is for us today.

“For I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you.” (Jeremiah 29:11 NIV)

The Session has been very busy for the last several months listening to you and making plans. Come to worship on February 20 to see what those plans look like! There are more details to come in the days ahead.

Grace and peace,

Mike