From the Rector
Dear Friends in Christ,
On Sunday, as part of the forum, I’m going to do a little bit of a program year review, mid-year financials update, some previewing of the coming year, and Q&A.
As always, there is a lot happening—and it’s always happening in a changing cultural climate. A recent article in The Economist was sent to me by a number of you. It reflects on the current shape of the Church of England.
It states, “Adult church attendance in England has fallen by over a third in 15 years; just a little over 1% go to services weekly, according to the c of e’s own numbers.”
Churches are being sold at a clip. They are turned into cafes or swanky apartments or spacious single family homes. Where altars were there are now breakfast nooks. Where organs once roared DJs now set up for nightly revels.
These churches were the backbone of what it meant to be England once. Perhaps they still are in their new function.
Those statistics aren’t far off the Episcopal Church’s. The average Sunday attendance at an Episcopal Church is 37 people. God bless small congregations doing amazing work across the Church.
But when one visits many of them there is no sense of dynamism. There’s a sense of waiting for the next chapter to be written by a changing culture and by demography.
It has been the determined work of Saint Philip’s not to let our future be determined by demography or by changes in the cultural tides. Our future will be determined by faith alone.
Faith in the love of Christ. Faith in the power of the Spirit. And faith in the life shared here together. Every baptism, confirmation, and reception here is one small part of that determined work.
One of my greatest frustrations when I go to many church gatherings is how many clergy seem resigned to what is happening. There’s a tiredness about the state of things. It’s understandable, certainly.
It’s understandable. But it’s hardly forgivable.
We are still heirs of the greatest story ever told in a world starving for meaning.
We are a community of hope in a time of lonely despair.
We are watching for the future.
We are citizens of the Kingdom when empires pretend to rule the day.
What is happening in the wider Church is not our story. The narrative of decline and slow death is the world’s story about the Church.
Our story is the Gospel.
Our story is the Resurrection.
And it is a story that is yet being written with every Amen and every Alleluia we share on Sunday mornings and day in and day out in prayer and worship.
Even as those grim statistics bounce around there are green shoots, too. Among the young there has actually been a boom in religious attendance—even in England. This is especially true in the Catholic Church.
France has seen a record number of young baptisms and booming confirmation classes. The Roman Catholic Church in France had its highest number of baptisms in 20 years last year.
Here in the States, recent surveys indicate that Gen Z-ers—especially Gen Z men—are actually more likely to attend weekly religious services than millennials and even some younger Gen X-ers.
We see glimpses of that same unfolding new story of faith here at Saint Philip’s. Thanks be to God that a decade ago there was a choice made to invest in the future and to build upon the past.
There is much here to be proud of, but I think what we can be most proud of is that we’ve not been content to let the past be our story, nor to let demography write the rest of ours.
I look forward to Sunday and to hearing more about what you’re seeing and where we can find new opportunities to continue to change and grow. Thank you for being part of life here and being part of writing the next chapters of our story.
Yours in Christ,
—Fr Robert
