From the Rector

Dear Friends in Christ,

In the past week or so, the churchwide numbers for the Episcopal Church were released as part of the annual reporting that each church does about its attendance, baptisms, members, and the like. To say the numbers were bad really doesn’t communicate the scope of the challenge. In addition, Pew Research released its most recent survey data on religion and American life, as well, and those numbers were no more encouraging.

—Of the roughly 7,000 Episcopal parishes nationwide, only 64 of them had an attendance above 250.

—Churchwide average Sunday attendance is down 43 percent compared to pre-pandemic numbers.

—90 percent of congregations report attendance of 100 or fewer.

—Median Sunday attendance at the average parish across the Episcopal Church plunged to 21 in 2021 after hovering around 50 in recent years.

—50 percent of Episcopal churches now have fewer than 25 worshipers on a Sunday.

The national data across denominations is not much more encouraging.

33 percent of Americans now say they never attend church (that number was 9 percent in 1972).

22 percent attend weekly (which was 41 percent in 1972). Those declines are accelerating and COVID showed a marked impact on those trends.

The pandemic accelerated trends already underway and has had a profound impact on the spiritual, psychological, and emotional health of the country and the Church. We’ve seen grim data from the CDC in recent months on the emotional health of our teenagers.

Churches that host young adult service programs, like Beloved in the Desert, have reported a significant increase in the need for professional therapeutic help and resources for their young adults. Many programs have shut down or ceased admitting new cohorts as they wrestle with these changing needs.

Saint Philip’s has decided to also take a sabbatical year for Beloved in the Desert to look at how the parish can best support future community members. One of the real questions we need to ask, along with programs nationwide, is whether the pandemic has changed the landscape in ways that are too unpredictable for all of us to jump right back into the work in the same way.

Our goal with Beloved has always been two-fold: to prepare young adults for leadership in a changing church and to support them as they explore the life of sacrificially lived faith.

We see from the statistics that the need to lead in a dramatically different Church is more important than ever. To do so, we’ll need to expand our capacity to recruit, support, equip, and pastor young people with very different needs than just a few years ago.

So we will take this year to assess how Saint Philip’s can continue its role as a place that forms and sends young people to lead in a changing Church. We will also take the year to look at the needs of our local community and retool not just Beloved but our wider array of outreach ministries to meet those new needs, as well.

The Church needs us to be forming missionaries, evangelists, preachers, healers, teachers, witnesses, prophets, and saints who understand what’s happening and can see the way forward—now more than ever perhaps.

The good news at Saint Philip’s is that one can look at any given 9:00am Sunday service and see young families. Almost every week this year, a new family has shown up to get involved. We have a demographic breadth that is remarkable and unique in the Episcopal Church. The change here is not just more of the same decline lamented in so much of the Church.

The change here is that whatever “next” looks like for the Church is happening here and now—in, through, and by your faith, hope, and love. While so much of the Church is obsessing over death we’re at the work of Resurrection.

We’re not immune to the cultural pressures facing the whole Church and culture but we’re meeting them head on.

There are so many signs of vitality here even as we recognize that we are in a new place and a new time. We will meet those new challenges in the way the Church always has: with a joyful faith in Christ that surpasses all the grim statistics the world can throw at us. We will meet these changes and challenges with the angel’s words echoing in our hearts: “Be not afraid.”

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Robert