Local religious leaders consider attendance changes ahead of Easter crowds

Apr. 8—The sanctuary inside St. John's Meadville church seats about 150 people comfortably, more if people are willing to get friendly and squeeze together.

The Easter service, according to Pastor Cameron Bowman, is "hands down" the largest of the year.

"Last year, they were outside the door," he said Friday. "There were chairs in the hallway."

As religious leaders around the area and the country look ahead to Easter Sunday services and sermons, the question of attendance patterns, never far from their minds, is ever more present in the wake of the pandemic.

At Calvary Baptist Church, Senior Pastor Tim Jordan was a bit more cautious, saying that the Easter service tends to draw the largest crowd of the year, "but you never know."

The church's attendance was trending upward before the pandemic, from about 150 to 170 people each week when Jordan arrived in 2015 to about 210 to 230 in early 2020. Today, attendance seems to have rebounded, enough so that the logistics of parking and auditorium seating are more of a concern than maintaining membership numbers. Still, some families left for other churches with similarly conservative approaches to Christianity — the pandemic shook things up a bit.

"COVID gave them a chance to shop around a little bit online," Jordan said. "It's not a loss to the kingdom of God, but it's a bummer for us short-term."

Decades-long trends of membership losses have been more than a bummer for some religious groups in the U.S. Like so many other areas of contemporary life, the pandemic has complicated those trends — speeding them up in some area, forcing more drastic adaptations in other.

Gallup polls have traced an eight-decade trend of declining church membership in the country. Where 70 percent of Americans reported belonging to a church in 1999, only half did so by 2018 and that figure fell below half, to 47 percent, for the first time in 2020 as in-person attendance plummeted due to both pandemic-related lockdowns and health concerns.

A study released last week by Pew Research Center showed that the portion of American adults who say they attend religious services once a month or more dropped from 33 percent in 2019 to 30 percent in 2022.

And as the country as a whole has grown less religious over the past half century, those who are religious have been moving from traditional churches to newer organizations. The trend has been particularly noticeable in the shift from mainline Protestant churches to nondenominational Christian churches, with the latter outnumbering the former in 2021.

Brian Jensen, senior pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Meadville, is among several leaders of local mainline churches who saw unexpected benefits when the pandemic forced them to embrace technology, both in streaming services online and televising them on Armstrong.

Now in his 20th year at First Presbyterian, Jensen will retire later this year. As he looked ahead to his final two Easter services on Sunday, he said he didn't expect the pews to be filled to capacity but that he did expect a large crowd in person. In addition, he said, people would likely be watching online from "all over the place."

His approach to televised services, which the church did not offer prior to the pandemic, is very different than the classic televangelist approach, he noted, and measuring the impact of virtual participation is difficult.

"It has not increased membership. It probably has increased attendance in that they are involved," Jensen said. "What we're looking for is what Emile Durkheim called 'collective effervescence,' which describes when communal gatherings foster a deep religious experience."

But can virtual religious participation produce an authentic experience of "collective effervescence"?

"Possibly," Jensen said with a laugh.

Stone United Methodist Church, another of the mainline churches housed in a historic building near Diamond Park, similarly turned to more techno-centric means of outreach in response to the pandemic, according to Pastor Sarah Roncolato. Stone began televising its 9 a.m. services on Armstrong and streaming online as well, which Roncolato said " has been a blessing to those who cannot worship with us in person."

"One of the things COVID has taught us is the kind of long-range planning we used to do doesn't make sense anymore," Roncolato said in an email. "At Stone, we are focusing on adaptive leadership in all areas, including worship using the technology, staff and resources available to us at any given time to connect in a meaningful way with people wherever they are, physically and spiritually, in their lives

But even for some of the best-established religious organizations, some trends may be irresistible.

A press release from the Diocese of Erie last month noted that since 1990, as the population of the 13-county region dropped by 7 percent, attendance at Catholic Mass in the diocese plummeted by 78 percent. Over the same time period, consolidations — including the combination of Meadville's three parishes into one — saw the total number of parishes in the diocese shrink from 127 to 93. And where 210 priests served the area in 1990, the Diocese expects to have just 62 in 2031.

Bowman felt there is still a place for the traditional churches that many people love, but added that "people are hungry" for religious approaches that may be seen as more culturally relevant.

Jordan saw shifting church attendance trends as characteristic of what he called a "post-Christian society," one in which people don't simply attend church because their parents did or because doing so is seen as part of what makes someone a "good American."

And that's not necessarily a bad development, according to Jordan, if it leads to more authentic engagement among those who do devote themselves to their faith.

Looking past his retirement to the future of his mainline church, Jensen was optimistic.

"It's a different era," he said. "My prayer is that the church will continue to thrive and I have every faith God will allow it to do so."

Mike Crowley can be reached at (814) 724-6370 or by email at mcrowley@meadvilletribune.com.