Faith Forward

Pastor’s Epistle—January 2021

I have no idea what 2021 is going to look like.

2020 has been a mess pretty much across the board. If there’s been any silver lining, I think it must be found in our increased connectivity online, especially as regards school and church. The whole world seems to be livestreaming these days, and St Peter’s is no exception.

We’ve been posting Morning Prayer, midweek Vespers, sermon recordings, Faith5 reflections, Confirmation CliffsNotes, and now full services live on our parish’s Facebook page and YouTube channel. We’re all televangelists now, I suppose.

In the next few months, the Covid-19 vaccine will be distributed more widely. We’ll start to return to restaurants and bars, stores and cinemas. Hopefully we will begin to recover collectively, and to fix the systemic rot that this crisis has revealed in our society. Yet the scars will last for years. A lot of businesses have folded. A lot of churches have closed. And all of us are wondering just how far we’ll bounce back.

Organized religion has been on the wane in the United States for decades now. Not uniquely, mind you—book groups, bowling leagues, Scout troops, fraternal lodges, volunteer firefighters, and the rest of civil society are all in the same boat. Even political parties have seen an exodus of membership. Basically anything that involves in-person commitment is getting clobbered, and the coronavirus has only accelerated the decline.

Folks aren’t getting any less religious in the broader sense. Majorities still believe in God—including, confusingly, one-third of self-identified atheists. Ghosts, UFOs, fairies, bigfoot, witchcraft, and neopaganism have all received a shot in the arm, proving that we aren’t terribly rationalistic. If anything, we’re seeking more enchantment, not less.

But much of the decline can be laid at the feet of the church itself. We bought into a sort of cultural Christianity, assuming that people would absorb the faith by osmosis. The old alliance of church and state has been supplanted by an alliance of church and market. We focused on institutional maintenance and consumerist business models, when what we should’ve been doing was forming faithful Christians for witness to the world.

People think they know what American Christianity is because they see it on TV, and are largely repulsed. I would be too, if I thought that’s all there was to faith in Jesus Christ.

The church of our immediate future will very likely be smaller, and of necessity more faithful. The Way of Jesus Christ will become a commitment again, requiring sacrifice, rather than just the default condition of middle-class America. This isn’t a bad thing. With faith, and the guidance of Holy Spirit, we may reclaim much of what we have lost spiritually over the decades. We will hear the Gospel with fresh and penitent ears, that it might truly be Good News for us and for the world once more.

Keep in mind that Christianity globally is growing in leaps and bounds. It isn’t our faith that’s sick. It’s our society.

St Peter’s has weathered the storms of 2020 remarkably well. Our community is dedicated, faithful, and generous. Thus far have we survived trials which have swamped congregations far larger than our own. And if online traffic is any indication, then our mission is reaching farther than at any point in our congregation’s history. We’re where we are by grace: God gives His gifts freely, that we too might freely give.

I don’t know what 2021 will bring. Will folks be back for Easter? Will pews be full again? I certainly hope so. But no matter what is to come in the year ahead, I hold to the sure promise of Jesus Christ our Lord: that in Christ, dead things rise to glorious new life. And so I do not fear death, be it of body or mind or institutions or status quo. Christianity has died many times over the centuries, yet ever rises again; for we have a God who knows the way out of the grave.

Here’s to a bright New Year. He’s to hope and health and renewed appreciation for all that we have, after we’ve had to take such a long hiatus from so much of it. May God bless you and keep you in the twelvemonth ahead, and make His face to shine upon you in each new day of it, as we look to the dawning and the rising of the Son.

In Jesus. Amen.