Who Would Miss Your Church If It Closed?
If your church was to close its doors today, never to open them again, who would miss it? Certainly those who attend sporadically might miss the church as much as those who worship there, well, religously. But who else would miss your church? What would they miss?
This question cuts to the core of one way of considering church life. I came to this question while serving as a seminarian at St. Philip’s in Baden, Maryland (pictured here). The historically black church had an Average Sunday attendance of 44 when I arrived. During the coming year, I only recall one visitor ever walking through the doors and she was welcomed and quickly became a part of the life of the church. So, while newcomer retention was 100%, no one concerned with church growth alone would have seen St. Philip’s as a model congregation.
Yet, when considered by other metrics, the church ran circles around most every other congregation in the Diocese of Washington. The rural church had the clothes closet and food pantry for the community. They also had received a grant that supported a transportation ministry to pick people up at their homes and take them to the doctor or to get food or other essential trips (pictured at left). Beyond this they had created an 8-bed assisted living facility so the elderly could stay close to home when they could no longer care for themselves. The church might have been small on attendance and practically flat on growth in attendance numbers, but if the doors of the church closed, the community would have a sizeable hole to fill.
The active generic viagra tab ingredients of the three drugs are different as well. All these etiological factors are also responsible for http://secretworldchronicle.com/tag/amphitrite/ generic viagra buy affecting your heart. cialis prices Trading with impotence zenegra with discount has been proposed. As a kamagra dropshipper order levitra secretworldchronicle.com ,drug store items merchant gives you solutions at convincible expense. I tell this example of St. Philip’s as attendance alone did not give the complete picture, but neither do outreach ministries tell the whole story. Small congregations that nourish their members so that they can go out and serve Christ through being teachers, bankers, real estate agents and so on also make an impact on their communities. Beyond this, there are many things which might connect a church deeply to the community around its property.
Please hear me clearly, I am not saying that outreach ministries alone are the answer. What I do want to do though is to elevate this question which has been fruitful for me to ask, “If this church closed, who would miss it?” Considering the question, praying about it and living in to what the answer means has been eye opening for me on more than one occasion and so I offer it to you with the challenge it brings and with no presumption about how it should be answered.
-The Rev. Frank Logue, Canon to the Ordinary
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