Post-COVID congregations
Faith leaders say it’s necessary to find creative new ways to engage
It was a Saturday morning at First Presbyterian Church of Santa Fe, and the Rev. Andrew Black was preaching the gospel. This was no sanctuary sermon, most likely found on a Sunday. Instead, there was a dining-room service, replete with French toast, coffee, sausage, orange juice and talk of environmental justice, in which biblical text intersected with what Black said was a responsibility to be good stewards of the land.
Call it environmental evangelism 101 — a way to draw attention to the need to connect and extend the reach of the church beyond its four walls, pews and prayer books.
Black said it’s the sort of approach faith leaders may need to pursue to keep people connected to the church and the community in a post-pandemic world because many people — accustomed to attending church via Zoom — may not be coming back in person as much as they used to.
“Part of the challenge of the pandemic is the church is supposed to be a place of faith, love, hope and worship,” said Black, an environmental conservationist who has led worship-based services in the wild. “Yet the pandemic was doing everything in its power to kind of challenge that interconnectedness and deep sense of community, so we had to work really hard to maintain that.”
Black’s church now meets people where they want to be — at an outdoor rooftop service where dogs are allowed; over coffee and breakfast during a Saturday morning lecture; out on the trail hiking or cleaning up debris on public lands.
If anything, the pandemic and the ensuing political, social and economic upheaval it created may make faith leaders realize the church is more than a building, he said. “A church is a community,” Black said. Interviews with a half-dozen faith leaders in Santa Fe suggest it’s a community looking to better connect to others in a world still enveloped in sickness, uncertainty, anxiety and war.
The challenge, they say, is the way people have become accustomed to being at home. To battle the trend, some pastors are working to ensure social distancing does not become
spiritual distancing.
That may be particularly important in light of a recent Public Religion Research Institute study showing just 16% of Americans surveyed rated religion as the most important element of their lives — a drop from 20% who said the same thing a decade ago.
The same amount of people — 16% — said they attend church once a week, while another 7% said they attend church once or twice a month and 29% said they never attend religious services.
Yet local faith leaders say the power of Zoom must be taken into account when it comes to attendance. If anything, some said virtual services attract parishioners from outside the state and the country.
“We do one livestream Mass per weekend and find that not only reaches our homebound — people not comfortable coming back — but people all over the country who are interested [in our services], so that’s been a boom,” said Rev. Andrew Pavlak, pastor of Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary Catholic Community in Albuquerque.
For his part, Black said his church’s virtual events are drawing in followers from around the country.
But he added you can’t always count up how many people are attending online. And you still have to find a way to minister live, in person, to those seeking a sense of hope.
For his church, that requires getting out and hitting the pavement, driving from Eldorado to Española, visiting members of the congregation in their homes to drop off Bible study material, religious pamphlets, things they might need — including food.
“That is how the church has always been,” Black said. “Jesus met people where they were; he was on the move all the time, constantly walking about the city of Galilee.
The Rev. Harry Eberts of First Presbyterian Church said another way to draw people closer is by offering extracurricular activities and services — early childhood care, COVID-19 vaccines, lectures and the sort of environmentally focused projects in which Black engages.
Those people don’t have to become members of the church or attend services, he said. But they learn the church is there for them.
“The church used to equal worship — if you come to church, that means you’re going to worship,” Eberts said in an interview at the church. “That’s not what church is, especially anymore. Probably more [people] come for other activities around the church. Just because they belong here doesn’t mean they are coming to worship. And that’s OK.”
Seeking answers
For Pastor Matt Bridges of St. John’s United Methodist Church of Santa Fe, one challenge of the pandemic era is engaging in fellowship when you don’t see your fellow congregants in person.
He said he finds the virtual and online world can be of help. During livestreams on the church’s website, he’ll look to the camera and ask if anyone wants to request a prayer for someone else. Soon he’ll see a chat request for a particular person and he’ll send out a prayer in response.
Within seconds, other people tuning in online will offer prayers or well wishes for that person, proving “you can maintain fellowship and connection” virtually, Bridges said.
The pandemic’s role in limiting or reducing live church attendance may have led some to reflect on whether their faith is tethered to a particular religion or in the habit of going to a religious service every week, he said in an interview at his church.
He said they may be asking: “How much of their [spiritual] journey was anchored in a weekly worship service?”
Rabbi Berel Levertov of the Santa Fe Jewish Center said members of his synagogue are slowly coming back after three-plus years of isolation and introspection. Many say they “want to feel the meaning of life, want life to be more purposeful.”
He finds many are “craving community, craving connection, and we just have to get used to it again — practice it, get out, get used to it.”
He hopes the center’s three-story, 16,000-square-foot building, with a grand opening scheduled June 11, will become a hub of Jewish-themed cultural, religious and artistic events and help attract people.
Like others, he said one way to reconnect with the disconnected is to find Biblical teachings relevant to the pandemic.
The Rev. Tiffany Curtis of The Open Circle, a small Christian church, said much of what is in the Bible “was written in the context of quite a bit of suffering. The people who were writing that and the people who were listening were experiencing oppression, alienation and suffering — and every single human being can relate to that.”
She said in teaching scripture it’s important to “connect to that common human experience of suffering, of confusion, of exile — and speak to what is hope in the midst of that. That is the core of worship and the Bible.”