Where Is Everybody?
Hebrews 10: 19-25
Recently a long-time parishioner shared a story about an even longer-time parishioner. It dates from a few decades back, when the storyteller was a young mother who’d only recently joined St. Stephen. She overheard the older woman say that she and her husband were often so financially challenged in raising their large family that sometimes they had to go to the bank and take out a loan so that they could pay off their pledge to the church. “I have never forgotten that,” the storyteller says. “I have never forgotten that.”
It’s a story from a time that seems long gone—when giving financially to church was more of a priority than it is to us today—indeed, when church itself was more of a priority than it is today.
The vast majority of Americans aren’t churchgoers at all. A recent study found that only 17.7% of Americans attend church any given Sunday. Interestingly, this study corrected other studies that showed as many as 40% of Americans claim they go to church. Apparently—this is actually true—they weren’t exactly honest with the pollsters. Maybe if they went to church more they’d know they shouldn’t lie!
Even churchgoers attend worship less than they used to. A study of national church attendance rates shows that over thirty years, the average churchgoer’s attendance rate has dropped from 48% to 38%, declining by a fifth.
A PCUSA study shows that in 1978, the average Presbyterian attended church about 42% of the time; but in 2008, the average was about 32%.
Even among churchgoers, church doesn’t seem as important as it once was.
I hesitate to share those statistics with you. I don’t want you to start thinking, “It’s okay not to attend church so much—everybody’s doing it!” But it’s a problem many of us have noticed in our own pews. People are wondering, “Where is everybody?” And the good news is that it’s not so much that our regulars aren’t coming at all as it is that they are coming less. Still, it’d be nice if people came more.
In many ways this is a symptom of the times. Our attitude toward church has changed. It’s just one option among many. Whereas fifty years ago, church was your only choice on Sunday, now we have myriad choices. And even if there’s no schedule conflict, you just get to the weekend and you’re dog-tired—you need a day off, you need time with your family. As to financial giving, we all feel so strained by the economy that even if we want to give, we feel like we can’t.
It seems like some folks want to return us to those thrilling days of yesteryear when people’s choices were limited and we had no choice but to come to church. I’m sympathetic when people say, “Why do we have kids’ league sports on Sundays?” But truthfully having choices is a good thing. It doesn’t really mean anything if we go to church because we don’t have much choice about it. There’s something inherently un-American and un-Christian about expecting people to go to church, expecting people to believe, expecting people to make financial contributions to the church. It’s much better for our souls if it’s a choice we’re making.
But let’s honestly ask ourselves: is all the busy-ness of our lives really our choice? Or do we feel trapped? I think a lot of people wish they could choose church and soccer, instead of church or soccer. The problem is, they can’t be in two places at once, so they make it to church when they can. But the fact that it isn’t a habit can make it easier to take church-going for granted, too.
I don’t know about you, but sometimes I feel constrained and confused by the plethora of choices around me. I used to love to go to bookstores, but now I feel absolutely immobilized by all the choices around me. It’s not just fiction or non-fiction, or bestsellers versus great classics. It’s hundreds of authors and books and topics all of which have people telling you this is the greatest book ever written. You like Lincoln? Several great Lincoln biographies. But you could also read “Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Slayer.” Or you can download it onto your Kindle. Or see the movie. Or there’s the new Lincoln movie just in the theaters, by Steven Spielberg. Or see “The Lincoln Lawyer.” Or schlepp over to the music section and listen to Linkin Park. It’s overwhelming. I’m tempted just to say, “Forget it, I’m going home to reread a George McDonald Frasier Flashman novel. At least I already know I’ll like it! I liked it the other fifty times I read it!”
But that’s no solution. Sometimes you just have to be bold. Sometimes I just have to boldly choose a book, buy it, and read it!
Because boldness is better than feeling helpless and overwhelmed.
The great thing about living in an age of choice is that we don’t feel obligated to worship God or go to church. We can freely choose to do it. Or not. Ultimately it’s a choice, and that’s good. The challenge is that at some point we have to make bold decisions about our priorities. What’s first in our lives? What’s most important? There’ve been times when I myself, as a preacher, have been hesitant to say, “choose church,” because after all, that sounds kind of self-serving; and besides that, ultimately it isn’t about church—it’s about Jesus. It’s about loving God and neibhgbor. It’s about faith that sustains you when times are tough or crisis hits. And who’s to say that you HAVE to go to this church, or support it through your actions and financially, in order to shoe the love you have in your heart for Jesus?
But if you love God, if you are a disciple of Jesus Christ, if you want to grow spiritually and truly serve your neighbor, there are a lot of good reasons to choose church, to make it your top priority. One shouldn’t feel obligated to come to St. Stephen, but to choose to do so, to make it your first choice and your top priority, is a bold assertion of God’s loving, gracious presence in an often overwhelming world.
That woman who went to the bank for a loan to pay off her pledge did so because she was bold. She had choices, same as you and I, and she chose what mattered to her most. She did it because she valued the church for what it did for her, her family, her children. It was a bold, free choice that she and her husband made, that despite the demands that were on them financially, they were willing to go into hock for the sake of paying off their pledge. In fact, I bet—and since I know the person, I feel sure of this—that she felt really strongly that St. Stephen made God’s love real and concrete in her life, and she was grateful for that, and that was why she gave.
The author of the letter to the Hebrews believed that Christians are called to boldness. By faith, he says, we have “boldness to enter the Holy of Holies by the blood of Jesus.” His reference is to the central area of the ancient Jewish Temple, the Kotel, sheathed in a veil, where it was believed that the presence of God dwelt, and which was so holy that only the High Priest could enter it, and then only once a year.
We believers have the outrageous boldness to believe that each of us carries the Holy of Holies within us, and that each of us by God’s grace dwells in the Holy of Holies all the time. Hard to believe sometimes when we’re working overtime to get that project done, or working at McDonald’s because we can’t get a job in our field, or worn out from driving kids from one activity to another. But it’s true. We make the amazingly bold claim that Holiness dwells in the world, and that God’s holiness dwells in us.
And that’s the best reason to attend church. Church is where that outrageous claim is taught and reinforced. We teach it in Sunday school. We embrace it in our fellowship time. We celebrate it in worship. We share it when we pray for one another and support one another in crisis. In church, holiness becomes part of our lives.
The author of Hebrews apparently had an attendance problem at his church, too. “Let us not forsake the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some,” he writes (Hebrews 10: 25). I like the way the New International Version puts it, simple and straightforward: “Let us not give up meeting together. Some are in the habit of doing this. Instead, let us cheer each other up with words of hope.” This translation does a better job of getting at what the Greek word means, ?????????????, “to encourage.” The author says that that the whole reason that we assemble together as a church is to encourage each other, to give each other the strength to hold fast to hope, to give each other the boldness to trust in Jesus Christ, to be purified from evil, to “consider one another in order to stir up love and good works.”
That’s what a church is supposed to do. Church is where we go to find backup and support from one another and from God when we feel like we’re overwhelmed. Church is the place that teaches us to have hope, and to embody hope to the world. By choosing church, we’re saying that even though it seems like there are so many things we HAVE to do, this is one thing we WANT to do.
I think of our deacons, for instance. Deacons are officers of the church, called to ministries of love and compassion and sympathy and service. They visit folks in the hospital or the nursing homes, they bring food when a family is grieving; they send birthday cards and make phone calls to check on people. In its own way, being a deacon is extraordinarily counter-cultural. These days when everybody tells us to mind our own business, and to put ourselves first, the deacons’ job is to take care of the neighbor and the stranger. They embody hope. The very fact that they pay a visit can mean the world to someone who is sick or homebound or grieving. It’s a concrete way of saying, “You aren’t alone.”
So many of the deacons have said how much it means to them. Before, they had wanted to help others, but they didn’t know what to do. They were uncomfortable in hospitals. They were shy meeting new people. But by being deacons, they’ve been made bold. They’ve been challenged to expand their horizons. They’ve had the opportunity to be Christ’s hands and feet. It’s not an opportunity that would have been easily available to them otherwise.
A few years ago, a member of the church had major surgery and was recovering in the Intensive Care Unit. The hospital staff requested that some of the deacons visiting him please leave—ICU patients were only allowed three visitors at a time! Talk about having the boldness to enter the Holy of Holies—those deacons were a long way from, “I don’t know what to do in a hospital!”
Church is a choice today more so than it’s ever been in American history. And that’s a good thing, because we choose it, or not, with integrity. We can choose to attend or not; we can choose to support it with our financial gifts or not. Nobody is making you go; nobody even really expects it any more. So it’s up to you. It’s easy to let it go, or take it for granted. But the church’s goal is to be a lighthouse of hope in an overwhelming sea of choices, a place that you look forward to coming to at the end of every week because it refreshes and renews you. This is a choice that boldly declares that we have hope—hope in a loving God, hope that holiness is present in the world, hope that is made concrete in a community that supports us, hope that supports and sustains us in the hard times, hope that challenges us to be bold in pursuit of bettering ourselves for the sake of serving God and others.
Seems like that’s a pretty good choice to make.