Talk to scholars that study American religion and most will say that the implosion of the “Seven Sisters” of old-line Protestantism has to be at the top of any list of big trends in the past half century.
For those who need to refresh their memories, the “Seven Sisters” are the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Episcopal Church, the American Baptist Churches USA, the United Church of Christ and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).
Many reporters, when dealing with mainline blues stories (think churches “for sale”) never pause to probe the “WHY?” factor in that old journalism formula “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “why” and “how.”
Often, journalists don’t give readers key facts about the mainline decline at all. In recent years, I’ve seen more than a few stories suggesting that the slight (but important) declines in some conservative flocks have the same root causes as the 30-50% declines seen in mainline churches since the 1960s.
Thus, it’s important to praise a news feature that includes all the basic facts, when talking about this trend, and then goes the extra mile to include waves of poignant details offering readers a pew-level view of what this decline feels like to the remaining believers.
That brings me to a must-read Washington Post feature that just ran with this headline: “The circuit preacher was an idea of the frontier past. Now it’s the cutting-edge response to shrinking churches.”
The setting for this story is a dense, mountainous corner of West Virginia, which is home to a wife-and-husband team of pastors in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (the story even pauses to explain the term “evangelical” in this context). Linked to that, readers are also told that this particular Lutheran body holds “more-liberal positions on issues such as homosexuality and the role of women.”
How busy is this duo? Here is a crucial summary passage that includes many of the crucial facts:
[The Rev. Jess Felici], 36, and her husband, the Rev. Jason Felici, 33, serve together as the pastors of five churches in one of the most isolated pockets of America. Their weekly acrobatics of military-precision timing and long-distance driving are what it takes to make Sunday church services happen in a place where churchgoers are aging, pews are getting emptier and church budgets are getting smaller.
That makes Appalachia much like the rest of the country when it comes to mainline Protestant churches.
Mainline denominations — the historically indomitable Protestant institutions that were the backbone of early American respectability, including Methodist, Presbyterian and Lutheran churches — are now on a precipitous decline.
From 2007 to 2014, according to Pew Research, the number of mainline Protestants in the United States dropped by about 5 million people, leaving just 14 percent of Americans — about 36 million — identifying with any mainline denomination. One in every five American adults were raised in a mainline church. But less than half of them continue to affiliate as adults.
This leads us to a frontier term that has made a comeback in the early 21st Century — the “circuit preacher” (or pastor in ELCA lingo). Historically, Methodism was the flock that used circuit riders the most. However, readers may now want to note that Catholic leaders, in some areas, are using similar strategies in areas where there are more people than there are priests.
Put that together, as noted by the Post religion team, and you have this: “The Hartford Institute for Religion Research found in a survey of more than 4,000 churches that in 2010, 71 percent of churches had a full-time paid pastor. Five years later, 62 percent did.”
This is a sobering story. No doubt about it.
But I really appreciated — as a guy who lives in an Appalachian mountain town — the fine details that allowed readers to go along on some of these Sunday rides and get a feel for the landscape. The detail about the young bald eagle that lives in a tree near the parsonage was especially lovely.
Meanwhile, the pastors are on the road again::
In these seven years, they have come to know individual deer by sight. They have become accustomed to a 100-year-old parishioner coating cotton balls in peppermint oil to get the smell out when the skunk gets under a church building.
Use the drive time to catch up on life via smartphone? There is this strange detail.
The drive from the nearest city, Harrisonburg, Va., is at least an hour — all the way up and down the steep mountain that separates this area from the outside world. Under decades-old law meant to preserve this area for scientific research, there’s no cellphone service or radio in most of the two counties, which are in the National Radio Quiet Zone. In certain parts, even at-home wireless Internet or microwave ovens are banned to protect the research zone.
How is this West Virginia region doing as a whole?
When Jason drives the longest leg of the circuit, an hour and 15 minutes to Minnehaha Springs, sometimes he doesn’t pass another car.
In this next passage, the details of the routine are woven into the harsh facts in some of these fading flocks. This is long, but essential:
Every Sunday, one of the Felicis starts the day at 7:15 a.m. with a 57-mile drive to the farthest of their churches, New Hope in Minnehaha Springs. After the service, that pastor drives all the way back to Franklin, where the Felicis live, to preach at the 11 a.m. service at the church next door to their parsonage. Meanwhile, the other pastor makes a mad dash through three church services, which means leaving early and arriving back late to get it all done. Each pastor writes one sermon each week and delivers it two or three times.
At Mount Hope in Upper Tract, some Sundays just eight people show up.
There’s much, much more to this story.
If you start reading this one, you will want to read it all.