I. Seven Mini Meditations For Your Lenten Reflection: What Should Christians Be Up To Today?
Welcome to this series of seven short meditations for the seven weeks of Lent – these Mini Meditations. This represents a departure from my practice of several years now: issuing occasional blogs. I plan, the Lord willing, to return to that practice after Easter.
Here, in a Lenten mode, I’m attempting to do something orderly – and something that anyone can handle, however busy you may perceive yourself to be this Lenten season. A once-a-week reading!
Thank you for tuning in – and I look forward to hearing from you in response, should the Spirit so move you. If things work out as I hope they will, you will be receiving one of these Mini Meditations each week in Lent.
—Paul Santmire, Ash Wednesday, 2025
I. Coming to Terms with an Era of Apparent Church Decline
II. Understanding Our Post-Christian World
III. Attending to the Signs of These Times
IV. Spiritual Discernment or Looking Before You Leap
V. Reclaiming the Child Within
VI. Revisiting Your Local Church
VII. Growing Up Into Christ: But Really Growing Up
Mini Meditation One: Coming to Terms with an Era of Apparent Church Decline
Why do I find it so depressing to drive by a nearby large and elegantly designed granite church building that now contains several condominiums? I guess that that’s because, in some intellectual moments, I have taken for granted the by now familiar sociological accounts of the “decline of religion” in the U.S. today. And since, in some sense, I’ve been in the business of religion, as it were, my whole adult life, why shouldn’t I be depressed?
I have my own vocational twist on this kind of story. The last parish I served before I retired was a venerable downtown congregation, Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, in Akron, Ohio that once had been led by the Rev. Dr. Franklin Clark Fry, the even more venerable, nationally recognized “Mr. Protestant,” whose countenance once made the cover of Time magazine, with those words inscribed beneath his photo. I had been called to serve what one friend called “Frank Fry’s Church.” The irony that that congregation’s huge educational wing, built for the many hundreds of congregants who flocked to that church during Fry’s era, was mostly empty in recent decades was of course not lost on me, as I pondered, with dedicated congregational leaders, what to do with those vacant spaces.
It didn’t help my spirits then to know that about a mile from my church a much-publicized evangelical “mega-church” had been established (I forget how many thousand members it had). That church, in turn, was beginning to establish “satellite congregations” in the suburbs. “When are ya goin’ to start packin’ ‘em into the pews, Pastor?,” a member of my own Church Council once asked me, with reference to that nearby mega-church. The thought, I responded, had crossed my mind.
Things have changed since the days when I was in Akron, of course. A number of evangelical megachurches, if I may say so, have gone over to the dark side. Winston Churchill once referred to the Anglican Church as “the Tory Party at Prayer.” Some huge American evangelical congregations, although not all by any means, have become the MAGA movement at prayer. Those churches appear to be thriving, depending on the indices one invokes to define “thriving.” Still, the overall church-going story in the U.S. has still been a narrative of decline. Years ago, for example, I remember regularly identifying myself in public as a pastor in “the 5 million member ELCA,” which today has slightly less than 3 million.
Given this situation, it’s of course critically important for all of us who care about the life and mission of the Holy Catholic Church in the U.S. to be able to figure out as best we can what’s going on in our society today, sociologically, psychologically, economically, and spiritually. What are the underlying mission challenges that all American congregations are facing in these times?
To that end, as one who’s been around the American ecclesial block a few times, I have decided to add my own retired voice to this discussion, which, in the church circles that I know, has long been underway, often with a cadence that belies what I take to be the now boring dirge about American Church decline. Stay tuned.
(To be continued.)
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