Story by Caroline Bowersox
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Empty pews have become a familiar sight for many Chapel Hill pastors as local churches struggle to rebound from dips in attendance numbers and decreased participation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to a study published by the Pew Research Center in September 2022, the percentage of Americans who identify as Christian has been steadily decreasing since the early 1990s. This trend of widespread disaffiliation is nothing new, but many church leaders believe that the pandemic only accelerated the issue.
“If the pandemic had happened at a different time, I feel like maybe more people would have come back afterward,” said the Rev. Dr. Paul Burgess, the senior pastor at University Baptist Church in Chapel Hill. “But it happened at this time in our country where there’s so much polarization and such a tendency toward division.”
The Rev. Will Rose, the parish pastor at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, said that he began noticing wide distrust in institutions and skepticism toward religion in the early 2000s. According to Rose, those issues became much more pronounced in 2020 and 2021. “I do think the pandemic was apocalyptic in a sense that it revealed a lot and unveiled a lot of how the church views science, and there was the racism during that time that was like a powder keg,” he said. “All of these things came to the surface, and then how does the church respond to those things?”
The Rev. Timothy Kulbicki, the pastor and campus minister at the Newman Catholic Student Center Parish, attributes much of the church’s attendance issues to an increasingly secular culture. “Up until perhaps 100 years ago, it would have been unthinkable for most people to live in a world in which there was absolutely no reference to God,” Kulbicki said. “They may not have been particularly practicing, they may not have been particularly pious, but at least there was this vague sense that God was somehow connected to the world. Increasingly, there are large numbers of people that simply no longer have that.”
Burgess notes that this increased secularization can make it especially difficult for parents and families to balance faith with their other weekly responsibilities. “Sunday mornings are no longer sacred. They’ll schedule practices on Sunday mornings, or they’ll schedule dance competitions out of town that take place on a Sunday. That makes it harder for these parents who want their kids to be in church, but who also want them to be well-rounded individuals and get all the benefits of social activity,” Burgess said.
The Rev. Meg Peery McLaughlin, who co-pastors University Presbyterian Church alongside her husband Jarrett, has also noticed how middle-aged Christians can struggle to prioritize church attendance. “If they’re parents, their kids are super busy, and they’re also having to take care of their parents,” Peery McLaughlin said. “That age of people has so many competing priorities that they’ve given into those other priorities more so than making faith primary.”
Several Chapel Hill churches first introduced virtual worship services as a way to safely meet together at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, but have kept them in place to adapt to the busy schedules of their congregants.
Prior to the outset of the pandemic, average in-person worship attendance at Holy Trinity Lutheran was about 250 people each week, spread across two Sunday morning services. In February, that number is just over half of what it was in early 2020, but the church is now seeing a larger share of people that have begun engaging primarily virtually. “We’re down to like 150 people on a Sunday, but we’re still doing our YouTube, we’re still doing our live streaming. By the end of the week, we have over 100 to 200 views on our YouTube,” Rose said. “So our numbers in terms of people that engage each week, not just in-person, is over 250 people a week.”
However, some church leaders worry that attending worship virtually is not an adequate replacement for engaging in Christian community. “The pandemic offered people an opportunity to see, ‘oh, well, I can watch a service online and not come in.’ It just kind of misses the point of community, which is central to the idea of the Body of Christ,” Burgess said.
Much of the decisions regarding pandemic safety measures like virtual services and congregational masking requirements were made ecumenically. Prior to the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the leaders of several Chapel Hill churches – especially those closest to the university and with a large student and faculty population – met on a monthly basis to discuss general ministry happenings in the area and to be in solidarity with one another.
“It was pretty informal. Just ‘let’s check in, have lunch together,’” said Rose. “But when the pandemic hit, it was like ‘oh crap, what are we going to do?’ And so we immediately got together.”
The Rev. Justin Coleman, the senior pastor at University United Methodist Church, became the unofficial leader of the group of pastors, and organized weekly Zoom meetings to discuss and collaborate with other local church leaders about COVID-19 safety measures like when to reopen for in-person worship. Dr. Wes Wallace, a professor of emergency medicine at UNC-Chapel Hill and a member of Coleman’s church, would join the Zoom meeting each week to update pastors on how the COVID-19 virus was affecting Chapel Hill and Orange County.
Even as daily life returns to pre-pandemic normalcy, the local pastors still meet once a month to hear from Wallace and to chat about how their respective congregations are faring. “The church is trying to stay together and work together as a team,” said Rose. “We’re all in this together.”
Each of the pastors that participate in that monthly group struggle with weekly worship attendance, but they are also reminded that numbers are not the most important aspect of a church. Peery McLaughlin notes how church health is often measured by what she calls “butts and bucks” – how many butts are in the pews on Sunday mornings and how many bucks the church raises to meet its spending budget. “I think there’s a whole lot more to church than that,” said Peery McLaughlin. “Like, how are we showing the love of God in this place and to our neighbors? What is the impact we’re making in spiritual growth and in the care of our planet and our neighbors?” she said.
In order for congregations to thrive, Rose believes that the church must shift the ways in which it engages with the surrounding community and the larger world. “The big questions aren’t going anywhere. ‘What does life mean? What is purpose? Is there meaning to the universe or not? Where did I come from? Where am I going?’ Those are the big questions humans have always asked and will continue to ask,” said Rose. “The church, our faith, our religion has decent answers to those questions, but we need to find a way to engage with others that isn’t threatening or seen as closed off.”
