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Churches merge and close in Maryland — 8 Episcopal churches shutter since 2007

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October 23, 2017 at 6:50 p.m. EDT
Worshippers at a 10:30 am service at Saint John’s in the Village. The congregation and the community, are fighting the proposed closure by the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland, due to finances and declining attendance. (Amy Davis/Baltimore Sun)

For a decade and more, Govans Presbyterian Church and Brown Memorial Woodbrook Presbyterian Church in Baltimore have labored in the manner of many mainline Protestant congregations: working ever harder to provide spiritual resources for dwindling numbers of congregants.

Govans, in North Baltimore, has been hosting its Sunday night dinners for the poor and helping lead GEDCO, the social service organization it co-founded in 1984.

Brown Memorial Woodbrook, about two miles from Govans, has been running its busy Sunday school and community garden and working on LGBT equality and other social justice issues.

But with attendance stagnating, maintenance costs rising and the population of Christians from which to draw shrinking, the two churches have decided to join forces. If the Baltimore Presbytery gives its approval next month, they’ll become one congregation before the end of the year, bringing more than 280 worshipers and 230 years of history together under one roof.

The merger would be the latest example of an increasingly common phenomenon: faith leaders closing or consolidating houses of worship as a way of adjusting to a culture that has grown less hospitable to their mission.

The Episcopal Diocese of Maryland has closed a net eight churches since 2007 and plans to shutter one more — 174-year-old St. John’s Episcopal Church in Charles Village — if the congregation can’t present a feasible financial plan by January.

The Delaware-Maryland Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church has consolidated eight of its smaller churches into three.

The Archdiocese of Baltimore has launched a long-term plan to reallocate resources over several years, including folding parishes into a smaller number of worship centers called pastorates.

Two historic Reform Jewish synagogues — Temple Oheb Shalom in Park Heights and Har Sinai Congregation in Owings Mills — have announced they will likely combine.

And Bishop James L. Davis, presiding prelate of the second district of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which includes Maryland, has directed all 411 congregations in the jurisdiction to spend six months taking a “hard, possibly painful” look at their own operations.

Each church is to address a set of questions — How much has your congregation grown? How many visitors have you had? Would you attend your church if you weren’t a member? — and weigh options, including staying on course or shutting down.

It’s set to begin in February.

“Our first step will be trying to get people to converse one with another, and come to some understanding themselves about what might need to be done, before our rules and regulations have to move in and do what may be inevitable and necessary,” Davis says.

The driving force behind the trend is the well-documented decline in Americans’ commitment to organized Judeo-Christian religion.

Denominations large and small report falling membership numbers, decreased attendance and faltering financial support. The decline began accelerating in the 1990s.

Membership at churches and synagogues has fallen by nearly 20 percentage points since World War II, according to Gallup. The Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church USA have lost nearly half of their members since 1967.

More than a thousand Catholic parishes have closed since 1995. The number of Jews who call themselves culturally but not religiously Jewish is rising sharply among millennials.

A few faith traditions have fared better. The Muslim and Orthodox Jewish populations are growing, and evangelical Christianity's numbers are holding steady. But more than 20 percent of Americans say they're unaffiliated with any religion. That's the highest number ever.

The Rev. Daniel Webster, canon for evangelism and media for the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland, has studied and written about the trend for nearly two decades.

While it’s hard to pinpoint a single most important factor, Webster says, it’s impossible to ignore the repeal of most of the old state blue laws, regulations that had long placed restrictions on commercial activity on Sundays, starting in the mid-20th century.

Today’s faith leaders must compete with activities such as youth soccer and pro football games and shopping at the mall.

“When I was growing up in what I call the salad days of the 1950s and early 1960s, the question in the neighborhood was ‘What church do you go to?’ ” Webster says.

“Now it’s, ‘Why do you go to church?’ ” he says.

“We no longer live in Christendom. We really have to accept that it’s a thing of the past.”

The larger question, faith leaders say, is what they should do about it.

A possible benefit of going to church: A 33 percent chance of living longer

More and more often, the answer seems to be: Shed your baggage, move more nimbly and sharpen your sense of mission.

That can mean merging two or more congregations into one, closing a congregation, sharing clergy across parish or even denominational lines, or bringing neighboring congregations together on ministry efforts, whether it’s feeding the poor or helping promote entrepreneurship.

The Rev. Kati Kluckman-Ault is senior pastor of Rejoice Fellowship. The Lutheran church in Glen Burnie came into being in 2016 when three smaller congregations merged.

In her previous role as director of evangelical mission for the Maryland-Delaware Synod, Kluckman-Ault oversaw two previous mergers, combining three congregations into one in Dundalk and two others into a single unit in Windsor Mill.

It can be difficult for longtime parishioners to give up the idea of continuing as a congregation, she says, whether it’s because the building, worship practices and faces are familiar or their loved ones were baptized or married there.

But in an era of declining numbers, she says, faith leaders must lead worshipers to consider sacrificing those comforts for the larger goal of sharing the gospel as efficiently as possible.

The situation has forced leaders to adopt an adapt-or-die ethos, Webster says, and some congregations fare better than others.

Until the arrival of a new pastor last year, Saint John’s in the Village, founded in 1843, was slower to change.

The Baltimore congregation, which employs a paid choir and practices an unusually formal high Anglican liturgy, spends a sizable portion of its $300,000 budget on maintaining its 159-year-old English Gothic church building.

When a major donor died, it became clear to the incoming priest-in-charge, the Rev. Jeffrey Hual, that other forms of stewardship had badly declined in the congregation. The diocese concluded that shrinking outreach into the community had led to a membership slide.

In his 14 months at the helm, Hual has helped raise more than $220,000, added 18 members and increased neighborhood outreach, but his efforts may have come too late.

When Episcopal Bishop Eugene Taylor Sutton met with church leaders in September, he gave them until early November to present him with a feasible financial plan or accept closure.

After a series of rallies by church members and neighbors, the diocese extended the deadline to January.

That’s a month before Catholic Archbishop William E. Lori is to sign off on a key phase of the long-term consolidation plan the Archdiocese of Baltimore has been working on for several years.

Lori is spiritual leader of the area’s half-million Catholics. Among his first priorities when he came to Baltimore in 2012, he says, was to consider how to address declining attendance figures and the effects of rapid demographic change.

He decided neither to close parishes nor to maintain the status quo, but rather to seek a way forward based on Pope Francis' call for Catholics to go beyond "mere administration" and bring evangelization to the people.

He laid out the foundational principles that would guide pastoral planning in the Archdiocese in 2014. In the time since, Catholics from the parish level on up took part in formulating a pastoral plan.

A draft of the plan, called “Be Missionary Disciples,” calls for a reorganization of the Archdiocese around pastorates — centers of worship and service that will, in many cases, combine the efforts of two or more parishes under the leadership of a single pastor.

Brown Memorial Woodbrook Presbyterian Church is no stranger to reorganization.

The local presbytery of the Presbyterian Church USA asked its leaders last year to embark on a period of self-assessment.

Established in 1980 as an offshoot of Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church in Bolton Hill, the congregation once boasted more than 500 members — healthy for a church whose sanctuary holds about 300.

Membership has declined steadily since then to about 100.

Sunday services draw an average of 45. A discernment team concluded in 2016 that the congregation could no longer afford to maintain its 40,000-square-foot building and seven acres.

“We realized that doing nothing was not an option,” says the Rev. Randy Clayton, the senior pastor.

They saw their best option when Govans Presbyterian suggested a merger. The congregations agreed on Oct. 1.

If the Baltimore Presbytery gives its approval next month, the two congregations will begin worshiping as one body — Govans Presbyterian Church — at the Govans site Dec. 3.

Kluckman-Ault, the Rejoice Fellowship pastor, says such mergers can bring grief at first. But if done right, they lead to a new body that’s stronger than the old ones ever were.

“Jesus didn’t look like a winner when he went to the cross,” she says. “But he was resurrected, and we have faith in that.

“Twelve guys were so changed by that experience that they spread that news around the known world.”

— Baltimore Sun