Faith Works 7-8-22

Faith Works 7-8-22
Jeff Gill

Most People Don't
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If the last six months have felt like a jet-powered roller coaster fright house ride, I get ya.

Events in the world, in the nation, in this county have taken off like a rocket, and just when you think you understand the trajectory or see the path of the tracks ahead, everything swerves and swerves again.

I will admit I like a line which I've seen repeated too often to attribute, but isn't mine: remember that cable TV news is a scripted drama. That's NOT (definitely not) to say it's all made up, but that there's always some selectivity and emphasis and a need in the producer's booth to keep viewer attention tied to the channel and the program. You have to do some prioritization and curation yourself to follow the thread.

Certainly actions of Congress and the Supreme Court either are or aren't what you can in fact find and read for yourself; when people ask me "what do you think" regarding such official matters, I have to check a few details out before I answer, to see what version of such realities the person I'm interacting with is asking about.

Depending on the sources you trust, where you get your overviews from, you may have one impression or another about a document which, in fact, I find very few people have actually taken the time to read. And being as specific as I'll get in this particular column, for now, I would note that you do not have to be a lawyer to read a Supreme Court opinion for yourself, and I'd hate to make too many assumptions about what one says or cast my weight behind any one group or faction before I took the time for myself to see what actually got said. I can't go to Ukraine to see what the facts on the ground are, so I trust Richard Engel quite a bit, because in effect I have to. But closer to home, I want to check things out to the degree that I can.

Let me simplify this for you. I regularly find that people have made broad general assumptions which influence their actions and expectations, ones which in essence are wrong, and not in a small, nitpicky way. I'll start with one of my favorite examples, which I am constantly trying to explain to people talking about church life, new church starts, and the need for evangelism by any and all of us.

"Everyone goes to church." This is simply not true, and sadly not even close. You can make a few spot checks, add up some numbers that are generally available, and without great precision still come up with a solid basis for saying on an average weekend maybe 17% of this county attends a worship service. A quick loose lap around the track: 179,000 residents, some 250 churches, once upon a time you could average neatly to about 100 a congregation, but today you have a slightly more complicated question because you have a few with a thousand or more, and many many at 30 or so a Sunday, but the average still works out to around 110-120 (the median is much lower, since the numbers cluster at the ends in two irregular groups).

You can retort that people attend less frequently, travel more, all true, but it's hard to push that figure up past 25% and I'd stick closer to 20% as a reliable figure for regular (more than once or twice a year) church goers. Which leaves over 130,000 souls without a steady harbor, so let the laborers go out into the fields, eh?

Likewise "everyone is going to the big contemporary churches now." Well, it would look that way. They've grown, most of them, from not existing twenty years ago to having a thousand or more a weekend coming through their doors. But there's only a dozen or so of them, and let's average them out to a thousand each, 12,000 people in large visible worship centers.

The community change is that about sixty years ago, we had maybe one thousand worshiper location (St. Francis), a hatful of 300 to 500 big downtown churches, and a strong contingent of 100 to 200 "small" congregations and a scattering of small rural chapels. It's the hollowing out of those small/medium churches that's changed the overall numbers. Today's 20% of 179,000 compares to 25% of 100,000 . . . so we have net fewer people in churches of any sort.

I will have a few more "most people don't" examples next week.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he tries to check his prior assumptions whenever possible. Tell him what you might be reconsidering at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.