Pastor Rob won’t forget his first day at his new church. The two-day drive from Maryland to Illinois was trying, especially the second day. The radio was on constantly, and only turned off the few times Rob pulled the van to the side of the road so his family could pray. They arrived at the parsonage beside the red brick church building about five o’clock, to find deacons ready to unload the van and church members gathering for an impromptu prayer meeting. There were hugs and tears: hugs for the new pastor’s family and tears for our nation. Rob arrived on September 11, 2001.
I thought about Rob often that week. I had finished 16 months as interim pastor at that church only the Sunday before. Rob’s first sermon, an anticipated celebration, would instead address crisis. I wondered about the lasting impact the terrorist attacks would have on his ministry, on all our ministries.
“It depends on how close you are to the disaster area,” a Salvation Army pastor told me. He had shipped in from Wisconsin to New York for a two-week stint at Pier 94, the Manhattan dock where all the relief agencies had set up, offering financial assistance to displaced workers and families who had lost their breadwinners. “For once, the people in my congregation—alcoholics and drug addicts—know there’s someone who has bigger problems than theirs. I will tell them about my experiences here, but I don’t expect it will last.”
For pastor Taylor Field on Manhattan’s depressed Lower East Side, the images remain vivid. His son Freeman attends Stuyvesant High School a few blocks from the towers. Field tells of pedaling his bike to Ground Zero to search for his son, at the same time the students were running from the dust cloud of debris and smoke. The younger Field has a persistent cough.
A pastor we visited in midtown, however, five miles north of the Trade Center complex, said his congregation might as well be in another state. In his affluent, brownstone neighborhood, life is pretty much back to normal.
If that’s true in Manhattan, then what about the rest of us? How many times were we told that September 11 was the day that changed everything? But did it?
What changed?
Not our congregations. Not really. Worship attendance, which swelled after the attacks, has dropped to pre-9/11 levels nationwide, pollster George Barna tells us.
And not society at large. Not really. We sing “God Bless America,” but our civil religion is devoid of spiritual content. “Bless us, God, just don’t expect any changes from us.”
What has changed is the clarity with which pastors see our country and our task. We see that America really is a pluralistic nation, one that simultaneously calls on pastors, rabbis, imams, and Oprah to lead its services. The field is level, and Christianity is only one of the players.
We have a renewed sense of the centrality of the gospel. It seems obvious, but Christianity really is about Christ. For the Christian who ministers in this new one-nation-under-God era, it’s paramount that we explain who that God is. Our bridge building cannot be at the expense of Jesus. Without him, there is no good news.
If our daily lives are not much changed after September 11, then the lens through which we view them is; if not the content of our ministry, then the priority we assign to it. Once again we have urgency.
In the aftermath, pastors exercised the prophetic voice. Congregations everywhere asked, “Is there a word from the Lord?” And on the Sundays after the attack, pastors stepped up and said: “Thus saith the Lord.” And it felt good.
In times like these, the nation needs us to do it, again and again.
Eric Reed is managing editor of Leadership.
Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
