Church & Community

A New York Times article explored how our world has changed in the aftermath of the pandemic.

At first, the solidarity was breathtaking. Out of concern for ourselves and one another, we suspended nearly all interpersonal activity for months, wiping our lives almost entirely clean of the very people we were trying to protect. But, perversely, that solidarity destroyed our social fabric… For several months the daily lives of many Americans were reduced to the boundaries of their nuclear unit and their phones and televisions and computers. Isolated, we saw one another first as threats and then as something less than real… Politics started to look more like a zone of virtual reality, too, and many Americans came to see their fellow humans as mindless drones.

It was deeply unsettling to realize that our modern, wealthy world was no fortress against contagion, mass death and pandemic hysteria of various kinds. The end of the end of history has been declared countless times since 2001, but no event punctuated the point as clearly as Covid-19.

The emergency began at a time of geopolitical uncertainty, but it ended in an unmistakable polycrisis: beyond Covid, its supply shocks and inflation surge, there was a debt crisis and an ongoing climate emergency, wars in Europe and soon the Middle East and renewed great-power conflict with China…

It looks like we finally got those Roaring Twenties we were promised. In 2020, the phrase was used to suggest an age of parties and sex and social recklessness was on the way, as 330 million cooped-up Americans let off some steam. [But] in 2025 … the world does not seem now more buoyant or full of hope, but abrasive and rapacious and shaped nearly everywhere by a barely suppressed rage. We have still not reckoned with all we have lost.

Did you know horses have friends? They do according to writer Sterry Butcher, who lives on a Texas farm with horses.

According to Butcher, horses form friendships, and these friends stand nose to rump to cooperatively swish flies from the other’s face with their tails. They’ll rake their teeth against the other’s withers or back, scratching places the other cannot reach on his own.

And not only do horses scratch each other’s back. They watch each other’s back. In the wild, they spend the entirety of their lives within the eyesight of another horse. Even domestic horses, who don’t venture beyond their pasture, will take turns staying awake while others sleep. It’s like shifts on guard duty.

What horses have is what we need. Every one of us needs a friend. Someone who will swish away the annoying biting flies that come toward us in life. Someone who will scratch our back, helping us with the things we can’t reach or do on our own. Someone who will stay awake and protect us from dangers.

For most of the last 30 years, the story of religion in America has been a pretty steady one: a constant, and consistent, drop in religious affiliation every year. Starting in the 1990s, the share of Americans who identified as Christian, or identified with any religion at all, began to drop precipitously. At the same time, those with no religious affiliation — nicknamed “nones” — began to spike.

That trend might be ending. Over the last five years, the share of Americans who are “nones” has stabilized at roughly 30 percent, across multiple tracking surveys — largely because of one group: Zoomers.

Sometime around or after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, young Americans began to find, or at least retain, religious belief at higher rates than previous generations.

Gen Z seems to be the key. Recently, surveys have found that Zoomers are the only generation not losing their religious affiliation. Why? There’s no unifying explanation for this trend, but it extends beyond the United States. And that suggests that there might be some structural reasons Gen Z is rediscovering faith. Something about post-Covid seems to be bringing youth back to Christianity, specifically, but also to religion in general.

There are three potential explanations:

1. Loneliness: Gen Z seeks community and connection in faith to combat widespread feelings of isolation.

2. Distrust of Institutions: Turning to religion as a countercultural response to declining trust in government and mainstream culture.

3. Political and Social Shifts: Young men are becoming more religious and politically conservative, while young women favor more liberal faiths, reflecting broader generational divides.

Journalist Derek Thompson is lamenting the decline of church attendance in America. As an agnostic, one would think he would be pleased. In a piece for The Atlantic, he writes: "Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence."

Thompson paraphrases social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his book, The Anxious Generation:

Many Americans have developed a new relationship with a technology that is the diabolical opposite of a religious ritual: the smartphone. (To) stare into a piece of glass in our hands is to be removed from our bodies, to skim our attention from one piece of ephemera to the next. Digital life is disembodied, asynchronous, shallow, and solitary.

Religious rituals put us in our body, requiring some kind of movement that marks the activity as devotional. Christians kneel, Muslims prostrate, and Jews pray. Religious ritual also fixes us in time, forcing us to set aside an hour or day for prayer, reflection, or separation from daily habit. Finally, religious ritual often requires that we make contact with the sacred in the presence of other people.

I wonder if, in forgoing organized religion, an isolated country has discarded an old and proven source of ritual at a time when we most need it. It took decades for Americans to lose religion. It might take decades to understand the entirety of what we lost.

Many American Christians believe they can achieve Christ's kingdom on earth through political means, by dominating the culture. Author Tim Alberta, in his 2023 book The Kingdom, The Power, And The Glory: American Evangelicals In An Age Of Extremism, attempts to get to the core of the issues involved.

He spoke to Pastor Brian Zahnd of Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, Missouri. Zahnd told him:

Christianity is inherently countercultural. That's how it thrives. When it tries to become a dominant culture, it becomes corrupted. This is one major difference between Islam and Christianity. Islam has designs on running the world; it's a system of government. Christianity is nothing like that. The gospels and the epistles have no vision of Christianity being a dominant religion or culture.

Tim Alberta elaborates:

The Bible, as Zahnd pointed out, is written primarily from the perspective of the underdog: Hebrew slaves fleeing Egypt, Jews exiled to Babylon, Christians living under Roman occupation. This is why Paul implored his fellow first-century believers - especially those in Rome who lived under a brutal regime - to both submit to their governing authorities and stay loyal to the kingdom built by Christ. It stands to reason that American evangelicals can't quite relate to Paul and his pleas for humility, or Peter and his enthusiasm for suffering, never mind that poor vagrant preacher from Nazareth. The last shall be first? What kind of socialist indoctrination is that?

Pastor Zahnd considers that the kingdom of God isn't tangible for many Christians: "What's real is this tawdry world of partisan politics, this winner-take-all blood sport. So, they keep charging into the fray, and the temptation to bow down to the devil to gain control over the kingdoms of this world becomes more and more irresistible."

Alberta concludes:

Pastor Zahnd told me he was offended by what the American Church had become. God does not tolerate idols competing for His glory and neither should anyone who claims to worship Him. He said, “You can take up the sword of Caesar or you can take up the cross of Jesus. You have to choose.”

The decline of the church in America is posing tremendous cultural problems. And sociologists are beginning to sound the alarm.

Once upon a time, America was a land filled with churches, dotting the leafy streets of small towns and major cities alike. In 1965, churches affiliated with mainline denominations, such as Baptists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians, claimed around 50% of the American population. However, by 2020, this number had dwindled to a mere 9%. This dramatic decline is one of the largest sociological changes in American history, impacting institutions that were once central to the nation.

The result is undeniable. We are living in an age of spiritual anxiety. Some mainline Protestants left for Evangelical churches and others for Catholicism. But much of that decline came from the people who simply felt that their politics gave them the moral satisfaction they needed.

As a result, people are desperate for meaning, latching onto fleeting political movements and slogans in search of purpose. And now their children are in the street—without any satisfaction at all. Spiritually anxious, they react to each short-lived bit of political hoopla as though it were the trumpet of Armageddon.

Desperate for meaning, they latch on to anything that gives them the exciting pleasure of seeming revolutionary, no matter how little they understand it or perform actions that meaningfully affect it. Shouting slogans, they ache for the unity of a congregation singing hymns. What Protestantism once gave, they have no more: a nation-defining pattern of marriage and children, a feeling of belonging, a belief in Providence, a sense of patriotism.

The danger in all this comes from the fact that the apocalypse is self-fulfilling. If everything in public life is elevated to world-threatening danger, if there is no meaningful private life to which to retreat, then all manners and even personal morals must be set aside in the name of higher causes—and opponents quickly come to feel they must respond with similarly cataclysmic rhetoric and action.

Twenty-year-old Henry Earls dresses up to go to the library. He picks out cozy knitted sweaters and accessorizes with well-worn copies of classic books. Earls looks like an adjunct English professor. He said, “I want to cultivate an aesthetic when I go to the library. And, honestly, I dress up to see if someone will come up to me and say hi.”

Gen Z seems to love public libraries. A report from the American Library Association found that Gen Z and Millennials are using public libraries at higher rates than older generations. More than half of the survey’s 2,075 respondents had visited a physical library within the past 12 months. Not all of them were bookworms. Almost half don’t identify as readers, but those non-readers still visited their local library in the past year.

Libraries have never been just about books. These are community hubs, places to connect and discover. For an extremely online generation that’s nearly synonymous with the so-called “loneliness epidemic,” libraries are increasingly social spaces, too.

“Coffee shops get so crowded, and you have to spend money to be there, but libraries are open for everyone,” said Anika Neumeyer, a 19-year-old student. “There’s a lot less pressure to be doing something in the public library. No one’s going to judge you.”

Fifteen-year-old Arlo Platt Zolov says, “A lot of people my age are surrounded by tech and everything’s moving so quickly. Part of me thinks we’re rediscovering libraries not as something new, but for what they’ve always been: a shared space of comfort.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Fellowship; Small groups – This is a golden opportunity for the small groups in the church to provide the fellowship and gathering opportunities that so many are missing. Small groups meeting in homes, perhaps with a meal, can be very attractive to disconnected young people.

When people at Onecho Bible Church talk about “the mission field,” they mean the many places around the world where Christians are sharing the love of Jesus. But sometimes, they’re also talking about a literal field in Eastern Washington, where the congregation grows crops to support the people proclaiming the gospel around the world.

The 74-member church, smack-dab in the middle of a vast expanse of wheat fields, has donated $1.4 million to missions since 1965. They’ve funded wells, campgrounds, and Christian colleges. This year, they want to provide food and shelter to asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border. Brian Largent, Onecho’s volunteer farm manager said, “Being as isolated as we are, it’s our missionaries and this mission field that keeps us very focused worldwide. This church is a very mission-oriented church—always has been.”

The church started with Mennonite migrants in the 1890s and Methodist farmers 20 years before that. But the unique fundraising program started in the 1960s. One of the church elders passed away at age 65 and bequeathed 180 acres to the church. He supported missionary work his whole life and considered that his legacy. He asked Onecho to use his land to continue the work of spreading the gospel.

The church decided it wouldn’t sell the field but would farm it with volunteers. The proceeds from the harvest would fund various missions. The first year, the harvest yielded $5,500. Revenue fluctuates, based on the success of the harvest. In 2021, the field earned $39,000. Last year, it was $178,000. “We just put the seed in the ground,” Largent said. “Then . . . it’s all up to the weather and what God’s going to do to produce the money.”

Cicero said, “The thing itself cannot be praised. Only its potential.” He was talking about young children. Such was the view in the Empire where Jesus arrived as an infant. Plutarch said, “The child, is more like a plant” than a human, or even than an animal.

But Jesus and his followers had a different view of the moral status of children. To follow him, Jesus said, you had to become like a child. Even babies, Christians said, are fully human and fully bear the image of God. As the African bishop Cyprian wrote, “God himself does not make such distinction of person or of age, since he offers himself as a Father to all.” And if that’s God’s view, then “Every sex and age should be held in honor among you.”

The church even extended that honor and protection to the unborn. The Didache, one of the earliest Christian documents says, “Thou shalt not murder a child by abortion nor kill them when born.”

Throughout the Roe regime, contemporary Christians have similarly demonstrated their “contempt of death,” their pursuit of justice for the unborn, and their love of children and pregnant women. The church has more than mere potential to better bear witness to life. It is the house of the Life himself.

Betty Hodge knows what it’s like to have an unplanned pregnancy. And she knows what it’s like to have the father of the unborn child push for an abortion. She’s been there. But she didn’t seriously consider terminating her pregnancy, because she didn’t feel alone. Hodge said, “Thankfully I had a family that was supportive.” She now works at a pregnancy resource center in Jackson, Mississippi, so she can provide that same support for other mothers in need.

These days, she sees a lot of them. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade (in 2022), allowing the state of Mississippi to pass a law banning all abortions except to save the life of the mother or in cases of rape or incest that have been reported to police. The clinic that gave its name to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case shut down in July. It was the state’s only abortion provider. So, while women may still travel to Florida, New York, or Illinois to terminate a pregnancy, abortion has effectively ended in the Magnolia State.

The state health office estimates this will result in an additional 5,000 babies being born in Mississippi in 2023. The pro-life movement there is eager to celebrate each of these precious lives, but they’re also aware of other upsetting statistics: Mississippi has the highest rate of preterm births—over 30 percent more than the national average. The state has the highest infant mortality rate in the US, with nearly nine of every 1,000 babies dying. And for the infants who live to be toddlers, 28 percent will live in poverty.

Hodge doesn’t shy away from these hard facts. For her, this is part of the work of being pro-life. ... And with the state expecting 5,000 more babies in 2023, she sees an opportunity to put pro-life beliefs into practice and show that Christians care. She said, “If we’re going to say we stand for life, then it’s pertinent for us to stand up and say we don’t just care about the unborn child. As a church, we have an opportunity to make a difference.”

Most people don’t take real estate advice from a drug dealer behind a gas station in North Minneapolis. But Larry Cook, bishop of Real Believers Faith Center, is not most people.

About a year ago he confronted some young men selling narcotics in the alley between his church and the corner store that seemed to do more business in illegal goods than snacks or fuel. Things got heated pretty quickly. Voices were raised.

“The owner don’t care about it,” one of the young men yelled, as Cook and his wife, Sharon, recall the confrontation. “If you want to do something about it, you need to buy the gas station.” “I will,” Cook responded. “I absolutely will.”

What the man selling drugs didn’t know is that Cook had actually been thinking about buying the store for the past 25 years. He believed he was being called and when the time was right, God would expand his ministry to include this sore spot in the neighborhood, the store at the corner of a busy intersection.

North Minneapolis has struggled for a long time. In the 1950s, there was a thriving African American community, with lots of families, churches, and Black-owned businesses. Then there was a wave of white flight, followed by racial unrest that scared away financial investors, and the construction of an interstate that cut Near North off from downtown. Today, the area is marked by instability and poverty.

In the fall of 2022, the store came up for sale, and Cook and his wife put everything they had toward the purchase of the $3 million property. They’ve now reopened it under the name the Lion’s Den, a testament to faith surrounded by danger and their belief that even urban blight can be redeemed.

Sharon Cook said, “This is what Jesus would do. If he was walking in 2023, he would buy this gas station. He would feed the hungry. He would lend a helping hand to the elderly the same way we’re doing.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Facing poverty, crime, and closing businesses, Christians can look to transform their communities.

LifeWay Research surveyed 2,000 Americans who do not attend church on what would draw them to one. Among the findings:

Method Of Invite

51% a personal invitation from a friend or family member

23% a TV commercial

23% a postcard

21% a church member knocking on the door

18% a Facebook ad

When Krish Kandiah was young, growing up in the United Kingdom, his family could always count on their next-door neighbor, Mrs. Oglive, to be around. They left a spare key with her in case they got locked out, because she was always there—morning, afternoon, and night—to let them in.

Mrs. Oglive never went out. She suffered from agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces. Having lived next door to her for 40 years now, they still haven’t seen her venture past her doorway. She wasn’t always this way. She has pictures on her mantelpiece of less anxious days, from her honeymoon with Mr. Oglive and from a day at the beach with her children. But after her husband died, Mrs. Oglive began to isolate herself.

One can only imagine the heavy cloud of fear and frustration that surrounds her. Now frail and in the twilight of life, Mrs. Oglive’s curtains are almost always drawn.

There are some parallels between Mrs. Oglive and the contemporary church. Many Christians observe the world from behind closed curtains, bemoaning culture instead of engaging it. Many local churches are isolated from the wider community and world, bunkered up like doomsayers, suffering from fear of an open public square with divergent viewpoints and lifestyles.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Only by encountering the risen Christ and receiving the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit are we able to step beyond our doors and carry out God’s mission. When we do so, we are transformed from an agoraphobic church to an apostolic church.

A fistful of black letters flicker atop the pale-yellow background. The sign is broken, but few care. Because they are broken too. There is a place, like God and grandmother’s house, where the door is always open. You may find better food elsewhere, but you won’t find better food for the money. They have a menu, though I have never needed it.

When you sit down at the table or the bar you will likely be greeted by someone who calls you “honey,” or “sugar,” or “baby,” or sometimes “boss.” But you will be greeted, and usually with a smile. And by someone who knows what it means to work long and hard for very little.

Some of them are working their way through college. Some of them are single parents trying to pay the rent and keep the lights on at home. Some are ex-cons trying to hold down a job by wiping tables and desperately trying to believe the rumors of second chances.

On any given day there might be a family of five seated near you with three small children scarfing down jellied toast and scrambled eggs. They’re here because the food is cheap and sometimes dad doesn’t want mom to have to cook after working twelve hours at the shirt factory. On one side of you will be three bikers and a war veteran swapping stories. On the other side will be an elderly couple who come every Thursday night. They come just to hear the voices. Their own kids have long since stopped visiting, and they’ve already buried all of their other friends.

It doesn’t matter what you’ve done or where you’ve come from, you are welcome here. Strait-laced or strung out, drunk or sober or in that fuzzy place in between. In blue jeans, a business suit, or pajamas. No one is turned away.

Waffle House may not be a church, but many of our churches could stand to learn a few things about open arms and second chances from this wild, wayside diner.

Some come with track marks from years of drug abuse. Others come with children in tow. Some are struggling through a bad week. Others, a bad decade. All bring their dirty laundry. They wash it and dry it for free at church-run laundry services throughout the United States. “Christ said we should feed the hungry and clothe the naked, and I think those clothes should be clean,” said Catherine Ambos, a volunteer at one such ministry in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Churches have been washing clothes across the US since at least 1997, when a minister at First United Methodist Church of Arlington, Texas, started doing a circuit around the city’s coin-operated laundries, passing out change. There may well have been others before this. Today, these ministries exist across the country, run by churches of all traditions and sizes.

Belmont Baptist Church in Charlottesville, Virginia, has one of the older laundromat ministries still running. The church started helping people clean their clothes in 2010, when pastor Greg Anderson heard through another ministry that poor people in homeless shelters and long-term-stay motels would regularly throw away their clothes.

Anderson said, “It was just easier to go and get new clothes at a clothing-center type of ministry as opposed to being able to launder them.” The church decided to install five washers and dryers in a building on its property and open a laundromat. Today, volunteers estimate that they save people upwards of $25,000 per year. This is money they didn’t have, or if they did, they could now spend on food, gas, or medicine.

19.25 million US households are without a washing machine.

38% of US households earn less than $50,000 per year.

Dr. Tyler J. Vanderweele, an epidemiology professor at Harvard, spent a decade researching how regular church attendance impacted health care workers. He summarized his conclusions:

Medical workers who said they attended religious services frequently (mostly in Christian churches) were 29 percent less likely to become depressed, about 50 percent less likely to divorce, and five times less likely to commit suicide than those who never attended. And, in perhaps the most striking finding of all, health care professionals who attended services weekly were 33 percent less likely to die during a 16-year follow-up period than people who never attended.

He also found that regular service attendance helps shield children from the “big three” dangers of adolescence: depression, substance abuse, and premature sexual activity. “People who attended church as children,” he added, “are also more likely to grow up happy, to be forgiving, to have a sense of mission and purpose, and to volunteer. Regular church service attenders also had far fewer “deaths of despair”— deaths by suicide, drug overdose, or alcohol—than people who never attended services, reducing those deaths by 68 percent for women and 33 percent for men in the study.

These findings aren’t unique. Many other studies have found that religious service attendance is associated with “greater longevity, less depression, less suicide, less smoking, less substance abuse, better cancer and cardiovascular disease survival, less divorce, greater social support, greater meaning in life, greater life satisfaction, more volunteering, and greater civic engagement. The findings are extensive and growing.”

At a Worldwide Developers Conference Steve Jobs said:

One of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it. And I’ve made this mistake more than probably anybody else in this room, and I’ve got the scar tissue to prove it.

And as we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple, it started with, “What incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer?” Not starting with “Let’s sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have, and then how are we going to market that?

Jobs recalled being excited about the first laser printer. He said, “I remember seeing the first printout come out of it. Just picking it up and looking at it and saying ‘We can sell this.’ All you have to do is hold it up and say ‘Do you want this?’ People went ‘Wow … Yes!’”

Possible Preaching Angle:

The church can learn from Steve Jobs. We don’t attract people with our technology, our gimmicks, our web presence. Like Jobs, we must “hold up” a community of Christ followers who love each other and God’s world. We can hold up hope. We can hold up an answer to guilt. We can hold up eternal life. Then people may see the thing they have been looking for, and join us.

The December 20, 2020 issue of The New Yorker harshly criticized the numerous Christian churches that don’t take the pandemic seriously and refuse to follow basic safety precautions. No statistics are available on how many churches comply and how many defy lockdown protocols, but the magazine did say:

In 2020, many churches realized that the best way they could love their neighbors was to temporarily shut their doors. Early in the pandemic, the National Association of Evangelicals and Christianity Today issued a statement calling on churches to close “out of a deep sense of responsibility for others.”

The article went into detail into the history of Christian compassion during past deadly pandemics. They referenced Rodney Stark and his book The Rise of Christianity:

Rudimentary nursing, in the form of providing food and water, likely led to dramatically better survival rates among Christians and those they cared for, which would have seemed nothing short of miraculous amid so much suffering and death. Starks argues that differing mortality rates would lead to further conversion opportunities. He points out that “the Christian way appeared to work.”

However, the current behavior of the defiant churches will inevitably hurt the faith:

The pandemic in 2020 has held a mirror to Christianity, just as the epidemics of antiquity did, but today’s reflection carries the potential to repulse rather than attract. ... Churches will have to reckon … with how much their collective witness––the term Christians use to describe their ability to point to Jesus in their lives––may have been diminished.

Possible Preaching Angle:

There is an obvious tension between government regulation and freedom of religion, between loving our neighbors and the politicization of aspects of the pandemic. Every church is responsible before God to consider how best to worship God corporately, how to keep our vulnerable members protected, all the while being mindful of our appearance before a watching world.