The Post-Pandemic Church Is About Fit, Not Size

By Rev. Michael Woolf I Lake Street Church of Evanston

One of the common things that I hear when talking to new members at my congregation is that it “felt like coming home.” There was an ephemeral quality that spoke to them that made them feel that this is the place where they want to build a community.  According to a new study by Faith Communities Today and Exploring the Pandemic Impact on Congregations, that sense of coming home has been happening a lot lately, as congregants, more than ever before are looking for fit between their values and their faith communities. 

I pastor a church in Evanston, Illinois, a community with so many churches that has variously been called “Heavenston” and “the city of churches.” With over 100 faith communities serving a community of just over 76,000, there is a wide variety of different denominations, worship styles, and levels of social engagement. If the study is correct, then that’s a good thing, offering plenty of different opportunities for parishioners to find their match. 

The study highlighted two findings that, as a pastor, I find incredibly important for how churches ought to think about their next steps in a post-pandemic world. First, 38% of adults began attending their church in the past five years, highlighting the increased rate of turnover that the post-COVID landscape has borne. Second, out of those new attenders, some 63% of the new attenders gravitated to their current church home because it “aligned with their beliefs, values, and preferences,” making it the number one reason for new attenders to switch congregations. 

While that reason was more important for those who found their new church three to five years ago than it was for those who did so more recently, this gives statistical evidence of the sort of ideological sorting that I have seen personally and heard anecdotally. For years, I’ve been hearing in my clergy groups that the “purple” church was more and more difficult to maintain, as political polarization was mirrored in the pews. 

While there has been much written bemoaning this fact, it is simply a fact that polarization is a defining part of our society, churches included. The question is how churches ought to move forward, having likely added new members who have increased expectations about the community’s alignment with their values. 

Of course, one of the values that might have drawn new members to a church could be their commitment to fighting polarization and striving to create spaces where we can be in community with those with whom we disagree. Equally likely, a new congregant might attend a church because they more closely match their ideological commitments. That’s a good thing, because it allows each congregation to make their own choices and find their own niches. A saying in the rural Alabama community that I grew up in holds true here: “There’s a shoe for every foot.”

The congregation that I lead is well known in its community for its progressive values and social action. We are an activist church, and that has been a core part of our identity for decades. Still, occasionally I will have a conversation with a congregant who is worried that we are too narrowly defined – that we ought to have broader appeal, and perhaps we should “tone it down.”

There’s a lot of wisdom in that concern. We are certainly not a church for everybody, but for those who call it home, the congregation aligns closely with their values and what role they think religion ought to play in the world. The result has been that for everyone we lost for taking strong stands on controversial issues, we also gained someone. We even added a few new members last year. I suspect the same is true in many contexts – those that would agree with my church’s stands and those that would not. 

The post-pandemic church landscape

As communities of faith try to figure out just what a post-pandemic landscape looks like, one of the key takeaways has to be that it is important for the church to be itself, to be clear about its commitments and values, and to effectively communicate them. People are looking, now more than ever, for alignment and authenticity, whatever that might look like in their context, and it’s impossible to align with an institution that does not know itself or communicate what makes it different from others. 

It might sound trite to hear the advice, “just be yourself,” but that is precisely what the church ought to do. God certainly delights in diversity; how else can we explain so many different ways to be the church? The key is to be church in a way that feels right – to new and long-tenured members, to the church’s context, and to the world. The rest will take care of itself. 

The Rev. Dr. Michael Woolf (he/him) holds a Doctor of Theology (ThD) degree from Harvard Divinity School. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Tennessee – Knoxville with a BA in Religious Studies in 2011 and completed his Master of Divinity degree at Harvard Divinity School in 2014. Michael is also an ordained American Baptist Churches USA and Alliance of Baptists pastor currently serving as the Senior Minister at Lake Street Church of Evanston in Evanston, IL, a progressive congregation with a commitment to social justice and interfaith dialogue. He also serves as Co-Associate Regional Minister for White and Multicultural Churches with the American Baptist Churches of Metro Chicago region. Before that, he served rural and suburban churches in Massachusetts.