Smaller than We Think We Are

Back when I was in seminary, some wise old souls of the church taught that one of the primary markers of a spiritually unhealthy congregation is a fundamental dissonance between the story they tell the world about themselves and the actuality of their lives.

A church that claims to be one thing, when in reality it's not that at all?  That's a church that doesn't understand itself, and that has lost its way.  The church that says "we're a family," but when you spend any time there, you realize the only way that's true is if you're talking about the Manson Family.  The church that says "we're welcoming," but offers up only cold silence and a circle of backs to visitors at the fellowship hour.  The church that says, "we're inclusive," but by that means only that they're as open-minded as a doctrinaire Maoist, or the church that says," we're bible-believing," by which they mean they've created zealous rationalizations for ignoring 93.2% of Christ's teachings in favor of a cultish theofascism.

Sure, no church is perfect, and sometimes the story we tell about ourselves is aspirational.  We say not who we are, but who we yearn to become, that we might by declaring it over and over become that thing.  Recovery works that way, for example. And when we look to ourselves, we carefully curate our observations to show only those things that affirm that ideal self image.

If that drives us to become the community that God is calling us to be, then it's a blessing.  If that so masks the reality of who we are that we're functionally delusional, then nothing we do will be grounded in reality, and we will fail.  This is true for persons and communities, churches and nations.

As a Presbyterian, I wonder at this often, as I watch my denomination to continue to shrink.  The latest data on that decline was shared recently, as the research wing of the PC(USA) offered up their annual snapshot of where we are.

Where we are is getting smaller at a slightly slower rate, which is what passes for good news these days.  Total membership shrank by 2.6% in 2025, with just under 27,000 fewer Presbyterians year over year.  One hundred twenty-seven congregations closed last year.  Nearly 70% of PC(USA) churches are officially now small churches, meaning they've got fewer than 100 members.

There was another familiar stat presented, one that was of particular interest.  As the article in Presbyterian Outlook stated:

The distribution of members among the denomination’s congregations continues to show that small congregations make up the bulk of churches, but most Presbyterians belong to larger congregations.

And then we got the following handy dandy little low-res chart:

I don't question that it's an accurate representation of congregational membership rolls and size distribution.  As far as the denomination is concerned, the membership roll is the number that matters.  Per capita is what butters the bread, eh?  Fair enough, but there's a potent little caveat to these numbers.

Here, I recall what the congregational researchers I've read over the years had to say about membership rolls and congregational size.  

Membership rolls are a notoriously unreliable measure of the true size of a congregation.  As a metric, they're filled with clutter and debris, with "members" whose engagement is marginal at best.  Kids who moved away.  Families that attend once a quarter.  Dear old friends who do come enough that you can't bear to boot 'em from the list.  Showing up every other year still counts as a member, right?  I mean, to my small church pastoral heart it does.  I'm always delighted when someone I care about whose presence I miss walks through those church doors.

If you want a better sense of the church incarnate, though, you look at worship attendance.  How many souls regularly and materially engage in the core unifying event of that congregation?  

That's the reality of the thing, the essence of who participates and who does not.  And that number is lower, typically tracking at around thirty nine percent of total membership, with higher participation in smaller membership churches, and lower participation in higher membership churches. 

If we sized congregations by attendance, things would look different.  The whole chart would reweight itself nontrivially upward.   A majority would still attend larger program-sized and corporate-scale communities, undoubtedly, but that majority would look less like a clear supermajority.  I don't have access to the data, but if I did?

We are, I believe, smaller than we think we are.

There is nothing in the world wrong with that.

In Defense of the Humble Footnote

Yesterday, after a several week long push, I finished a draft manuscript I've been working on for the last several years.  It's bubbled along beneath the surface of other projects, going through one unreadable iteration after another, and I've scrapped and reworked it at least twice. 

Fear Not, Little Flock is a book of encouragement and exhortation, meant to offer up a little bit of steel for the spines of small congregations.  There are plenty of Jesus MegaCenters out there, and having an alternative where life together functions on a human scale is a blessing.  It's due to my publisher in a month, so it'll be there well ahead of schedule, which is how I prefer to treat my editors.

I'll be writing more on the topic over the next little bit, I'm sure.  But what was on my mind, as I finished up, wasn't small churches.  

It was the humble footnote.  The manuscript has footnotes, and I don't know if they'll make it through the process of editing.  It seems unlikely.

This is a bummer, because I love footnotes.  

Footnotes...those little superscriptural markers that lead you to explanatory text or bibliographic information at the bottom of a page...are entirely out of style in the contemporary publishing industry.  The editorial herd has moved on.  First, it was endnotes, where that little number or an in-text citation had you flipping to the back of the book and futzing around to find the deets.  

Then, as was the case with my last two books, the new "style " was to not provide any superscriptural marker in the text at all, and to instead slap a chapter by chapter list of bibliographic references on the hindquarters of the book, with only page numbers to connect you to the actual reference.

I have no idea why this happened, but it's two steps backwards.  Endnotes are an inferior UI.  The "Tramp Stamp," or whatever the heck it's called when endnotes have no direct marker in the text?  That feels like it's just there for liability purposes, as it offers no meaningful opportunity for reader engagement at all.

Footnotes, particularly when coupled with a complete bibliography, immediately connect the reader with an informational metanarrative.  As you encounter resources or other writing that has informed your author, it's right there in front of you.  It's not "distraction."  It's openness of process, and immediately raises reader awareness of the textual foundations of a work.  It is, for author and reader alike, a superior way to convey information, by an order of magnitude.

But it can be more than that.  Footnotes are also a lovely place for an authorial aside.  You can share a related story or reflection.  You can snicker sotto voce in the wings at something in the main text, like you're Statler and your reader is Waldorf and the main text is Gonzo's latest failed routine.  Those marginalia add delight.

So why was this change made?  Why the shift in style?

Is it that we've lost the technical prowess in printing to manage doing footnotes?  Of course not.  Best I can tell, the change was made to save the costs of more complicated typesetting as the publishing industry has withered and retrenched and withered and retrenched again.  Mucking about with footnotes really does make the process of changing physical type more time consuming, and the additional labor required costs money.  It's collateral damage from industry decline, an inelegant adaptation rather than a step forward.

But with most publishing now fully digital, that logic no longer holds.  Physical typesetting has been supplanted, once again for cost saving purposes, yet still the style remains. 

It has become yet another way fad trumps function, an "advance" that makes life harder, and whose industry-driven logics have nothing to do with the author-reader connection, reader engagement and education, or the reason books exist.

Other than that, I have no problem with it.

On Congregational Demise

 

And here, talking against the winds, so to speak, I must enter, along with my lamentation, my objection. You may say that I am just another outdated old man complaining about progress and the changes of time. But, you see, I have well considered that possibility myself, and am prepared to submit to correction by anybody who cares about community, who can show me how the world is improved by that community’s dying.

Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow, p. 274

Charn Sunrise

Low down and near the horizon hung a great, red sun, far bigger than our sun. Digory felt at once that it was also older than ours: a sun near the end of its life, weary of looking down upon that world. To the left of the sun, and higher up, there was a single star, big and bright. Those were the only two things to be seen in the dark sky; they made a dismal group. And on the earth, in every direction, as far as the eye could reach, there spread a vast city in which there was no living thing to be seen. And all the temples, towers, palaces, pyramids, and bridges cast long, disastrous-looking shadows in the light of that withered sun. Once a great river had flowed through the city, but the water had long since vanished, and it was now only a wide ditch of grey dust.

"Look well on that which no eyes will ever see again," said the Queen. "Such was Charn, that great city, the city of the King of Kings, the wonder of the world, perhaps of all worlds. Does your uncle rule any city as great as this, boy?"

C.S. Lewis, THE MAGICIAN'S NEPHEW

How 'Bout Them Apples

On one recent afternoon, I was sitting in my kitchen puttering away on a nearly-finished manuscript.  Progress was being made, but the pleasant distraction of working by a big bay window looking out to the street can limit how much gets done.

I notice every passerby, as my peripheral vision catches every neighbor out walking their dogs, every salesperson wandering door to door.

What caught my eye that afternoon was a mother and daughter as they slowed down at the edge of my yard to notice one of my two apple trees.  

The taller, deep green Honeycrisp nearer to the house has yielded, in the past five years, exactly one perfect apple.  It doesn't flower much, and never quite seemed to recover from the trauma of having most of its branches torn off as a sapling.  That damage was done by a young buck deer scraping the velvet from new antlers, and I wasn't sure it would survive.  What few flowers it produces now are out of sequence with the other tree, and are the farthest thing from fruitful.  This year, it produced one withered apple, a sad little object no larger than the tip of a thumb.  

But then there's the dwarf Fuji I planted nearer to the sidewalk to crosspollinate with the Honeycrisp.  It's not as heavily leafed, and stumpier, but is nonetheless going like gangbusters year after year.  Even after I pruned away full third of the new apples back in the spring, the branches droop heavy with growing fruit.

It was the Fuji that the daughter noticed, and she excitedly pointed it out to her mother.  They stopped, and considered the tree.  The girl asked an question, and her mother answered her.  "Yes, that's an apple tree," I could see her say.  A huge smile spread across the girl's face, as her eyes danced across dozens of apples.  The sparkle in her eyes translated into excited little jumps, as she pointed and counted the apples with such energy that her little body needed to leap a bit.

It is possible, I realized, that she might not have seen an apple tree before.  There aren't any others in our neighborhood, not visibly in a front yard, at least.  Or perhaps she'd gone apple picking, but never ever seen an apple tree while simply out walking. 

Years ago, before those apple trees were planted, before I'd even begun my first tentative attempts at gardening, I'd often wonder at how it is that America's suburban neighborhoods are so devoid of fruit and harvest.  

Now, it's not just the sweetness of those apples that I enjoy, but the pleasure that others take in their existence.  

Bringing It Down Carefully

It's been a pleasant week up at my father-in-law's house in Western Maryland, one filled with reading and hikes and puttering about on the lake.  The weather has been hot by Western Maryland standards, enough that the minisplit AC that had to be put in a few years back was working overtime, with fans set up to distribute that one unit's cool air through the rest of the upstairs.

That heat has meant that I've been using the mornings to get things done outside, focused on whittling away at one task in particular.

About twenty yards up the heavily wooded rise behind the house, I'd been long eyeing a deceased hardwood tree.  It died perhaps five or six years ago, and stood about seventy feet in height.  It weren't jus' dead.  It was really and sincerely dead.  The wood around the base and most of the way up the tree was unrotted, hard, and had "cured on the vine," and for the last few years I've figured it would offer up about a weeks' worth of evening fires in the hearth.

My goal, for this trip: finally bring it down, buck it into rounds, and schlep those rounds down the hill to dry and cure.  I've done that with two other deceased trees on the property, and at that height, it's just about at the top end of what my modest 18" homeowner-grade electric chainsaw can manage.

After taking a few minutes to sharpen, oil, and adjust the chain, up the hill I went with axe and wedge and chainsaw.  Within five minutes I'd hewed out the directional undercut, and begun the back cut to bring it down.  Being a suburbanite, I don't get to do this often, so it's always done 1) in the most straightforward and traditional way and 2) with as much care as my scatterbrain allows.  I know my limitations, and my propensity to forget things, like fully securing the chain-oil plug so's it doesn't goop oil down my pants.  Not that I've ever done that.  Ahem.

Bringing down a tree requires one's full attention.

Vibecoding might be a thing these days, as we offload our cognitive tasks to AI.  But Vibefelling a tree?  That too easily turns into an existential error, the sort of mistake that costs you property damage, a limb, or a life.  

So I consider and then create the undercut mindfully.  Where's this going to go, exactly?  I want to set it down not just as far away from the house and parked cars as possible, but also where it'll do the least harm to the healthy trees around it.  It's worth careful consideration and reconsideration.

As I'm putting in the back cut, I slow down right at the end.  Were I an experienced arborist working with excellent equipment, this would be less necessary.  But when you're engaged in an unfamiliar, infrequent, and risky task, take your sweet time about it.  I've felled fewer than a half-dozen trees in my fifty seven years of life, so I watched the cut like a hawk.  Has it begun to fractionally expand, the barely noticeable beginning of that long final fall?  I want to be a few strides away as soon as that movement begins, in the event I've misjudged something and the trunk steps out, heading in an unplanned direction.

I cut and checked, cut and checked.  Finally, that movement began, the clean line of the backcut expanding at a barely discernible rate.  I pulled the chainsaw blade, and stepped back as the expansion increased.

It all went as planned, and down it came precisely where I'd intended, with a satisfying crackling followed by a deep ground-shaking whump.  The tree, life long gone from it, was now ready to be sectioned out, bucked into rounds and split for the fire in winter.

When we realize a thing needs to be brought down, it's best to do so with care.  If you rush in, full of blind confidence and bravado, you're likely to do more harm than good.