– Written by: The Rev. Mary Frances Schjonberg is a freelance writer who formerly was a senior editor and reporter for Episcopal News Service. |
[Episcopal News Service] There is a largely unspoken tension between parents and their adult children in many Episcopal families. It’s not about politics or even theology, at least directly. It’s about the point of going to church.
“And it’s not because the church abused them in some way, but that their cohorts don’t seem to need it,” the Rev. Elizabeth Habecker, a former member of the Diocese of Rhode Island Standing Committee, told Episcopal News Service when asked what challenges she thinks the church should address. She and her late husband the Rev. John C. Habecker raised their two daughters in The Episcopal Church. Neither of the two go to church now, she said.
Habecker, the first woman ordained in the Diocese of Maine, has a long history with the Episcopal Church Women, and she sometimes asks members at meetings if they have grandchildren who are not baptized. Most raise their hands. The same is true for clergy members’ children, she said.
“They’re worried about what’s going to happen,” Habecker said. “I don’t have an answer, but I do have a question” about how to change the trend.
She is not the only one. The Rev. Susanna Cates, canon for formation and vocations in the Diocese of New Jersey, told ENS that she was “inundated with emails” in mid-May when she announced plans for a group for parents with adult children who no longer attend church.
The idea of a group grew out of a conversation Aimee Hanyzewski had with a parishioner at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, where her husband, Andrew, is the rector. “I could just hear the pain from her stories, talking about her children, and how sad it was to not have them in church with her, then not even be active in any way,” she said. After another parishioner mentioned the same concern, she contacted Cates to ask if there were any resources for parents with these concerns.
Not finding anything specifically related to The Episcopal Church, Cates said, they decided to invite people into a conversation about their concerns. The group has been meeting weekly via Zoom since June. Most participants are parents to adults in their 30s and 40s, many of whom have children of their own.
When she first contacted Cates, Hanyzewski said, she felt that the most fruitful direction for the group might be to explore the relationships of parents and adult children, and how to have good conversations about a sensitive subject without any feelings of judging or being judged. She hoped there would be a way for participants to “walk away feeling empowered to talk to their children again about their faith, and which hopefully would promote a helpful conversation between their child and the parents.”
But, she told Cates, “We got to make sure people understand there is no magical unicorn.”
Cates agreed. “I made it very clear it’s probably not going to be the case that when we’re done having our conversation, you’re going to go and have the way to get your child to come back to church,” Cates said she told the group at the outset. “The point of these discussions is not to come up with, you know, a 30-day solution to get your adult children back in church.”
Discussions in the group emphasize “meeting people where they are” and not going into a conversation with a plan for rebutting what their adult children are saying so they can be made to come back to church.
Jesus sets the example for this sort of acceptance, Cates said. He drew people in “not with fear, not with coercion, not with anything like that, but simply a sense of this abiding, patient, listening, love.”
“We’re concerned about our families and friends that aren’t in church anymore, but the responsibility is not just on them,” Cates said. “It’s on us to fully live into our baptismal covenant and learn how to speak about God in the language that people can understand. It’s the day of Pentecost in the Book of Acts. It’s the Ethiopian eunuch looking at Scripture and saying, ‘How can I understand if nobody explains it to me?’ It’s the Christian journey. That is our journey, and we have to be able to talk about that.”
Some members of the group already feel “a little bit emboldened to even just say, ‘Can we talk about this? Can I hear from you? I don’t want to tell you anything, but can I hear from you about what you think about religion or church, or The Episcopal Church in general, or the way that we brought you up in the church, any of these things,’” Cates said.
Organizing the group sent Hanyzewski back to memories of growing up as the daughter of the Rt. Rev. Keith Whitmore, formerly the diocesan bishop of Eau Claire in Wisconsin. Hanyzewski, a freelance set and lighting designer, portrays herself as being “in the family business” while her brother is not as involved. She’s shared that experience with the group to show that they are not the only ones wondering about how they got to this point.
The Rev. Scott Russell, an Episcopal chaplain at Rutgers University in New Jersey, told ENS that attending church “really feels like an option for so many people.” Yet, said Russell, who has met with the group, “I think these parents in this group really crave a way to make church seem relevant and really necessary.”
Cates would agree with Habecker’s assessment about why younger adults don’t attend church the same way their parents do. “We’re no longer in that very short span of time from the late ‘40s to the mid-’60s, where there was a church boom, there was an everything boom,” she said. “That was a very isolated incident in pretty much all of United States church history. It really wasn’t like that before, and it hasn’t been like that since. It may never be like that again.”
And it’s time to move on, she suggested. “Rather than sitting in that history and wondering why things aren’t like that anymore, let’s value and grieve what has gone from us and then say, ‘Okay, now what?’”
Any number of studies document the vast changes in church attendance and seek to explain the reasons for it; moreover, those reasons may not be as sensational as some observers’ narratives might suggest.
Michael Graham is program director for the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics, a self-described fellowship of evangelical churches in the Reformed tradition, and the co-author of “The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back?” He recently described surveying 7,000 people who used to attend at least once a month and now attend less than one time a year.
The study found that many, but not all, people left for “primarily very pedestrian reasons that seemed actually very pragmatic,” like a family change, a marriage, divorce, remarriage or moving and not finding a church they liked, and then getting out of the habit of attending, he said in an NPR interview in January.
Cates said she thinks Episcopalians, including those in the diocesan group, are “starting to realize that we have to rediscover our enthusiasm.”
“We need to be able to talk about why church matters,” she said.
The hope is that the lay people involved in the group, and it’s all lay people except for Cates, will create similar groups elsewhere in the diocese and beyond. Her biggest hope “is that people come out of this being able to have difficult conversations with people that they love, and being so passionate about what they’ve learned that they can’t help but have those conversations right now.”