By Bradley W. Parks, The Times Recorder (Zanesville, Ohio)
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Heavy doors swing slowly open with a creak. Donna Barclay, the secretary at Central Presbyterian Church in downtown Zanesville, kicks the doorstop down. It hits the floor, echoing off the sanctuary walls.
The sanctuary is like this many days of the week — empty, reverberating with every sound made in its emptiness.
The historical building is up for sale for $490,000.
“We have a declining attendance (and) population in our church,” said Larry Ledford, a member of the board of session at Central Presbyterian. “With the number of people we have, it’s hard to maintain a church so big.”
Attendance numbers have fallen sharply in recent years at Central Presbyterian. As of May 31, the congregation stood at 165 members. Ledford remembers when the congregation consisted of several hundred people.
“There used to be more people,” he said. “That’s the bottom line.”
The possible sale of Central Presbyterian raises the question of whether other downtown churches will see similar challenges in a shifting religious landscape.
Many, if not all, face the challenge of reinvigorating their congregations as they grow older and turnover rates shrink.
The brain drain
The decline and attempts at revitalization at Central Presbyterian reflect those of the downtown area as a whole.
While people attempt to revamp downtown with new businesses, some churches are trying to up their efforts as well.
Melanie Von Gunten is the director of religious education and the unofficial historian at St. Thomas Aquinas. She attributes congregational change to brain drain, which is when people earn a college education and leave their hometowns, usually to bigger cities.
“Sometimes the younger people are almost forced to look outside Muskingum County for employment,” Von Gunten said.
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Ah, left wing liberalism a welcome site to destroy conservative churches and seminaries and denominations. Left winged liberals should be proud that another church is biting the dust, and you liberals can give satan the credit for infiltrating this church and the pcusa, but I warn you, eternal damnation awaits you and your minions to be thrown in the pit of lake of fire for eternity Revelation 20. Enjoy your victory.
This is not just a PCUSA type of phenomena, in that across mainline Protestantism, churches were built in urban cores that met the demographic and population trends of the 18th and 19th century. The RC has responded to this demographic shift by merging and combining parishes. In summation, as the urban cores transition from majority black or white to majority Hispanic and Asian, their worship patterns will take on a more charismatic/holiness/pentecostal formats and structures. Matters of the Holy Spirit which the PCUSA is deaf, dumb and blind.
What is true is that the PCUSA is in essence clueless and lost in most urban centers, so their remaining churches become either an agency for the dispensing or housing of state welfare services and their social witness activities become more less captive to the liberal Democratic political machines that has enslaved their cities and people for decades.
Either way, it a path to nowhere.
This is just a sign of the times. People do not think that hearing and knowing God’s Word is important anymore. Boy are they in for a surprise when the day of final judgement comes.We need to be ready and prepared.
Recently I left the PC USA after 40+ years. I am in the process of joining a church associated with the EFC of America. I am blown away by the bible centered messages and spirit filled worship. The PC has drifted so far away from these two elements.
Good heavens what distortions. In rural areas and in downtown areas the people are moving away to find jobs. It is not evidence of a moral decline, the failure of prophecy. It is demography.
A rural church in Western Pennsylvania drops 200 members in the last 40 years. It must be because of liberals, or it could be because 80% of the people moved away or died.
Or it could be that the church didn’t clean its rolls in the past few years and got fed up paying Per Capita on those empty seats.
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Or the kids grew up and moved away to get off the farm. Still, if they weren’t given the Word before they left for school, they would have no incentive to go find it after school.
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So .. why are those large, mainline churches in the middle of cities declining? I know in Pittsburgh, they’re sold and reopen as craft brew houses and restaurants. They get more patrons now, than they had in years previous.
Maybe the time has come for all of us to take the Bible Content Exam and the Exegesis Exam.
it means that the church did not go and find new members to replace the ones who left or died. It is ad when the church doesn´t evangelize and no souls come to Christ.
There are fishes in the seas but Too bad Presbyteraqins do not catch them. Why are the fundamentalistic churches growing? They go out and beat the bushes! They don´t build the church and wait for folks to come! They go out and seek those who will hear the Words and The Lord calls these folks to come to have fellowship in the Church.