Our new neighbors–the woman, particularly, it seemed–had a problem.
“Can we help?”
We’d met the two, Walter and Marge, just the previous afternoon. Twenty hours later, from their backyard sun deck, the four of us were charting unfamiliar bird life.
Marge lowered her binoculars. Walter reached for his pipe.
“The church,” Marge answered. “Which one is right for us? So hard-hard-hard to decide!” Shrugging, glancing toward her husband but getting no help there, she added, “We do like to shop around, you know. We’ve been Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian–back home . . .”
At the “back home” she gasped and abruptly thrust long fingers across her mouth. In our new-found retirement community that phrase is the worst of all no-nos. Whether arriving here from the Northeast, Midwest, or elsewhere, this Sunbelt refuge is our home now.
“We will join something,” she said. “Won’t we, Walter?”
“I suppose so,” he said after an uncomfortable silence. “Could help get us settled in–maybe.”
Recalling the recent commitment my wife and I had made to the evangelism effort in our parish, I noted that we were Catholic and that we’d be pleased to have the two go with us to Mass the following Sunday. That ended the discussion–not so much in the manner of its being stomped on, as might have been the case a generation or two ago, but more as if our offer would have us all pointlessly traveling a dead-end road. It was Walter who changed the subject to the migratory habits of yellow grosbeaks. “There goes a flock of them right now!” he observed, although the rest of us, at that moment, must have been looking somewhere else.
A few weeks later we learned that the couple had begun attending services at a Congregational church, the decision apparently based largely on “their wonderful choir!” A nearby Baptist church, second in the running, lost out because its pastor was too vehemently “anti-cocktail.”
We who have taken up new lives in this southern retirement haven are escapees from northern winters and from taxes felt to be excessive only until we’d left them behind. For those who do not strongly identify with any one denomination, yet who, in a general way, consider themselves Christians, the question of what church to join, if any, becomes part of a psychic mix characterized by deep changes of many kinds. Even the language here can be different. Example: “See you this evening” translates as “See you at 2:00 this afternoon.”
This is the Bible Belt, with a Baptist church, often quite small, at nearly every crossroads. Several Protestant bodies with a common presence in the North, including Dutch Reformed and Unitarian, are hardly seen in these parts. The changes add up to a cultural shock for Catholics and Protestants alike.
While our sun deck friends were joining a church for its outstanding music, other recently-arrived shop-arounds were affiliating with “Bible-based” churches for their preaching and fellowship, with the Seventh-Day Adventists for their health regimen, and with a Presbyterian church out of what may have been a sense of nostalgia. We know of few shop-arounds who’ve chosen the Episcopalians, but none who’ve gone Catholic.
Why do these undecideds not choose us? From their perspective, insofar as we can tell, such a step would be about on par with running naked through our only shopping mall.
Do the attractions of music, preaching, and fellowship count for more than historic validity? I put this question, expressed as ecumenically as I could, to a new resident from upstate New York. He’d joined a revivalist group here after finding a “Welcome Friend!” packet in his mailbox and the pastor and pastor’s wife standing at his door proffering a fruit basket and a still-warm baked chicken.
“Now that’s caring! That’s fellowship!” The true church, as he sees it, is the church, almost any church, where fellowship prevails.
Most Catholic churches here are relatively small–parish size, except in the largest cities, is typically below 250 families. Throughout the region, our numbers, although increasing, are derived almost entirely from Snowbelt-to-Sunbelt migration. Without that, many of our parishes could accommodate their Sunday worshipers inside a broom closet.
Unencumbered by the massive size of so many northern parishes, we are as well positioned for personal outreach as the majority of the area’s Protestant congregations. Often, what we could do, we don’t do.
Where a Protestant group will seek out names of newcomers, regardless of what church affiliation may be indicated, then extend a personal welcome, every Catholic parish we know of holds back until the newcomers themselves take the first step by signing in at the rectory.
If we cannot do better than the others on fellowship, on preaching, or on choir/congregational singing, what’s left? What, if anything, do we have to offer that the others do not?
The answer comes from a years-ago convert, one who brought himself to us, rather than we to him: “What we have to offer is what we don’t talk about much anymore: Ours is the only church body that goes back to the beginning. We, and none of the others, are the Church in continuity since the time of the apostles, the very Church to which Christ entrusted the keys of the kingdom. History supports this and so does Scripture. If others fail to see us in this light, they will evaluate us only on superficial or transitory considerations in which, unfortunately, we’re all too likely to fall short.”
My wife and I have found few shop-arounds who dispute our Catholic claim of uniqueness. What we do find is that almost no one seems even to know about it. I brought up the issue of our apostolic origin when a newcomer asked for “any reason why I ought to give you a try.”
My response, structured on Matthew 16:18 (“You are Rock, and on this rock I will build my Church”) fell, initially anyway, upon stony ground.
“The Catholic Church founded that long ago?” he asked. “That’s a new one on me!”
After jotting notations on slips of paper, he glanced up to announce this conclusion: “I’d say you people probably got underway around the twelve hundreds. Martin Luther came along in the fifteens. That would allow three hundred years, more or less, for things to get where they were until Luther started to straighten them out. If your church were much older, the Luther types would have turned up sooner!”
Looking squarely at me, he declared, “I’ve never heard of such a thing!”
“What thing?” I asked.
“That any of today’s churches–well, except maybe the Baptists–goes back to the beginning.”
His response points to what, in this area, seems to be operating strongly against our hope of attracting others. Lack of knowledge about the Church and its teachings is pervasive among our shop-arounds. It’s deep and abiding.
As we work overtime in so many quarters to downplay our uniqueness, seeking inter-faith harmony, we are viewed as merely another denomination, even a sect. Our keystone role as the parent Church of Christendom is not g.asped at all by shop-arounds. It meets blank stares, divisiveness now replaced by boundless ignorance.
Sometimes we lean so far backward on our ecumenical benches that we contribute to this ignorance; I have in mind, for example, the totally unamplified statement by a Catholic spokesman at an inter-faith seminar: “We were once forbidden to read the Bible.”
Common among shop-arounds is a view expressed by a widow, one of the few natives to the area: “Really,” she said, “is there a peanut’s worth of difference in what any of us believe? I don’t think so!”
Why not, then, consider us along with the others?
“Well,” she explained, “I went to a wedding once in your church.” She laughed. “Those seats! Hard as settin’ on a rail fence. Give me a church with nice, comfy sit-downs!”
After a brief pause she added, “What else is there?”