If you are reading this (and you are), chances are you go to church on Sunday, or at least occasionally. If you don’t go to church, this essay is not for you. But if you are one of the ever-diminishing class of people who are affiliated with some religious body, I encourage you to read on. And if you are one of the people who, for reasons of heritage or personal choice, belong in some way to the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church, I beg you to read on.
As a member, perhaps, of one of our older and more established parishes, you must be aware of the declining number of people in the pews, and I’d bet this causes you as much concern as it causes me. I am grateful for your concern, and as a step in dealing with it together, I would like to ask you to think about why it bothers you that our numbers are shrinking by asking yourself this question: What is it that keeps you coming to church week after week?
There are no right or wrong answers. Just think carefully, clearly, and honestly about what motivates you. What really gets you up and to Divine Liturgy on a Sunday morning? Take careful note of everything that comes to mind, without censoring or judging. Write it down, then read your list over thoughtfully. Do any of your reasons express your sense of your own identity or identification with your parish? In what ways? Do any of your reasons cause you to think, “This is me,” or “I belong to this group, this family.” Why?
To belong to a church is to give expression to a very complex set of personal, social, psychological, and spiritual factors that form the core of your own identity. Knowing your identity, as well as how—or whether—you identify with your parish will affect how you respond to the challenges that your parish faces, not to mention your own spiritual challenges. This is important not only to you, but to me, and to all of us who make up our little flock.
One way of identifying with your parish is the way of the Ego. If you identify yourself with your ego, your parish will be an extension of yourself. Noting fewer people at Divine Liturgy may provoke a diminished sense of yourself and your personal self-worth (especially if you are the pastor). To make up for this, you may find yourself leaving our church, or seeking a church that, by the numbers, appears to you to be more successful: more people in attendance, more dollars in the bank, a bigger building. You feel better associating with more “winners” and fewer “losers” in an effort to gratify yourself, i.e., your ego.
But there is a way of identifying with your parish that does not involve your ego: the way of communion. The New Testament word for this is koinonia, which means sharing, participation, fellowship, community. The way of communion (including, but not limited to, eucharistic communion) identifies you with something—rather, with Someone—in a way that makes you a bigger person while your ego becomes smaller and smaller. Your parish is then an extension not of you, but of Jesus Christ.
Look at your list of reasons for going to church again: does it include something like sharing in the life of Jesus Christ together? You may not have worded it quite this way, of course, but if your list includes anything like this at all, then by doing this exercise you have already taken the first step toward the renewal of our whole Church. Congratulations—and thank you!
Now let us begin this work of renewal together.