Dear Friends,
I’m not very well traveled, but I did take a study trip to Rome and Florence while in seminary. One of the things I learned right away was that, at least in these two areas, Italian culture is unabashedly Roman Catholic. Everywhere I went, statues of Mary littered the grounds of private homes. I witnessed people in conversation on the streets and in shops and restaurants cross themselves unselfconsciously and probably without thinking about it: the sign is part of the expressed social language. Other religions and Christian denominations are resident, but the culture is Roman Catholic, despite that fewer than one-third of its people attend church.
Ashland has this in common with Italy. Our local culture is heavily influenced by a long Evangelical Christian tradition – about 30 Baptist churches alone are listed in the online Yellow Pages – and yet The Rev. Jeremy Couture, senior pastor at Unity Baptist Church, posted in a 2016 blog that according to recent estimates, 40 percent of people in the Ashland area have no religious affiliation whatsoever, and only 15.7 percent of the people in Ashland attend church on a given Sunday. That means that of the approximately 9,000 people who live within a 1-mile radius of our church property, 3,600 have no specific religious connection, and 7,600 do not attend church on a regular basis.
Harder to find was the number of people in Ashland who identify themselves, when asked, as Christian. My experience, however, suggests that many more people identify as Christian than are church members or who attend worship services. Are these “cultural,” unaffiliated Christians, Christians?
Ashand is certainly not alone in these church trends, and pastors all over the US are forced to confront the question “Why do I have to attend a church to be a Christian?”
We’ll look at this question in June as we begin a season of considering what it means to be a member of the Body of Christ. How would you answer the question?
Wishing you every blessing,
Mtr. TJ