When last I wrote in these pages back in April, our spirits were high at St Peter’s PCA. We had transitioned to virtual services, we had retooled our pastoral ministries to suit, and here in New Orleans, a mostly compliant populace was keeping coronavirus infection rates at a manageable level. Though a handful of families had shifted affiliations, we had good reason to be hopeful — even as we remained in prayer for our parishioners, our neighbors, our brothers and sisters in city and state.
In mid-July, we were even able to reopen, resuming in-person worship on a limited level. Strict guidelines governed our gatherings: services took place on an RSVP system, with chairs placed six feet apart. Our liturgy was condensed by fifteen minutes, to mitigate risk. Masks were required at all times, except during Communion, which was served in individual, pre-portioned cups. Most visibly, fellowship after church was limited to a few words or a wave on the way out the door—no palling around with chitchat and kids afterwards, to which we had been so long accustomed.
But worship was still worship. And deep in the sweltering midsummer, we were grateful — even if half our members still tuned in over Zoom.
By early fall, with an end to the pandemic nowhere in sight, our conversation had turned from the murmur of whispered fears to a new pursuit of wisdom in transition.
This is the part where I’d like to say that as July bled into August, and August into September, we saw a turnaround in the church. That, seeking truth and hope in these trying times, families began to trickle back, that our services resumed their normal length, that our weekly Bible studies began to bear new fruit. But our story didn’t break that way. Rather, as those months drew on it became clear that a very different future faced us. By early fall, with an end to the pandemic nowhere in sight, our conversation had turned from the murmur of whispered fears to a new pursuit of wisdom in transition.
Churches are businesses too, enterprises whose primary service is service: teaching, preaching, counseling, ministering. But service providers of any stripe require both a clientele and a budget, and as we began to observe the trends of the summer and fall, it became clear that despite our hopes, the losses we had endured were not being replenished, neither in souls nor in shekels. Absent any new growth in Pentecost, the numbers began to tell the story for us. Looking at it rationally, we could see a unique split forming: while some of these losses were unique local impacts of the new global reality, others would have transpired even without the pandemic, such as longtime families being relocated for work. Differentiating these cases helped us to realize that St Peter’s was not being randomly depleted — rather, seen from a greater height, our dispersion was being re-dispersed once more. Our Shepherd needed His sheep elsewhere.
Accepting this, of course, was no easy task, and even today I’m not sure that all former St. Peterites fully have. This is partly due to the swiftness of our transition — though we had originally planned to hold our last service on our anniversary, on Epiphany Sunday in January, a strict fiscal calculus forced us to accelerate that timetable to November, to avoid needless financial risk. Thankfully, however, at the beginning of November, just prior to the election, we were grateful to celebrate All Saints Day in joint worship with Redeemer PCA — a sweet expression of Christian unity in a divided land.
In some ways, two months after our last service, the end still feels so sudden, and scattered once more, we long for a little more time together. But what do we hear of time, from the lips of eternity? That “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Peter 3:8). Indeed, easing our transition have been two key insights, insights that at first seem independent of one another but which overlap in critical ways.
First, external observers might suggest that our church had failed, that as a business it had not lived up to its potential, or that its leadership had fallen short. As a relic of that leadership, let me be the first to say: perhaps so. But the logic of this critique only holds for those for whom a balance sheet, a P&L, is the highest authority. Rather, we know that failure and closure are two radically different things, and that—as I argued back in April—the logic of the Kingdom subverts the logic of this world, breaking through with entirely new narratives. Earthly success is both idol and tyrant, never satisfied no matter how many offerings we bring. Whereas faith, hope and love unto the end — these, these are the colors of the banner of heaven.
In Bonhoeffer, Eric Metaxas makes the point well: “In his book Ethics … Bonhoeffer wrote about the way people worship success. The topic fascinated him. … It was success they wanted, success more than anything. [Yet] God was interested not in success, but in obedience. If one obeyed God and was willing to suffer defeat and whatever else came one’s way, God would show a kind of success that the world couldn’t imagine. But this was the narrow path, and few would take it.”
We mourn the loss of our warm community, we wonder when we’ll see one another again, we visit churches with new and uncertain angles to their pews. Indeed, this Christmas season, perhaps no hymn feels more á propos than “I Wonder As I Wander.”
As believers, our primary identity was not in St. Peter’s and never was. It was in something else — someone else — entirely. And in this lies hidden the second insight, the salve that both stings and soothes as it heals. It is the “magic deeper still,” as Aslan put it, that in truth, all churches fail, and by design. Every church worshipping on earth contains within it the seeds of its own disappearance, planted there right from the start. Though we may blossom, we blossom for one moment only, like the Epiphyllum oxypetalum, the Queen of the Night orchid that blooms just a few hours each year. And yet that bloom remains a glimpse of beauty eternal, the church united forever — a vision, the writer of Ecclesiastes says, that has been placed in our hearts (3:11). With this vision in hand — that ultimate hope set before us at every baptism, every funeral, every celebration of the sacrament—how can we but rejoice?
We at St. Peter’s rejoice because we have died. Subversive logic indeed, of the most glorious kind: “For you have died,” Paul writes in Colossians 3:3, “and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” Hidden, he writes. Not absent, not illusory, not fictional. Only hidden, waiting to be revealed.
Has the transition been difficult? Unquestionably. We mourn the loss of our warm community, we wonder when we’ll see one another again, we visit churches with new and uncertain angles to their pews. Indeed, this Christmas season, perhaps no hymn feels more á propos than “I Wonder As I Wander.” Perhaps the hardest part for me personally was taking down the raiment in our sanctuary one afternoon, folding the cloth stoles and paraments we had used as our stained glass into plain brown boxes to be stored. Their lush greens for Pentecost, their rich crimson for Christmas, that magisterial purple for Lent. When next they will garland a room with their colors, both brightening and deepening it at the same time, only the Almighty knows.
And yet — not all who wander are lost, and this Christmas we formerly of St Peter’s give deeper thanks for the arrival of our Shepherd. Our earthly shepherd — Pastor Shane Gibson — is still helping to rehouse us — brothers and sisters reading this, we covet your prayers for the Gibson family during this transition — but we take comfort knowing that beyond him we have a Shepherd greater still, who calls His sheep to new pastures. For the truth of the matter is that we were never truly dispersed to begin with — not in March, and not now. The numbers may tell this story too: from January 2014, when we first began meeting, to January 2021, when we had first chosen to close, was seven years almost to the day. We know well what the number seven means—across the whole of Scripture, it appears again and again as the number of fulfillment, of perfection, of completion.
Magic, one might say, deeper still.
A native of Mississippi, Benjamin Morris is a writer living in New Orleans.