c. 2005 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) It was a prayer meeting that looked like a needlework class. The 19 women who met to knit and crochet prayer shawls at a Presbyterian church in Pennsylvania are part of a little-heralded movement that may reverse the declining fortunes of mainline Protestant Christianity.
Calvin Presbyterian Church in Zelienople, Pa. _ where needleworkers pray for the person their shawl will be given to _ is one of 70 congregations in a national study of mainline Protestant congregations that have experienced renewal through commitment to classical Christian practices such as prayer. All are drawn from denominations that have lost millions of members over the past 40 years.
But Diana Butler Bass, senior research fellow in church history at Virginia Theological Seminary, has found evidence of growth not just among evangelical mainliners, but among more liberal congregations that take traditional Christian spiritual practices seriously. She got a grant to study them.
“I felt like this story wasn’t being told,” Bass said. Even their denominational headquarters seem uninterested in what these churches are doing, she said.
“I am under no illusions as to how many problems mainline Protestantism has on an institutional and national level. But that is where the problem is. The signs of hope are for these individual congregations, and only insofar as these grass-roots networks can pressure the national structure to change.”
If one looks hard enough, it isn’t difficult to find dynamic mainline congregations.
For example, St. George’s Episcopal Church in Arlington, Va., has developed an “urban abbey” with a quasi-monastic rule of life to help members develop regular patterns of prayer, Bible study, worship and service.
The Church of the Redeemer, a gay-friendly United Church of Christ congregation in New Haven, Conn., has revived the old Puritan practice of requiring members to give public testimonies of faith. As a result, attendance has grown from 40 to 240.
“These people are really liberal, but they have to be able to testify to the experience of the Holy Spirit in their lives,” Bass said. “They have a rule now _ no Godless announcements. Any time you get up in front of the congregation, even if it’s to talk about the Sunday School, you have to be able to link it to some element of the biblical story.”
Bass was drawn to Calvin Presbyterian’s commitment to seeking God’s will through prayer. At meetings of the lay board that governs the church, elders do not vote “yea” or “nay.” Instead they pray over each issue, then indicate whether they sense it is God’s will for the congregation.
“They have turned all of their business meetings into spiritual formation groups,” Bass said.
Since 1996, Calvin has grown from 100 to 240 in Sunday attendance. In 1992, Calvin was precisely the same size as an average congregation in the Presbyterian Church (USA), with 200 members. But while the size of an average PC(USA) congregation has since fallen to less than 150 members, Calvin’s membership doubled to 400.
The prayer shawls are one part of that renewal. Each is “made by the hands while the heart is praying for blessing for the wearer and the people that the wearer loves,” said Diane McClusky, 46, who coordinates prayer ministry at Calvin. “Usually, when you say you are going to pray for someone, they don’t really know you are doing it. But when you put those prayers into a tangible thing they can take in their hands and wrap around them, it’s like wrapping them up in prayer.”
When McClusky, a therapeutic massage practitioner, came to Calvin five years ago, she was too shy to pray aloud.
“Now, any time someone tells me they need prayer, I’m on my knees; I pray over the telephone, anyplace,” she said. “My goal would be for people to feel as comfortable asking someone to pray with them as they do asking them to have a cup of coffee. The world is so hungry to be loved, to be connected with our creator.”
Founded in 1845, Calvin, like most mainline congregations, boomed after World War II but began a long decline in the 1960s. In 1996, the Rev. N. Graham Standish, a former counselor with a doctorate in spiritual direction from a Catholic university, became pastor.
Standish, now 45, was reared in Episcopal and Presbyterian churches where he saw little connection between ritual and the wider world. He dismissed Christianity as irrelevant until, as a therapist in a psychiatric hospital, he saw things he couldn’t explain.
“One kid who was psychotic saw Jesus in a window; but seeing Jesus in the window actually healed him,” Standish said. “Spiritual issues kept coming up in counseling.” He joined a church and enrolled in seminary, intending to add theological insight to his counseling. But he found a call to the pastorate. “I really felt called to reach out to people like me, people who had been turned off by the church but were really spiritually hungry.”
Although evangelicals would be comfortable with his strong Trinitarian theology, Standish defies theological labels. He speaks of practicing “mystical Christianity.” “We are trying to put spirituality at the center, rather than theology or ritual or orthodoxy, although the Spirit will lead you to a stronger theology and also in some ways to a greater orthodoxy,” he said.
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The church has commissioned a dozen members as ministers of healing prayer who make house calls to those who are sick or in need. Two are available for prayer after each Sunday service. And a Wednesday night healing service features “centering prayer,” a meditative practice rooted in monastic tradition.
Recently, the congregation focused its prayer on behalf of Zane Sanders, a teenager who had been slated to play Jesus in the Calvin theater group’s production of Jesus Christ Superstar. He was critically injured last October in a car accident.
Doctors induced a coma to reduce swelling in his brain. He endured surgery, a collapsed lung and ventilator-induced pneumonia. But a month after the accident, he was walking on crutches, singing, playing the guitar and writing songs.
“The whole church created an e-mail list with updates to keep everybody praying for him, and the guy had a miraculous recovery,” Standish said.
Long before Sanders’ accident, the youth group had become more prayerful, said Bruce Smith, Calvin’s music and youth director since 1982. When the meetings end, “they’ll stay afterward and pray with each other in twos and threes.”
Due to Smith’s training as a jazz musician, Calvin was musically avant garde before Standish came. But Standish brought a unique approach to combining traditional and contemporary genres. Services start with ancient music, such as Gregorian chant, progress through Reformation hymns and end with contemporary music in a variety of styles. Though Zelienople is the kind of small town where a “mixed neighborhood” means the newcomers have no German ancestry, black gospel music is a staple at Calvin.
“We are really trying to be a church that knows tradition and at the same time moves into the future,’ Standish said.
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