Protestant congregations renewed by classic Christian practices

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 people their shawls will be given to — is one of 70 congregations in a national study of mainline Protestant congregations that have experienced renewal through commitment to classic Christian practices such as prayer. 
   
All congregations 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  in Alexandria, 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,” Bass said.
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 fewer 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.” (RNS)