Photograph by Steven Cordes via Unsplash

Recently I attended Sunday worship at a United Methodist church while I was visiting family over the holidays. This church has a special place in my heart as it was the church where almost ten years ago, I learned my trade as the seminarian intern for the historic downtown church while I was attending Duke Divinity School. The church is a large church for the area and by any metric for that matter — boasting a multi-thousand membership and a large average Sunday attendance. As I walked through the doors to the church I settled back into a lull of comfort and ease — after all this place had been a church home for a year while I served there. It was falling back into a community that had known me, supported me, and loved me in the early stages of my ministry. Of course, this community was not and could not be the same community that I served a decade ago. So much has happened between both parties, and so much has happened in our world.

A recent news story reported the significant decline of church attendance and membership between 1940 and today. It pointed to many societal factors and realities contributing to this decline, all of which we can concretely say were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic at the onset of the 2020s. These trends can allow an unhealthy nostalgia to creep in. This is not the nostalgia of walking into a beloved former congregation. Instead, it is much more pernicious. It’s not hard to see that many of us long for the days of crowded pews and boisterous singing from joyful, large congregations. But that nostalgia is both dangerous and a damning indictment on what God is up to in the here and now.

To borrow from the famed poet Alfred Tennyson, while the Church “may not be the strength that in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are.” We have so much to offer the here and now that if we are caught remembering the past too fondly, we will miss the promising potential of the present moment. That same news story that has made a splash also highlighted my friend, the Rev. Jasmine Smothers and her congregation in midtown Atlanta, First United Methodist Church of Atlanta. This once bustling congregation has dwindled in size, but they refuse to let nostalgia cripple them. They are taking their large footprint that’s worth a sizable amount of money and developing affordable and equitable residential property on their land. Their dreams of what God can do refuse to bend to nostalgia, and we should follow in their footsteps. There is a healthy kind of nostalgia that can show us that our place is a room of remembrance, but we dare not allow unhealthy nostalgia to turn that room into an idolatrous space that will never grow, change, or adapt.

What I found beautiful about attending my former church was that there were children I helped baptize into the family of God now old enough to express the faith for themselves. There were members whose faces weren’t there for small and big reasons. I missed them. There were new faces who greeted me as a first-time visitor. I gave thanks for them. The story of the Church is that it is both ever-changing and ever the same. If we use nostalgia appropriately, it can be a great blessing. The trick is to remember that we are not the ones who have the final say on what has merit or what should be relegated to the past. We trust God for guidance on that front. For God has seen the rise and fall of churches, communities, countries, and civilizations. Through it all God has shown us what matters and what should fall to the wayside. It’s my hope in this moment the Church will have the wisdom to know the difference and trust the one whose story we are enfolded into.