When bad things happen, Judy Shierman sees the silver lining.
And in the case of the economic downturn, it is this: Attendance has shot up at the First Baptist Church in downtown Calgary, where she is the associate pastor. “I love to see new people,” she says.
She began noticing the increase in September – around the time the wheels fell off the global economy. Since then, her congregation has bloomed by 20 per cent to about 350 people. While she acknowledges other factors may have contributed, she suspects economic woes helped to usher new faces into the pews.
“People tend to draw closer together and rely on each other during difficult times like this,” she says.
As businesses falter and Canadians fret over whether they’re next for the unemployment line, churches across the country are enjoying a dose of good fortune. For some it’s an uptick in attendance; at others, donation plates are overflowing.
Jammed parking lots at the Carruthers Creek Community Church in Ajax, Ont., led officials to hire buses to shuttle people from a satellite lot to Sunday services, which attract between 800 and 1,000 people. That’s about a 5-per-cent increase in attendance compared with December and January last year, said church manager Roxy Banik. “There’s a lot of need right now,” she says. “There’s a lot of fear.”
And in Oshawa, Ont., a town whose fortunes are tied to the health of the struggling auto sector, donations are up at Faith Lutheran Ministries. The congregation of 75 raised $17,000 over the holidays.
“It just seems like people are more generous, and that’s really surprising,” Rev. Dennis Becker says.
Large evangelical churches across the United States have also experienced a burst in attendance since September. The boost is reportedly generating excitement among evangelicals who believe that the big Christian revivals known as the second and third Great Awakenings were touched off by economic turmoil.
“It’s a wonderful time, a great evangelical opportunity for us,” Rev. A. R. Bernard, senior pastor at New York’s largest evangelical congregation, told The New York Times.
How to make church more attractive has long puzzled pastors and priests concerned about greying, dwindling congregations. In his research, Joel Thiessen, assistant professor of sociology at Calgary’s Ambrose University College, is looking at what draws in Sunday morning regulars compared with those who only attend sporadically at Christmas, Easter, weddings or funerals.
The economy is cropping up more and more frequently in interviews with his research subjects on both sides, he says. “The hypothesis among some of these participants is that as people are without material and financial things … they’ll find this void in life that only God can fulfill.”
Almost all Christmas/Easter worshippers say they’re too tired and busy with work, chores and children to attend regularly, he says. While that struggle could be amplified during tough economic times as people scramble to get by, growing unemployment may also mean that people have more time for church.
“We might also see more attendance because people are seeking that source of dependency in a time of need. It’s no secret, even among Christmas and Easter attendees, that they tend to pray to God more when they are in a time of trouble.”
Which is why many religious leaders have hope that the downturn will result in widespread spiritual awakening.
“Some of the best opportunities are when things aren’t going so well,” says Doug Schneider, senior pastor at the Embassy of the Kingdom of God in Oshawa. “In North America our core values probably need to be sharpened a bit with a paring knife. We’ve built so much on money and fame … I just think that things like this cause us to come together more as a community.”
While communal support is one benefit, religion can also provide a road map for dealing with stress, said Carol Musselman, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Toronto.
“Any religion or any religious observance explicitly acknowledges that there are problems in life,” she says, “and all religions say that there’s a source of strength available that is outside ourselves, that we can draw on.”
During a recent Sunday service, Pastor Shierman factored the economy into her sermon. She described a person standing on a mountain, unable to see the path below. “Even though you can’t see the path ahead,” she told her congregation, “and even though we’re going through tough times – whether it’s health or economy – God knows the path.”
But the economic downturn has been both muted and delayed in Canada compared with the United States, so some caution that it’s too early to tell whether any attendance increases here will be widespread or long-term.
“Things have to get a lot worse before people are going to start seeking their answers in religion,” said Rev. Joel Vander Kooi of the Bethel United Reformed Church, an evangelical church in Calgary.
In his 25 years as a pastor, he has seen people turn to the church in great numbers only once: after Sept. 11, 2001, when he was a pastor in Walker, Mich. Unless the economic crisis drags on and begins to severely affect vast numbers of people, he predicts his church’s membership will remain constant at 500.
“People don’t start asking the really hard questions until they’re really pressed to it,” he says.
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