(Each Saturday, a faith leader in Franklin County offers a personal perspective in this space. To become part of this series, email religion@recorder.com or call 413-772-0261, ext. 265.)
Currently serving as interim pastor at the Montague Center Congregational Church, I’ve been struck by the significance of something I’ve seen in every church I’ve served but have not understood until now. One of this congregation’s great strengths is the provision of wonderful suppers, concerts, sales, and great soup every other Tuesday noon. What they are trying to do is to provide town residents the opportunity to meet each other by accident.
To explain why this feels significant to me, I need to tell some stories:
1. From 1950 to 1960, my hometown in Ohio grew from 2,000 to 7,500, and our churches grew significantly, too. But accompanying this growth was the failure of our Main Street as people abandoned it in favor of the new shopping centers springing up everywhere then. In 1972, Main Street was bulldozed in favor of a marina for boats coming in off Lake Erie. When I saw the results, what shocked me was not the absence of the buildings, but of the spaces between them and in front of them where people would meet on the way to somewhere else. The loss of our Main Street, and Main Streets everywhere, meant the loss of the possibility of meeting neighbors regularly by accident, so necessary for real community life.
2. In 1970, serving my first parishes in Heath and Rowe, I was met by a feeling of sadness in both towns and their churches. It slowly became clear that the towns were grieving over the loss of a way of life. In the ’50s there were maybe 40 working dairy farms in Heath; by 1970, there were 11. When I left five years later, there were six. Now there are none. Not only was a way of making a living disappearing, the intentional gatherings allowed by, and necessary to that life, were also dwindling, some to the point of disappearing. Towns and churches all across the country were experiencing similar losses.
3. I also served in Hartland, Vt., where I heard this story: In 1960, population growth required the neighborhood two-room schools to be shut down in favor of a new central elementary school in which the kids could finally be separated from each other into grade levels. The very same year, the church built a new educational wing with enough classrooms that the kids could finally be separated from each other into grade levels, just like the schools. This happened all over the country. Now that church in Hartland, like so many, is back to using one-room-school curricula.
4. Something has changed fundamentally for our main-line congregations in the transformation of our towns from communities that centered our lives, into suburbs that scattered us into the separate institutions of work and education where we now spend most of our waking hours. Symbolic of the change has been the disappearance of children from our worship services. Banishing children from participating with us in our adult religious life mirrors their overall disappearance from regular serious interaction with adults outside of their educational institutions.
Until our time, a vital part of the education of young people — especially in the realm of meanings, values, ethics, and morals — came first from their listening in on adult conversations, most often in churches, then from beginning to participate in them. We have tried to replace that with institutions of learning.
At the Congregational Church in North Adams, I heard a dramatic expression of our present scattered state in a 14-year-old boy’s response to his confirmation process which included adult mentoring: “This was the first time I had a serious relationship with an adult who wasn’t either family, or paid to take care of me.”
Montague Center church is now searching for a new pastor. The search committee is leading the congregation in answering the questions, “Who are we?” “What is our purpose?” and “What kind of person do we need to help us accomplish our purpose?”
If it were up to me, which it isn’t, my answers would be threefold:
We are a congregation that regularly gathers the people of our town for the important purpose of meeting each other by accident.
Our purpose as a congregation is to invite people to gather together, with their children and grandchildren listening in, to engage the most important questions in life.
The pastor we want is one who can walk with us and our children and grandchildren, and our neighbors and their children and grandchildren, as we try to find our way back to each other.”
Allen M. Comstock has been an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ for nearly 50 years.
The Montague Center Congregational Church, Trinitarian, is a United Church of Christ congregation located on the green in Montague center. It was founded in 1751, a year before the town was founded. It is a thriving congregation with 65 members.