The steeple chimes sound better two or three blocks away from Westminster Presbyterian.
The church only recently began ringing them again, and Rev. Karl Schwarz hustled down the street to hear the inaugural chiming. As they resounded, Schwarz noticed Devonshire neighbors in their yards lifting their heads to listen. He asked what they thought, and the neighbors told him: “It’s beautiful.”
The same chimes played patriotic hymns when the Devonshire Fourth of July parade rounded the final corner. The parade starts and ends at Westminster, and the church kept its sanctuary doors open that day so neighbors could come inside and use the restroom or get a drink of water. Schwarz enjoyed watching people peek in who had never been inside before. When he introduced himself, accompanied by his two young daughters, the typical response was: “Oh, I thought everyone here was old.”
That’s one of the perceptions Westminster is trying to change, Schwarz says.
“We’re kind-of like Sleeping Beauty’s enchanted castle,” Schwarz says. “Everything is just closed up in front, and we’re trying to open it up.”
It’s a transitional time for Westminster, and the same is true for most other religious institutions in our neighborhood. Many have been around for 50 years or more, and the people who started them and built up the congregations are aging. The reasons each church had for coming into existence may no longer be good enough to sustain them.
Chances are, churches that don’t re-invent themselves will eventually die or cease being relevant.
Of course, what’s a few less churches in Preston Hollow? The idiom that Dallas has a church on every corner is no less true in our neighborhood. If churches wind up closing their doors, likely the only people who will mourn them are the ones currently sitting in the pews, holding on for dear life.
And that’s exactly what Preston Hollow churches are coming to grips with. Gone are the days that a congregation can plop down in a neighborhood and expect people in the surrounding community to darken its doors each Sunday. Even some people who call themselves “religious” are staying home because they simply don’t see the point.
A congregation that wants to see the future will have to learn what some in our neighborhood are discovering: The difference between death and life is the difference between a church simply taking up space and a church looking beyond its walls and making a difference for people on the outside — people who don’t have any reason to walk in.
They’re not coming anymore
After World War II and into the ’60s, Dallas experienced rapid growth, especially north of Northwest Highway. Around that time, many denominations strategically planted buildings so that people moving to newer areas of the city wouldn’t have to travel more than a few miles to attend worship services. Preston Hollow was one of those burgeoning areas, so sanctuaries and steeples began sprouting up left and right.
Probably 100 or so congregations grew in Dallas along with their neighborhoods, says Robin Lovin, Southern Methodist University ethics professor and former dean of Perkins School of Theology. Now, he says, these congregations find themselves at roughly the same stage in their life cycle — in the throes of transition.
Simultaneously, neighborhood religious leaders say they’re witnessing a major shift in America in which people are losing interest and attendance is declining — even in the buckle of the Bible belt.
The most recent Gallup poll on church attendance found that roughly half of Americans attend a worship service at a church or synagogue at least once a month. Of those who seldom or never attend, only about a quarter of them cited reasons that had to do with laziness or not having enough time, while fully half referenced some sort of grievance with the church — they don’t believe in organized religion, they don’t believe in what churches teach, they don’t believe in going to church, or they don’t believe in God.
“We don’t live in a time when people will walk through the door and explore this for themselves,” Lovin says. “There are so many things competing for attention in society that a church has got to identify itself in some distinct way. It has got to give people a reason to want to come, and it has got to make that identity known in a public way.
“You can’t just sit there on the corner and hope that people will walk in, and hope if they do walk in, they will find something that they like.”
A neighborhood meeting place
Westminster’s congregants aren’t operating under any such illusions. For starters, the church is shrouded in the Devonshire neighborhood, so it’s not in a heavily trafficked area. In Devonshire itself, however, Westminster is considered “the neighborhood church,” Schwarz says, even for people who attend different churches or don’t go to church at all.
It’s an identity derived from the steeple chimes and the Fourth of July parade, as well as the fact that it serves as a polling place and hosts neighborhood meetings. Westminster also welcomes neighbors to its preschool playground during non-school hours and to the open field behind the church. The field acts as a neighborhood dog park — the Devonshire Neighborhood Association has even placed a bag dispenser on the church grounds for neighbors to clean up after their pets.
The church’s prominence in the neighborhood’s landscape recently persuaded a young couple that joined Westminster to move nearby from their home in Plano.
“It made a difference that the church was inside the neighborhood rather than on the corner of a busy street,” Schwarz says.
Of course, this same characteristic also is the reason the church’s membership will probably never grow by leaps and bounds.
“If we were looking to be a megachurch, this would not be the place,” Schwarz says.
No more brand loyalty
It’s a different story at Preston Hollow Presbyterian, on the busy corner of Preston and Walnut Hill. Though our neighborhood has plenty of smaller churches dotting the landscape, it also has a few congregations like this one that are some of the largest in their respective institutions, among them Saint Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church and Temple Emanu-El.
Preston Hollow Presbyterian’s membership, roughly 2,700, makes it one of the largest 25 churches in its denomination. These days, those membership numbers are unusual for a mainline church because people are less loyal to denominations, Lovin says.
“If people find an attractive church that is a different denomination than they grew up in, they’re quite likely to join that,” Lovin says.
Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches may be the exception to this rule. Whereas mainline Protestant churches need to create a new identity in order to survive, Lovin says, in Catholic and Orthodox churches, “the continuity of style of worship is very important for the identity of the community.”
Among Protestants, however, non-denominational megachurches may have the edge because their newness means they aren’t stunted by an aging congregation.
“The old churches have history and tradition. They move slowly.
It’s like steering a battleship,” says Blair Monie, pastor of Preston Hollow Presbyterian.
He points out that most Presbyterian churches were founded on Main Street, next to Woolworth’s.
“And what happened to Woolworth’s? The mall. Instead of these little boutiques where you knew the people, people started going out to the mall,” Monie says. “That’s almost a parallel. Megachurches were not founded on Main Street; they were founded next to the mall. That suddenly created a big community, and the little Presbyterian churches on Main Street suffered, and young people left, and you were left with a bunch of old people on Main Street trying to figure out why they couldn’t get anybody to come to their church.
“They’ve got to learn to do church different, but I don’t think the secret is in emulating the megachurches.”
De-cloning churches
What’s happening for the most part, Lovin says, is that our communities are changing, but our congregations are not.
“A congregation that really wants to stay the same will eventually die,” Lovin says. “The same people will continue to do the things they’ve done until they die, and then the congregation will die.
“Where change will happen is when you’ve got a core group of people in a congregation who are excited enough about the experience they’ve had that they want to share it and make sure it survives for another generation.”
The mistake many churches make is trying to mimic the strategies of churches experiencing growth. Instead, Lovin says, any church that wants to survive a generational transition must find a mission and identity unique to its makeup and surroundings. What’s clear, he says, is that a one-model-fits-all approach won’t work.
“People keep holding up models and saying, ‘Be like this, and you’ll succeed.’ That’s the problem. You don’t want to say, ‘Be like this other church down the block.’
“It’s being something different and distinctive that gives you a chance of having a future.”
If Preston Hollow Presbyterian wanted to emulate a megachurch, it would probably need to do away with its violins, organ and 160-strong choir — including 38 members who also perform with the Dallas Symphony — and trade them for a contemporary praise band.
“We’ve decided that instead of that, we really need to do most what we do best,” Monie says. “It probably won’t make us a 10,000-member church; on the other hand, while most other Presbyterian churches are shrinking, we’re not.”
But its leaders aren’t resting on their laurels, either. The church recently hired a 33-year-old associate pastor, and one of her major responsibilities is to create a vibrant community for young adults — a demographic that religious institutions are struggling to retain.
Different faiths, same dilemmas
The problems plaguing 50- to 100-year-old Christian churches in Dallas also are impacting the city’s Jewish synagogues. A congregation like Temple Emanu-El, with 2,600 regular attendees and 7,500 people who affiliate themselves with the congregation, isn’t in any imminent danger, of course, but its leaders are taking precautions to make sure that doesn’t change.
“We undertook a demographic survey probably 10 years ago,” says Larry Ginsburg, first vice-president at Temple Emanu-El, “and we realized that we’ve got an aging congregation, and the rates of affiliation for younger people are not as high as we’d like to see in order to have a healthy institution.”
Unlike Christians, Jews do not actively seek converts, so the congregations’ future rests heavily on younger generations. Young people have many demands on their time, and they’re marrying and having children later, Ginsburg says. For some young couples, their children are the reason to affiliate. So the question leaders began to ask, he says, is how to involve single people and young couples without children.
They decided to approach the problem in two ways: first, by offering reduced annual temple dues for 20- and 30-somethings, and second, by hiring a young adult — Mimi Zimmerman, daughter-in-law of former Temple Emanu-El Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman — to create programs and activities specifically geared for that age group, such as an Asian Shabbat dinner or a Rosh Hashanah martini reception.
“She’s a young person who thinks young, and we’ve given her a very long leash,” Ginsburg says, adding that a recent young adult events was titled “Burgers and Beer”. “That’s not something that I would think of,” says Ginsburg, who is 61, “but that’s something appealing to young people.”
The younger generation also factored into Temple Emanu-El’s decision to remain at its current campus at Hillcrest and Northwest Highway. It has been the temple’s home since the mid-’50s, when the congregation outgrew its South Dallas facility and followed the city’s growth trends to North Dallas. Leaders recently contemplated another move toward the growing population in Plano and other areas north of the city, but decided against it, partly because many of its 20- and 30-somethings are choosing to live in Uptown and Downtown.
Whether they will move further north once they marry and have children is unclear, Ginsburg says, but “young people really are the future of our congregation,” he says, “so where these people live is important.”
Be the best at something
Generational transition can be difficult enough, but Royal Lane Baptist off Hillcrest is also undergoing a pastoral transition. After 26 years of shepherding the congregation, Rev. Ray Vickrey retired in May.
“We are in a very heightened sense of exploring our identity as we try to think who are we as Royal Lane Baptist Church after Ray Vickrey has retired,” says Associate Minister Jason WalkerCraig.
WalkerCraig, a 20-something, was hired last year, mostly to care for the church’s youth, but the congregation specified that it wants him to focus on ways the church can reach out to the surrounding community.
However a church distinguishes itself — perhaps a unique style of worship, relevant educational programs or tight-knit small groups — “you want it to be a purpose that is outward-looking and relates to the wider world and isn’t just inviting someone in,” Lovin says.
“You want to tell the difference from a church seeking to grow as opposed to a social club seeking to grow, but there are lot of ways to do that.”
Royal Lane’s pumpkin patch each October is one of its outreach efforts. It’s “more fun than going and picking one out at Wal-Mart,” WalkerCraig says. The point is not to coerce anyone inside; it’s to send Royal Lane members outside to interact with their Preston Hollow neighbors — “whether any of these people become members, they are worth ministering to,” WalkerCraig says.
Dallas is “a very saturated market in terms of churches,” WalkerCraig says, so much so that “churches get to a place of member-stealing — convincing people we have the best program, the best ministry, the best preacher.”
If Royal Lane’s congregation is
“the best” at anything, he says, it’s probably allowing people the freedom to be themselves. On the bottom of the church’s weekly worship bulletin is the phrase “Diverse people united in Christ”, and “I’ve never been at a place where that’s more true,” WalkerCraig says. “There is a certain unity at Royal Lane that is astounding to someone who is still relatively new [because] there is every diversity you can imagine.”
Unity doesn’t equal agreement
Diversity is a common way Preston Hollow congregations identify themselves. In other neighborhoods, this refers more to racial and socioeconomic diversity, which has changed since the time many of our churches were built in the ’50s.
“All of these North Dallas neighborhoods were pretty much alike at that point, certainly not the racial and ethnic mix that it is today,” Lovin says. “The whole population of Dallas was not as diverse as it is today.”
Though some race and class differences may exist in Preston Hollow congregations, here diversity refers more often to opinions and lifestyles.
In a congregation such as Saint Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church, the second-largest Episcopal church in America with 7,200 members, diversity shouldn’t be surprising. Rev. Bob Dannals, who became the church’s rector a year ago, describes his parishioners as “an eclectic, comprehensive congregation — not everybody thinks the same way.” And he finds that refreshing.
Over the decades, attendance has had plateaus and surges at different points, Dannals says. Two of the more recent growth spurts happened when his predecessors urged the laity to use their gifts and talents not only at Saint Michael but also in the wider Dallas community, and led the church to be a purveyor of social justice — “not just putting band-aids on, but trying to better the systems,” Dannals says. One result was Saint Michael’s partnership with the 70-block Jubilee neighborhood near Fair Park that began 11 years ago.
Saint Michael’s most recent plateau came in 2003, when controversy erupted in the national Episcopal church over the election of Rev. Gene Robinson, a practicing homosexual, as the bishop of New Hampshire.
“That was a stressful period for the whole of the national church and the whole of the Anglican communion,” Dannals says. “There were challenges as the local congregation addressed or faced what was happening at the national and international level … We knew it was something we had to work out within our own community, and we’re still doing that.”
The church’s attendance is on the upswing again, and that can be attributed to “a measure of humility, a measure of patience, an ability to listen to people whose views are different than ours,” Dannals says. It goes back to the church’s eclectic makeup — “unity is not the same as agreeing,” he says.
Daring to be different
Many of the houses surrounding Northaven United Methodist aren’t in the church’s groundbreaking photos because in 1955, they hadn’t yet been built. It was one of the churches planted by a forward-thinking Methodist bishop, and the strategy worked — as the neighborhood around Preston and Northaven filled in, the church’s numbers swelled, reaching a peak of roughly 800 members by the mid-’60s.
From the mid-’60s through the mid-’90s, however, Northaven United Methodist followed the pattern of many other churches and saw a slow decline in its attendance.
“As the neighborhood members fell off somewhat, we began to attract people from all over the city,” says Rev. Eric Folkerth. “People came to Northaven more for who we were in terms of our identity than where we are in the neighborhood.”
It has always been a progressive Dallas church in terms of its theology, Folkerth says. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, Northaven’s congregants were among the loudest voices in the city speaking against the Vietnam War.
That mentality began attracting people far beyond the realm of the Preston Hollow neighborhood that nurtured the church in its early years. Then in 1998, Northaven took another progressive stance by voting to join a national network of churches devoted to making the United Methodist Church more inclusive, specifically geared toward welcoming people of all sexual orientations.
So when the church decided to construct a new building, the decision was made to design something that would reflect the identity of the congregation — a building signaling that Northaven is not the same congregation as the one that started 50 years ago. Plans called for the church to be built right on the corner of Preston and Northaven, instead of being set back from the road as it had for half a century, and for its architecture to have a contemporary feel.
“We decided if we’re going to exist for the next 50 years, we need to do something new,” Folkerth says. “Either a church redefines itself somehow to attract new folks, or it will die.
“I’m not going to name names, but I think that is happening in the neighborhood. Some churches are doing the same thing the way they’ve always done it, and they’re really struggling, and I think we’ll see some of those churches close in the next five to 10 years.
“The neighborhood has changed, and the church hasn’t necessarily been able to adapt to that change or find some way in the current environment to be relevant.”
Looking back toward the future
To find examples of religious institutions who successfully made the transition, Lovin says, congregations should look no further than downtown and the city center — any churches still standing found a way to adapt.
It should also encourage neighborhood pastors that population trends are in their favor, he says. Unlike in Chicago or St. Louis, where some churches will die because there are simply fewer people to fill their pews, “there’s no reason that a congregation in Dallas has to die. People are moving into the city; the overall population is growing,” Lovin says.
Even so, neighborhood religious leaders know that urban renewal doesn’t automatically translate to rising attendance in their congregations. Beyond the mid-life crises Preston Hollow is experiencing, they say religious institutions across the country are in the beginning stages of a major shift, one so immense that the implications aren’t yet clear.
A few decades from now, some neighborhood pastors believe, the landscape may look very different from the sanctuaries and steeples that have dotted our neighborhood for the last 50 years.
If anything, Schwarz says, we should stop viewing our places of worship as bunkers and start viewing them as “mission outposts — this is where we gather, this is where we worship, this is where we have fellowship, but it’s the base from which we go out and do.”
The crucial thing to ask, he says, is: “How do you be faithful where you are?”
