Hilton Head Island, SC – September 11, 2022
The Chapel Without Walls
I Corinthians 12:14-24a; I Cor. 12:24b-30
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. – I Cor. 12:27 (RSV)
On January 5, 2004, The Chapel Without Walls held its first service in the auditorium of the Hilton Head Middle School. There were about a hundred people in attendance. It was our largest attendance until Dr. John McCreight preached his final sermon several years ago, when there were about a hundred-thirty people in attendance. John was a retired Presbyterian minister who served three terms as an interim associate pastor at First Presbyterian Church when I was its pastor, and a couple of times after I left. From the beginning, he and his wife Joann were regular attendants in The Chapel until dementia prevented her from coming.
John continued as a Chapel regular until his death three years ago. He was a supply preacher for me at The Chapel on several occasions in the early years, but the time came when he felt he was no longer physically able to preach. Because that was his decision, I asked him to preach one last time, and he agreed to do so. Many of his friends from The Chapel, First Presbyterian Church, and the Cypress, where he and Joann had lived for a number of years, came on that memorable day to hear a grand old man of the pulpit preach his Last Hurrah. John had a voice like the voice of God, although perhaps it would be better to say that if God doesn’t have a voice like John McCreight’s --- deep, resonant, and powerful --- He should have.
Over the years, we had other ministers who regularly attended The Chapel Without Walls: an American Baptist, an Evangelical Lutheran, a United Methodist, and a United Church of Christ pastor. For a brief period we formed a four-parson co-pastorate, consisting of the Lutheran, Methodist, UCC man, and me. However, it only lasted for three months or so. The Lutheran, John Melin, moved to France and then back to Hilton Head and then to Minnesota; the Methodist, Adrienne O’Neill, moved to Mississippi, where she later died; and Bob Naylor, the UCC pastor, returned to Massachusetts to resume service as a congregational consultant. Furthermore, our regular guest preacher over the past three years, David Leininger, has just moved to North Carolina. Now, in the words of the prophet Elijah, “I, even I only, am left,” and I’m feeling bereft of clergy colleagues in The Chapel.
For the first five years of our existence, we averaged about fifty people in attendance each Sunday. For the next five years we had about forty, for the next five years about thirty, and for the past three and a half years, which includes The Years of the Plague, we have had about twenty each Sunday. COVID has definitely taken the greatest toll on our attendance. There are about fifteen people who were regulars before COVID who have not returned at all, and they are unlikely ever again to attend.
I’m sure most of you are aware that Mainline Christianity has declined greatly over the past half-century. My denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA), has lost more than half its total membership in that span of time. The same is more or less the case for the Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, American Baptists, and the Disciples of Christ. The American Roman Catholic Church has also lost millions of members.
Many factors are involved in this decline: the movement of many Mainliners to self-described evangelical denominations or congregations, an unhappiness with some of the stands on social and political issues by the Mainline churches, and especially by the dropping away of young people who were raised in the liberal denominations or in Roman Catholicism but who just stopped going to church altogether. Now they are what religious demographers call “Nones”: people are who are not affiliated with any church. America is becoming more like Europe or Canada. We are far more secularized than we were fifty years ago. That is further illustrated by the fact that several of the evangelical denominations have also started to lose members.
However, secularity as such does not account for the decline in attendance in The Chapel Without Walls. The continuously advancing age of a congregation largely composed of advanced-age people is the primary explanation for our numbers going down so dramatically. When this congregation was organized, I was a month short of sixty-five years old. Most of the people who attended initially were, on average, five years younger than or ten to fifteen years older than I. Now, eighteen years later, I am slightly over the age of the average member, although there are far more octogenarians and nonagenarians than there are septuagenarians or sexagenarians. We have almost no one in their fifties, and only one in his forties.
This is the smallest congregation I have ever served. My first congregation, in northern Wisconsin, had two hundred members and an attendance of 75 to 90 people. I then became an assistant pastor at a large city church in Chicago of three thousand members with an attendance at two services each Sunday of sixteen hundred or so. Next I was pastor of a church of two thousand members in northern New Jersey. Then we moved to Hilton Head in 1979, where the membership was 650. It grew to 1800 within nine years, and First Pres, both financially and with charter members, helped start another Presbyterian church on the island and also one in Bluffton.
This congregation and the one in Bayfield, Wisconsin are the only two churches I have served where I knew everyone by name. I have called on most of you in your homes. I know you folks better than I have known the members of any of the other congregations. I have been pastor here longer than in any other congregation.
However, you need to know that we are a congregation in serious decline. This became graphically clear to me when we had a new church directory printed a month ago, thanks to Karen Edwards, who also typed out our last directory, which was printed in March of 2017, a little over five years ago. Back then, we had 91 names in that directory, half of whom were quite active, and the other half not so much. Those percentages are more or less the same for every church I have served: the four where I was a called pastor and the four where I was an interim pastor.
Now we have 43 active members, of whom two-thirds are quite active, and the others not so much. What this means is that in just five years, we have lost about half of our members.
You may wonder what has happened to the half of the 91 who are no longer here. It is not because of any great wave of dissatisfaction. I did a statistical analysis. (With such small numbers, and knowing every single person, it wasn’t hard to do.) Eighteen of our folks moved away from the island. Fourteen are now home-bound; they are sufficiently debilitated that they are unable to attend services any longer. Fourteen who were active in 2017 are no longer active in our congregation, but most of them in no other congregation either. However, the largest grouping are the nineteen members of The Chapel Without Walls who died in the last five years: nineteen! Do you need a numerical index which illustrates beyond doubt that we are an old congregation? There it is. Those numbers explain our major loss of members.
Happily, 26 of the 91 active members in 2017 are still active. Also happily, 17 newcomers have joined us since March of 2017. Thus now we have 43 actives, and many of them come regularly to services. Most of the rest attend at least on occasion. But some are home-bound, and therefore are unable to attend.
Theologically and philosophically, a congregation which calls itself The Chapel Without Walls is making a statement by its very name. We do not seek to wall anyone either in or out. Everyone is welcome here, regardless of sex, theological leanings, color, social status, or sexual orientation. But also, from the beginning we did not intend to own our own building, and we never had any inclination to buy or build one.
There are advantages and disadvantages to that decision. First, we did welcome anyone who attended The Chapel Without Walls. And many of them stayed with us. We had to pay rent for only fifteen years, and not a mortgage. Because we never had an edifice, we never had any inclination toward an edifice complex. The disadvantages are that there were many occasions when we had to scramble to find someplace to hold a service when the place where we holding services told us we couldn’t hold a service on that particular Sunday, for whatever reason. We have held services in nine different locations in almost eighteen years.
We were in Congregation Beth Yam, the Jewish synagogue, for the longest stretch, and in The Cypress for the next longest stretch. Because our numbers were steadily declining, we left Beth Yam for The Cypress, in hopes that new folks from Cypress would increase our attendance significantly, which they did. But then COVID struck, and then we had to leave The Cypress. We have been told we can never return, because they have decided they will no longer host any religious groups. So then we went to the Island Recreation Center for three weeks, until COVID also drove us out of there. Then we were in Jarvis Creek Park for about eighteen months. At my prodding, the board somewhat reluctantly agreed to move inside, because I convinced them I thought we would not survive another winter in the park pavilion.
Due to the kindness and hospitality of the Island Funeral Home and its manager, Lawrence Melton, we have been here for nearly a year, at no cost. Frankly, in the providence of God, the generosity of the funeral home has allowed us to continue in existence, because we could not afford to pay the rent we had been paying. As unusual as it may be for any congregation anywhere to meet in a funeral home, we probably would not still exist unless many other islanders over the years ceased to exist. On the other hand, the Island Funeral Home made the funeral arrangements for the nineteen of our own who died over the last five years, and for others before that, so in a very small way we are indirectly repaying them for their extraordinary kindness to us.
On January 5, 2004, we held our first service. On January 6, 2024, we will celebrate our twentieth anniversary as a congregation. To be candid, I never thought about a twentieth anniversary back then, but I do now, because it is an important milestone.
On December 19, 2024, I will celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of my ordination, if I live that long. I have no reason at this time to imagine that I won’t live that long.
However, sixty years is a very long time for any preacher still to be preaching. I am increasingly aware of that. You would have no reason even to think about it, but I want you to know I am thinking about it.
The entire twelfth chapter of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians is devoted to his thoughts on the gifts God gives to all Christians, and how Paul understood those gifts to manifest themselves in institutional Christianity. He referred to the Church as “the body of Christ.” He was the first person to employ that term with that meaning.
Initially he said that all of us are the hands, feet, heart, and head of Jesus in the world. Symbolically, we are his “body.” But every Christian and every congregation is also part of “the body of Christ,” in the sense that we manifest Christ’s mission to the world; we are the ones who make it happen.
Being a Christian is not merely a one-hour activity on Sundays. It is a 24/7 operation for each of us to enact in our own way. The Chapel Without Walls has turned out to be the Church for Oldsters Who Are Learning to Meet the Challenges of Ever-Advancing Age. It is the congregation with which all of us currently have associated ourselves as members of the body of Christ. Paul explained the connection with these words: “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.”
According to the Gospel of Matthew (and only Matthew), Jesus once said to his disciples, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Mt. 18:20). Jesus seemed to imply that great numbers are not necessary for the Church (broadly understood and with a capital “C”) to survive. But no congregation can continue if it dips below a minimum number of adherents, and that number varies among the hundreds of thousands of small congregations throughout Christendom.
From its inception, The Chapel Without Walls evolved into a congregation of older people who offer the benefits of wisdom and age to one another. Now we need to have more members. You are a vital key to making that happen. New Chapelites can be any age, but because of our collective ages, any new faces who come through the door with you are likely to be relative oldsters, because you are an oldster, and maybe not even a relative one.
Invite open-minded, liberal, interested, and interesting people to come here, because that’s the kind of people you are. Among all of us, we know many hundreds of prospects. But it is up to us to extend the invitation. Our twentieth and twenty-fifth anniversaries depend upon it. And, as Jesus further said, “I tell you, lift up your eyes and see how the fields are already white for harvest” (John 4:35).
There are a lot of white-haired people out there who either stopped going to church years ago or who never went to church. “Go out into the highways and byways,” as Jesus said, “and compel them to come in.” Well, “compel” may not work, but “invite” may result in success. “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few” (Mt. 9:37). You are a laborer for God and Jesus Christ. Please contemplate the words of our closing hymn as you sing them. Come, labor on.