Joy Cusack––staff
When I was a child, my dad liked to entertain me with this nursery finger rhyme:
“Here’s the church,” he would say (bringing his fists together),
“And here’s the steeple” (up went his index fingers to form a pointy steeple),
“Open the door” (his thumbs opened wide),
“And see all the people” (his fingers interlocked and flipped over to reveal ten wiggling fingers representing the people).
At least that’s how I remember it.
Well, today, many Christian denominations, including our own, are wondering, “Where are all the people?” It’s an honest question that is causing some good soul-searching. Statistics say that church memberships, in general, are declining, and fewer people are attending churches and contributing to them financially. But as our feature article this month, “Healing, more than counting, the people” (p. 24), suggests, we might instead ask ourselves, “Are we healing”?
Because, of course, many people don’t necessarily make a vibrant church. Perhaps Jesus implied that when he said, “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20). What those two or three are doing in Christ’s name is more important than their small number. If they’re alive with the love of Christ, if they’re about the Father’s business, healing the sick and the brokenhearted, they’ll be too busy to count the number of people who come.
