Dear Frozen Chosen:

For the past hour or so, a little committee of nine Fahrenheit degrees has assembled around my backyard thermometer. They show little sign of inviting another into their club. This is somewhat annoying, as I have attempted to continue my morning dog walks (only these days without a dog). In the absence of a cold nose nudging me towards my boots, I have little incentive to head out on a morning with such poor temperature attendance, so I’ll wait a bit to see if more degrees arrive to make my participation in the great outdoors a little warmer. That’s the funny thing about calefaction—the more the merrier, until there are too many and somewhere in August it’s a crowded thermometer that keeps me inside.

A few weeks ago, I found myself back in Peotone for the funeral of my former organist. A dozen or so former members of the Presbyterian church inquired about the good folks of La Grange Presbyterian Church. First Presbyterian Church of Peotone has closed, and the congregation merged with the much larger church in Manteno. The building has been repurposed as a single-family home by a local builder who believes he can sell for $650,000, an unlikely proposition for a house in town without a garage or off-street parking.

Of course, the conversation turned to the size of my current congregation. I resisted boasting of our Easter attendance of nearly 200 and settled on a more honest weekly average of just under 100. “Wow!” they responded, “That’s a big church!” Even merged, Community Presbyterian Church in Manteno huddles around three dozen on Sunday, but that’s a significant increase from our average Peotone attendance of around twenty. “If you and your spouse come and visit our church, you’ll increase our attendance a full 10%,” I used to say by way of invitation.

Numbers are squishy measures of things. They need context for one to understand their content. In consulting with dozens of congregations over the years, I never found a church that thought they were in the Goldilocks zone of ‘just right’. Most thought they were too small, which usually meant they had a budget that exceeded the generosity of their current membership; but their financial expectations had been set years before by a much larger congregation, and now they were facing the tyranny of what municipal planners call ‘legacy costs’. Occasionally I encountered church pillars who thought their congregation had gotten too big. Usually, they were lamenting the loss of their own control over congregational meetings that could now out-vote the priorities of their extended family which once held sway over every decision.

As I track our attendance records at FPCLG, I sometimes wonder what I’m actually trying to count. The saints of our church who in 1963 expanded the Sanctuary to its current capacity of around 280 were ridiculously short-sighted. They grossly overbuilt for our needs, and while the sweeping verticality of our worship space is inspiring, it’s a lot of volume to heat and air condition. But we’ve been blessed; the current giving of our friends and members is more than sufficient to meet our expenses, legacy or otherwise. Even on a low attendance Sunday, we never would have fit in Peotone’s sanctuary, even less so now that it’s been converted into an open-concept living space, which I find to appear very cold. (See here for listing.)

Attendance tells us nothing about the true warmth of a room. As I glance again at my thermometer, it appears that the band of nine has invited one more member to its exclusive club of Fahrenheit. Things could be worse; the same temperature at my sister’s place in Canada would be way less than zero.  

Musing over what counts, I remain,

With Love
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor