BERNE — Most of the old  churches still stand, including some that offered up their first prayers when America was an idea that had yet to be thought, let alone realized.

Some of them, though, are closed.  Some are barely hanging on. All are adapting as best they can to the internet age, when community, friends, and church have all undergone some re-defining.

Outside of the Bible Belt— and some thriving megachurches — that description might apply to much of rural America, especially in the Northeast, with Berne and Knox being no exception.

There is no megachurch in either town. There is no Roman Catholic church in either town or in any of the Hilltowns — St. Bernadette in Berne merged with St. Lucy’s in Altamont in 2010. Its former building is now the Berne Public Library.

There is still, however, the First Reformed Church of Berne, founded in 1763. Its present church building was erected in 1830. It has had the same pastor for the last 40 years, Bob Hoffman. He says 25 to 30  people attend its Sunday service.

There is also, a little way down Helderberg Trail from First Reformed,  Helderberg Lutheran Church, where “Pastor Wendy” Cook has been the minister  for four years. Built only a few  years after First Reformed, its Sunday attendance is about 35.

Over in Knox, the Thompson Lake Reformed Church has Timothy VanHeest as its pastor. His church is “yoked” to the Knox Reformed Church, and he ministers to that congregation also. He says the Knox church gets about 45 worshipping on Sunday; Thompson Lake about 20.

The Thompson's Lake Congregation took root in 1826. Its  white clapboard church at the intersection of  routes 157 and 157A was built in 1855.  Knox Reformed Church was organized in 1842, and the church was built in 1902-3.

These are churches with staying-power.

Another Knox church, Rock Road Chapel, is of more recent vintage, founded in 1964 by Jay Francis, who at age 71  remains its pastor. It welcomes 75 to 100 people to Sunday worship. Francis says his church could be described as “evangelical/charismatic, but I don’t want to be put in a box.”  The other churches belong to national denominational groupings.

This fits a national trend of evangelical and non-white churches growing while attendance at mainline churches drop. A recent Gallup poll found 27 percent of New Yorkers attend church weekly.

The Gallup poll found weekly church attendance highest in Utah, at slightly more than half, followed closely by four southern states — Mississippi,Alabama, Louisiana and Arkansas. Vermont, at 17 percent, had the fewest weekly church-goers. Four other New England states, as well as Oregon and Washington, had a quarter or fewer of their residents attending church regularly.

 

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Have a question?

This Sunday at 6 p.m., the pastors of all four churches will gather at Berne Reform Church Friendship Hall to answer “God questions.”  They hope to get a good mix of churchgoers and members, as well as some persons who belong to no church — people with questions  about God, the Bible,  and spirituality that they would like answered, or at least discussed, in an informal setting. Maybe even some young people.

Jeffrey Van Iderstine, a Thomson Lake Reformed congregant, said he came up with the idea of such an event to “engage people in the community who may or may not attend these churches or any church for that matter.”

He would like to see it happen yearly.

VanHeest  sees it as an “opportunity to make connections with people.”

It’s not the first time the churches have banded together. They have had joint Lenten services, Hoffman said for as long as he has been here, since 1976. The two Berne churches are good neighbors, too. The two pastors cover for each other when one is away.

Pastors of three of these churches ( Pastor Wendy Cook, the pastor at Helderberg Lutheran, was out of town and interviewed by phone later) met with The Enterprise recently to talk about the role of churches today and the challenges they face.

They also wanted to talk about how they are taking up the task of engaging people — minds and souls — in our distracted age.

They described  how organized religion has declined in the area and how the sense of community has, too. They spoke of modern life and its secular nature.

And of how their own work has changed over the years.

Spiritual hunger

VanHeest thinks there is a “general larger-than-us trend in our culture, which is the spiritual, but not religious, mindset...A lot of the spiritual needs of people could be met by churches if they ask a few questions, and see how the church is compared to what they remember maybe from a vacation Bible school program in the ‘60s.”

How does this contemporary spiritual need manifest itself, if not by church-going?

“I see it in funerals,” Hoffman said. “People always die and we get called.”

He thinks that people who never come to church want a church funeral for “comfort and hope.”

Times of crisis tend to bring people back to church, all three pastors agreed. It’s a needs-related phenomenon.

“The average person,” Francis said, “doesn’t have much interest in God until there’s a crisis.”

 VanHeest recalled how he had once had a new family join the Thompson Lake church, and — unlike some newcomers — they stayed for good. “They had three crises subsequently and that really locked them in,” he said.

But though a need for solace or tradition may drive people back to church, the  role of the churches in filling those needs may be fading. The churches are performing fewer marriages and  funerals, and even those they do perform, says Francis, are often for families who don’t attend any church.

A glance at this newspaper’s obituaries from week to week will show how many people now have funeral services conducted in the funeral home itself rather than in a church.

Another trend Francis notes is the increasing practice of cremation, about 40 percent he estimates of those buried from his church.

But the most worrying trend, say the pastors, has been the “gradual but consistent” fall-off in church attendance over the last four decades.

Francis said, “In Berne and Knox there are maybe around 6,000 people.   but among our three churches, you have maybe a total of 300 members. Some people drive out of the area to go to church, but not that many.”

According to the 2010 federal census, the most recent, Knox has 2,692 residents and Berne has 2.196 for a total of 4,888. Using the state average of 29  percent being under the age of 18, the two towns have about 3,470 adults. If an estimated 300 of those are regular church-goers, that is about 9 percent of the total adult population.

A “post-Christian” place?

Francis  cited a study by the Barna Group that identified the most “post-Christian” cities in the United States.     

The evangelical Christian polling firm conducted phone interviews over a seven-year period, asking respondents about 15 factors Barna deems to define Christians — ranging from belief in God and commitment to Jesus to attending church and donating money to a church; if five out of 15 factors weren’t met, that person was considered “post-Christian.”

Albany came out on top, as the most post-Christian city in the country.

“It’s almost as bad as the city [Albany]  up here,” he said. “We have a secular society in New York. Here the cultural things is not to go to  church, in the Bible Belt it is to go to church.”

Does the presence of the families in the Hilltowns that go back for generation provide churches a more solid  bedrock?

“The old of the old are still coming, but the new of the old families not so much,”  “Francis said.

Nor, thinks VanHeest, is it “a matter of newcomers diluting a religious culture here,” he said. “There really aren’t that many newcomers.”

He sees the drifting away of young people, away from the Hilltowns or simply toward the distractions of modern life, as being the primary forces behind the continuing decline of church culture here.

The “religiously unaffiliated” now account for 23 percent of American adults, up from 16 percent in 2007, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center analysis; this is largely due to the Millennial generation, many of whom say they do not belong to an organized church.

VanHeest also sees sociological change behind the reduced role of churches in people’s lives, especially the erosion of communal places and events. He’s says the Knox church used to  put notices in the post office and general store. Both are gone now.

Something lost

“We don’t have a community gathering place, a place of intersection….People are not making a destination of anything in the town, except maybe the Knox transfer station,” VanHeest  said.

“I have always said someone should open a hot dog stand there,” Francis joked, referencing the busy town dump. “They’d make a lot of money.”

“Probably a lot of people,” Francis said,”are more attached to their Facebook friends than to the people who live next door.”

Berne still has a post office but Hoffman says the bulletin board there is so overloaded that he doubts many people stop to peruse it.

All agreed, however, that the recently revived Fox Creek Market in Berne is providing a needed community gathering place,

Francis thinks community may be making a comeback, with things like popular farmers’ markets being a sign people want  to be with others.

Hoffman is encouraged by the good turnout for the Music in the Park series  sponsored by the Berne Public Library.

“The music was background the other night  to all the different conversations that were taking place. It was fascinating,” he said, to see people reconnect with each other.

Once centers of the community, do churches still play that role? Or can they again?

The First Reformed Church  has had a monthly dinner, for seven or eight years, for anyone who wants to come. It’s  called NEAT (No Eating Alone Tonight). Hoffman says,”It was initially targeted for people who would normally be alone. But little by little, we’ve had couples come and say ‘it’s just the two of us at home, can we come?’”

“We’ve been blessed to have a lot of youth volunteers to help us serve,” he said.

Helderberg Lutheran does something similar, a monthly breakfast.  Rock Road Chapel hosts a weekly breakfast for 30 to 50 people.

The needs remain

One of the most striking instances of a return to a communal feeling that was once uniquely provided by churches occurred when a 12-year-old boy was buried not long ago from the Knox church, with Hoffman officiating because VanHeest was away at the time.  An overflow crowd attended, some looking on through the windows of the church.

“They were there because they had a need,” VanHeest said. “And also because they wanted to be together.”

The boy was “active in many different places,” he said. “He had all these connections...and when people from them all came together, the church can’t even hold them.”

He notes that activities that used to “be subsumed in the church” are no longer. Schools are centers of communal life now, especially through sports, he said.

But no matter how different modern life may be from the times when churches were all-important,  “People have the same needs they’ve always had…. People still need to know their identity, to answer the question of who am I”, VanHeest said.

“They still need to know their destiny, where am I going....What does this all add up to….Our need  for comfort, peace, and hope is eternal,” he said. “But people get false answers to real needs. There are just easier answers out there than to go to church.”

“If  a person feels lonely on a Friday night there’s a spiritual need there for connection..Maybe  at the end of a week s person feels, ‘ I have invested myself, but I don’t see any result from it,’” he observed.

“The easy thing is to go to a bar..or watch a movie...or connect with somebody on the internet...These are self-medicating solutions, because they don’t provide what God alone provides.”

“Unless we're in a crisis, we find our own answers,” he said.

What’s the right question?

Francis described a restless discontent that affects many people:  “People can’t just sit in a chair and think these days….They always have to be doing something….There’s an uneasiness.”

He says people see things in term of right and wrong rather than life and death.  

People should be asking themselves, Francis maintains,  “What will contribute to your life or the life of someone else? What are words or actions  that will contribute to death or despair?”

VanHeest  sees the anger that erupts at town board meetings as a sign of such discontent, of people being upset over minor things  rather than the big issues of life.

Their work, the pastors suggested, is not getting any easier.

“Years ago, people took more responsibility for their spiritual life.” said Francis. “And it was easier to pastor that kind of person. But now it’s more common for people to come to you empty.”

Cause for tears

Francis  says he wants to continue to pastor as long as he can. “I love God and I want to see His kingdom extended,” he says.  “But as I go on and I see all the need that is out out there, I am more a man of tears.”

The needs are many and sometimes acute, Francis  says. Needs like a family’s son back from Afghanistan, “all tattooed up,” still having nightmares. Or the dying elderly man who needed comfort at the end, after never attending church as an adult.

“He was  in a position when he not in control anymore after being all his life in control,” recalled Francis. “He went in peace.”

Beautiful landscapes and uncrowded conditions locally don’t keep out the general ills of modern society, the pastors said.

“Drugs are  more prevalent that you would think up here,” Francis says. “Alcohol is more prevalent.”

“If you went through the last two years of Altamont Enterprise articles,” VanHeest said, “you’re going to find rape….death by cop….a family situation that got so out of hand that a man set fire to the house.

“The waters are peaceful but every so often there is something that raises the reality to our awareness,” he said.

“You see the messes people make of their lives, and I have a heavy heart,” Francis said.

VanHeest said he feels the same way.

“There were times when I could relate to  Jesus when he was starting out and things were moving forward and there was no opposition. That’s a young man’s picture...Later in his life, Jesus stood looking out over the city of Jerusalem...He cried, not out of frustration but for its people who had not noticed the opportunities,” VanHeest said of spiritual paths not taken.

“My only frustration,” Hoffman said, “is not having enough time to do all the things that need to be done.”

New way to reach people?

Turning to their hope for the Questions event on Sunday, VanHeest said, “One thing I have learned is that it doesn’t help much to provide answers when the questions haven’t been asked.

“We’re trained to be an answering dispenser,” he said. “But what Jay said is true, people come and they don’t even know how to phrase the question.”

“This event Sunday  is really exciting,” he said. “You can try to run around and provide answers but that doesn’t work. The seed won’t take if the soil  isn’t prepared.

“This event allows people whose soil is ready for some good seed to ask their questions,” said VanHeest.

He and the other pastors hope it will be a new way to reach people.

“It could be a way to hit people from an angle different from the way we hit them every week...People will be asking the questions, instead of just waiting to get answers,” VanHeest says.

He believes also that sometimes the answers offered in church may  not be the answers to the questions people really  have.

There’s humility required on the part of these pastors in staging such an event.

“Sometimes people think we have a special connection to God,”  Hoffman said. “But we don’t, not any more than they do.”

Demystification

Pastor Wendy Cook of Helderberg Lutheran would probably have agreed with Hoffman had she been at the Enterprise roundtable.

She said later, speaking of the Questions event Sunday, “I hope we demystify what church is so that people will feel welcomed. I don’t care if  it’s my church or another that they decide to try.”

The important thing, she said, is to get them to church.

She also said of the event, “I have no expectations, but I am full of hope. The Holy Spirit works in amazing, sometimes very mysterious, ways.”

She said her church has “very faithful committed members.” But almost all are middle-aged are older.

“We are representative of what’s happening,” she said of her congregation, which has only one young family. “We’re normal.”