St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church

The New York Times

February 1, 2009
To Add Members, Church Subtracts Pews
By NICOLE NEROULIAS

WHITE PLAINS

WHEN the Rev. Gawain F. de Leeuw stands before his flock at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church here on Sunday mornings, he sees the pews as a quarter full, not three-quarters empty.

Five months after removing more than a dozen of the long, red oak pews — more than a third of those in the church — to bring the shrinking congregation closer together physically and spiritually, he is open to any other cost-effective ideas to make St. Bart’s a more welcoming place.

“Fifty years ago, everybody used to go to church,” Mr. de Leeuw, the rector, said, smiling at about 50 people gathered in his 22 remaining pews last Sunday. “The sense of obligation people had is gone, but maybe that’s a good thing. Those of us who gather here are here because we want to be.”

Such dogged optimism helps him and his congregation stay focused on a difficult task: bringing their 80-year-old church back from the brink. Once the spiritual home to more than 1,000 worshipers, St. Bart’s is down to a few dozen members and up to $300,000 in debt.

Their crisis reflects a larger trend: challenged by socioeconomic shifts, controversies over the ordination of women and homosexuals, and competition from other faiths and secularism, the Episcopal Church has lost more than one million members domestically from a peak of 3.2 million in 1967.

The denomination remains the third largest in Westchester, according to membership figures collected in 2000 by the Association of Religion Data Archives, but had lost nearly one-third of its members since 1980, while the numbers of Roman Catholics, Jews, evangelical Protestants and Orthodox Christians have grown.

By rearranging furniture, wearing name tags and warmly greeting visitors, the members of St. Bart’s are on the right track, said the Rev. Nicholas Lang, the rector at St. Paul’s on the Green in Norwalk, Conn., whose congregation has grown to 450 members from 50 in 15 years.

“The Episcopal Church is facing problems nationally, but changes have to be made on a local level, because that’s where people connect to a church,” he said of his advisory visits last year to St. Bart’s and six similarly struggling churches in Connecticut and New Jersey.

Those sticking it out at St. Bart’s say Mr. de Leeuw’s initiatives have begun to attract some younger families, bringing the weekly Sunday school and nursery program attendance up to a dozen this year. At their annual meeting last week, church members listened attentively to the rector’s requests for creative ideas to raise the church’s profile, ranging from potluck suppers to starting a motorcycle gang.

“We could call ourselves the Heck’s Angels,” said Bill Burmeister jokingly, of White Plains, a member for 17 years, who said attendance began to drop off because of leadership changes in the 1990s but has stabilized since Mr. de Leeuw became rector six years ago.

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