This weekend the wife and I are in the area of Pittsburgh, PA. We haven’t had a private get-away for several years now, and this came up as a good weekend to relax. So we went to some thrift and antique shops. Got a few trinkets for our sons, but nothing for ourselves. The time away was adequate in itself.
This afternoon we went down into Pittsburgh, on Penn, and walked through the market. I look at this and wonder if it is the agora of old. There are people. Lots of people. There are vendors on the street. Sometimes it seems almost as many of them as shoppers. But unlike the old world, there are no elders as sources of wisdom. No gate to the city. Nothing but commerce. It’s not even as rich as Ephesus, where the vendors at least invested in their pagan religions. The hedonists of today live for the moment.
What wisdom did exist in the past seems to have been turned into an historical reference. Of course the church still operates.
A wedding was in process as we walked past and I shot these photos.
But with all the activity outside the church, this or any other church just sits as a building, waiting for people to come in. Who aren’t coming in.
Now, like a television show, we flash back two weeks. When the Evangelical Free Church national conference was being held in Columbus we hosted. a pastor and his wife from a small town in Nebraska. It was a joy to have them. He was a Dallas grad from the early 60s, back when TEDS was still a quite young institution. We discussed, but only briefly and I wish we could have spend more time on it, the change of rhetoric in evangelicalism today.
We call it outreach. We talk about the unchurched. We no longer call it evangelism. We no longer refer to the unsaved or the lost. It appears that sociological description has become our prescription. It is any wonder that the agora is filled with people while the church is constantly becoming emptier and emptier?
(For those who care, all pics were shot with a Pentax K100D and the SMC Pentax-FA 28-200.)
June 26th, 2010 | 4:05 pm | #1
I think it is difficult to look at a picture of a crowd of people and decide they are hedonists, or pagans, or unbelievers, if, in fact, you are doing that. I dress nicely (and try to be fashionable at times), care about my appearance, do not wear religious jewelry, wear make-up, etc. If you saw me shopping at a mall (where I go infrequently), or at my job, or at a coffee shop, I may not look like a believer, but my faith and Christ are the foundation of my life. (You would need to talk to me to find this out, and I would not hide this from you at all.) I think it is always important to remember “… the Lord sees not as man sees; man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7). And I remind myself on a recurrent basis of this because it is very easy for me to look at someone and make the wrong assumptions.
June 27th, 2010 | 8:35 am | #2
alison,
My comment was not intended to read into individual lives, but into the character and behavior of the church and its response to the Gospel imperative.
June 27th, 2010 | 12:31 pm | #3
As a native Pittsburgher, I have to say that there are a lot more “old” things in the city than you may have realized. For starters, it looks like you were shopping in the Strip District. That is an area with a lot of history and a lot of nostalgia, and if you look hard enough you will certainly find “elders” hanging around. Western PA has one of the highest percentages of elderly people in the country.
As for our pagan gods, we have those too. We call them the Pittsburgh Steelers.
As for the empty churches, you’re visiting the wrong ones. The old historic buildings are the property of Catholics and mainline Protestants, both of which have a chronic difficulty filling pews. But if you move out into the suburbs, which is where most growth is nowadays, you will find newer church buildings full to the brim with people, because they are the property of Evangelicals, non-denoms, pentecostals, etc. On the surface, this may seem like an old-vs-new thing, and yes that can be a part of it, but that isn’t the whole story. It has more to do with how the mainline churches themselves have strayed from their roots into spiritual irrelevance.
June 27th, 2010 | 4:16 pm | #4
the Strip District
Well, we were down on Penn, s. side of the river. Between 15th and 21st streets.
As for our pagan gods, we have those too. We call them the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Just ask any Browns fan. :-)
the mainline churches themselves have strayed from their roots into spiritual irrelevance
That’s the principle.
Since we were staying at the Fairfield out on Neville Island (a really great Fairfield) we googled churches around the Pittsburgh area. The E Free looked like it was into relevance. The Mennonite church looked like it was into self-esteem. So this morning we went to the OPC church in Sewickley.
June 27th, 2010 | 8:05 pm | #5
My father works in Sewickley.
Not sure why those churches are trying to produce self-esteem and relevance. We get both of those vicariously through the Steelers.
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