The pew that used to be full
By Ruthanne Pilcher, Contributing writer · · 2 min read
A woman wrote in January to say that she raised three children in the church, that all three were baptized and confirmed and sang in the choir, and that none of the three has been inside a church in ten years except for her husband's funeral, and that she sits in the pew they used to fill and does not know what she did wrong.
I will tell her what I have seen from the office, and then I will tell her what I think, and they are not the same thing.
What I have seen
Our membership rolls have about four hundred names on them and about a hundred and forty people in the building on a given Sunday, and the gap is mostly the children of the hundred and forty. This is not a problem with your family. It is the shape of nearly every congregation I know of in this part of the country, and the women who sit in half-empty pews on Sunday are sitting near other women doing the same, and most of them have not compared notes, because the subject is shameful, and it should not be.
I have also seen some of them come back. Not many. A few, in their forties usually, after a death or a baby or a divorce, sliding into the back row like they are not sure the door still works for them. It does. I have opened that door at a quarter to eight on a Sunday for nineteen years and the lock has never once cared who was on the other side of it. Nobody makes a fuss. The ones who come back almost always say the same thing afterward, which is that their mother never stopped asking them to come and they never stopped saying no and that somewhere in there the asking became the thing that held the door open.
What I think
You did not do anything wrong, and I would like you to stop looking for it, because the looking is a kind of pride; it assumes the outcome was yours to produce. It was not. You gave them the thing. They have it. What they do with it is between them and the Lord, and he has more patience with your children than you do, and more time.
Keep asking. Do not nag, which is asking with a scorecard. Ask the way you would ask them to dinner, which is to say with the assumption that they might come and the knowledge that they might not, and set the table either way.
And sit in the pew. The pew is not empty. You are in it.