On paper I’m still a UCC “Church” member. Haven’t attend in ~10 years.
Back in 2005 or so, it was a thriving congregation. Had 2 worship services, early with maybe 50 people and a later one with Choir and Sunday School with 100-125 + 20-40 kids.
Now, they are down to one service with normally under 50 in attendance. Often times the only Sunday School child is the Pastors daughter.
Due to a fire in 2010 so so, they have a new larger sanctuary, multi-purpose room, kitchen, meeting room plus the older office and Sunday school building that was saved by the FD. In May 2021 when the state dropped all Coof mandated they continued to mandate masks, canceled all non-worship events like church supper/fund raisers, well into 2022.
Anyway, they are/were gonna try to hire a consultant as they have realized each year they are pulling more funds from the endowment then they make on investment income, even before Biden’s stock market. They estimate 5-8 years before the endowment runs out and they can’t pay utilities. Yes, the endowment now paying for electricity, gas, etc.
I saw on their FB a while back how grateful the head minister was to sell the former office building they had and move in to a single leased floor in anther building.
I suspect it will be in the next 3-5 years you will begin to see local congregations run out of money and as a stop gap probably try to merge to keep them selves alive a few more years.
Get woke, go broke.
That’s quite a collapse. It’s a shame, too, because people once considered it worthwhile to go there. The old-fashioned liberal churches seemed pretty benign, and people could deal with them, but they lay down the foundation for the crazy stuff.
Freeper “lightman” referred me to an old Evangelical and Reformed Church hymnal, which I looked at on Internet Archive. The various prayers and services in there were beautiful and theologically-sound. It occurred to me what a different world we would have if the mainline Protestant churches hadn’t apostasized.