The Rev. Jess Felici looked out from her pulpit at her tiny flock.
“Our closing hymn comes from our green books, Number 492,” she said. The pianist struck up the opening notes. And the pastor walked right down the aisle and out the church door, leaving her congregants still singing without her.
She turned on her car. Drove down the gravel road until she reached the paved one. Took the hairpin turns down into the valley and back up the next mountain.
Forty-one minutes later, she walked through the doors of her next church, where the service was well underway. Still wearing her white robes, she waited while a congregant finished reading from the book of Psalms, then took over the pulpit. “I invite you to stand as you are able for a reading of the Gospel,” she picked up seamlessly.
Two churches down and one more to go on this Sunday for Felici.
Jess, 36, and her husband, the Rev. Jason Felici, 33, serve together as the pastors of five churches in one of the most isolated pockets of America. Their weekly acrobatics of military-precision timing and long-distance driving are what it takes to make Sunday church services happen in a place where churchgoers are aging, pews are getting emptier and church budgets are getting smaller.
That makes Appalachia much like the rest of the country when it comes to mainline Protestant churches.
Mainline denominations — the historically indomitable Protestant institutions that were the backbone of early American respectability, including Methodist, Presbyterian and Lutheran churches — are now on a precipitous decline.
From 2007 to 2014, according to Pew Research, the number of mainline Protestants in the United States dropped by about 5 million people, leaving just 14 percent of Americans — about 36 million — identifying with any mainline denomination.
One in every five American adults were raised in a mainline church. But less than half of them continue to affiliate as adults.
That has left churches, especially in rural areas, facing the tough question of how to keep serving the members who remain. Some churches simply close. Others merge. And in an increasing number of places, rural and even urban, pastors are bringing back an old-fashioned concept: the circuit preacher..READ MORE
