Church Used to Always Be at Home: Now We’re Right Back Where We Started
Once upon a time congregations met only once a month. Now, most don’t. Here’s why.
When Willie Mae Boler was a girl growing up in rural Georgia, she only went to church one Sunday a month. The church, Allen Chapel Baptist, was founded by the Allen family, who lived nearby. It started with just about 10 people over 100 years ago, and the pastor only came ’round every few weeks. Allen Baptist was a “first Sunday church.”
The church down the road was a second Sunday church. And other churches, also with similarly small congregations, were third Sunday churches or sometimes second and fourth Sunday churches. However it was mixed in, church only occurred on the one or two days a month that the traveling pastor was present. Folks hardly ever attended worship service every single Sunday.
“It was a totally different environment then,” Boler explains. “We didn’t have as many cars. People walked to church. We looked forward to that one Sunday.”
Boler, now 70, fondly remembers attending her first Sunday church and sometimes going to the second Sunday church, if time permitted. But a few decades later, with Black and Brown people migrating to cities, or to even more densely populated country counties that…
