Attendance rates of Andover houses of worship continue to fall short of pre-pandemic numbers, which has led to a push towards online programming, according to interviews with leaders from three faith groups in town.
While congregations have been open for in-person service for several years now, several Andover churches and synagogues are still not attracting the same numbers as before March 2020, when the pandemic struck and shuttered cities and towns.
“People’s patterns of engagement shifted,” said the Rev. Dana Allen Walsh of South Church on Central Street. “A regular worship attender… came like twice a month. Now, I’d say normal is like once a month.”
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South Church, one of the larger Christian congregations in Andover, lost a rough average of 60 of its approximately 190 in-person weekly worship members after the pandemic, said Walsh. That is a familiar story for both Congregation Beth Israel synagogue and St. Augustine Parish.
However, instead of worrying about participation rates, Walsh said she has pivoted and is trying to create more engaging religious programming for her current community.
“I try really hard not to see it as grief and loss,” said Walsh, “because there’s been so many good things that have come out of it.
“We’ve just had to be really creative, resourceful, and keep leaning into what’s possible and allow ourselves to let go of things… we might have done it before the pandemic,” she said.
‘New Norms’ For Worship
Viewing the pandemic as an opportunity to foster new norms rather than as a time of great loss in a faith community is a common theme among spiritual leaders in Andover. For instance, South Church, St. Augustine Parish and Congregation Beth Israel fostered online worship communities due to the pandemic lockdown, according to interviews with the congregations’ leaders.
“For some of our very elderly or incapacitated people, [live streamed services] seems to be a real wonderful thing, especially [during a recent]weekend when it was so snowy,” said Sister Madonna Kling of St. Augustine Parish. “It’s really been quite popular, so we have live streaming of weekday masses.”
The wider St. Augustine Parish lost around a couple hundred parishioners after COVID, but its numbers are bolstered by the community’s small virtual following, according to Kling. The church typically gains two or three new families per month, and Kling said attendance at St. Augustine has been “an upward struggle.”
At Congregation Beth Israel, online programming has been a lifeline for members of the synagogue who have moved away from Andover since the lockdown started.
“One of our congregants who used to be here in the Andover area now lives up in Maine, but she joins us pretty much every week,” said Jeff Tye, the president of Congregation Beth Israel. With the added web-based members in the synagogue, Tye estimates that Beth Israel gets four to five more members every event.
While not everyone has returned to their pre-pandemic houses of worship in Andover, religious communities say they continue to find new ways to engage their existing audience.
“The God I believe in is one who’s always creating, is always bringing goodness and hope into our world,” said Walsh. “I think faith wise, we should be the innovators more than anyone. We should always be leaning into what’s possible.”
This story was published as part of a collaboration between Andover News and the Department of Journalism in Boston University’s College of Communication. The student journalist is a member of Professor Meghan E. Irons’s Reporting in Depth class.