HANOVER — When Kyle Seibert started attending church in high school, it was mostly for social reasons: He was friends with other kids in youth group.
But something else took hold: He kept hearing about a God who loved him, no matter what he thought his shortcomings were or whether he thought he deserved that love.
“I kept going back and back and back,” Seibert said.
That led him to pursue a career as a pastor. In 2018, Seibert took the lead at Our Savior Lutheran Church and Campus Ministry in Hanover. He was 25, making him a bit of an anomaly among clergy, who traditionally would not step into leadership roles until they were much older.
“A few decades ago there was an understanding that new pastors would serve as associate pastors in a church where there were multiple pastors,” Seibert, 30, said. “Those expectations no longer apply because the world has shifted. The church has shifted. The larger culture has shifted.”
Seibert is one of a handful of younger clergy members leading Upper Valley congregations. As more clergy move into retirement, the younger generations are starting to fill those spots in a region where church attendance is lower than in other parts of the country. As newcomers to mainline churches, these young leaders aren’t as beholden to the old ways and are more open to strategies could lead to a revival.
New England is the least religious part of the United States, with Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine coming in at the bottom of a 2016 Pew Research Center Poll. Conversely, northern New England also has the oldest and fastest-aging population in the country. As congregations skew older, young church leaders are trying to maintain and expand membership and are facing financial challenges.
“I think you just have to embrace it and work in this weird, new time,” said Amy Davin, 35, who has served as pastor at First Congregational Church of Hartland, United Church of Christ, for a little over two years. Davin attended a UCC church as a child growing up in Salem, Mass., but stopped as a teenager. While attending Hampshire College, she found herself drawn to theology and religion.
“I just thought, ‘What can I do practically in this line of work?’ ” Davin said. “It all just kind of came back to me, how welcoming the church I grew up in was and I realized I’d taken it for granted.”
After taking a year off, Davin went on to earn her master of divinity from Harvard Divinity School and then spent six years as a hospital chaplain in Philadelphia.
“I knew I wanted to be a parish minister,” Davin said.
She started looking for roles through a process she compared to online dating: Davin created a profile and churches that were looking for clergy could view it and reach out. She connected with the Hartland UCC and loved the strong community feel.
“That’s one of the things that really drew me to this congregation,” said Davin, who lives with her husband in Hartland. “So much of Christianity, especially the roots of Christianity, are communal.”
Churches played a central role in everyday American life, forging social connections while hosting the essential services of worship, and baptismal, matrimonial and funeral rites.
That started to change in the 1960s, said Randall Balmer, an Episcopal priest and the John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College. Not all of the changes had to do with the counterculture movement: Some Protestant denominations were faced with a financial crisis.
“One of the things they did almost immediately was to cut funding for campus ministries, so they are not there on the campuses trying to draw students,” Balmer said. “When you don’t have that kind of continuity, it’s difficult to expect these students when they become young adults (to) … start going to church again when they’re out of college.”
Churches in other parts of the country, particularly the South, have fared much better: Evangelicalism continues to grow and recruit more members.
“Very often they don’t require seminary training for their ministers,” Balmer said. “They’re just ordained at a local level.”
Most congregations “formed and normed” in a world that no longer exists, said Seibert, who grew up on Long Island, N.Y., and did his religious schooling at Boston College and the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. Seibert and his wife live in Lebanon.
In most households, both parents work full-time, which can make it more difficult to fit religion into everyday life.
“We know we can’t do all the things we used to do in the ways we used to do them, so I think it’s causing us to question maybe more urgently about what is important about what we do, what is core, what is central and how do we do those things in new ways today,” Seibert said.
If someone wants guidance but can’t make it to the church, Seibert brings the church to them: He will visit with a medical provider during their lunch break at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, for example.
Ryan Gabel, who has been associate pastor at First Baptist Church in Lebanon for around two years, regularly meets with people at Jake’s Coffee Co., on Mechanic Street. The church currently holds services at the Masonic Lodge in Lebanon. The church, on School Street, was lost to arson in 2016 and a new one is under construction.
“This is my office,” Gabel, 35, said during an interview at the coffee shop where he was wearing a shirt that read “the church has left the building.” “Sometimes I have conversations with them about what I believe and the Gospel. And sometimes it’s just a chance for me to show somebody love and that I care for them and support them and I’m here for them.”
Gabel grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania and graduated from Mansfield University with a degree in liberal studies. He thought about a career as a teacher, but it wasn’t the right fit. He worked for a security company and served as worship leader for a church in upstate New York. While there, a pastor asked Gabel if he could pray over him. The pastor told him that God wanted Gabel to attend seminary to become a pastor.
“And my response was, ‘If you had any idea who you were talking to, you would not be saying this to me,’ ” Gabel recalled. “I was heavy into drugs, lots of addiction.”
Still, he followed the advice and applied to Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Hamilton, Mass. He remembered thinking “if I get in, then that’s God telling me to go, and if not, then OK.” A week later his acceptance letter came. It was life-changing.
It was also tough academically, and for a time he dropped out. Then, at the urging of his mother-in-law and family friends, he went back to school and finished his degree. Afterward, he started applying for jobs in Pennsylvania and farther south. Then, he got a call from Rick Pinilla, the senior pastor at First Baptist.
“I was trying to go one direction, and God had something totally different planned out, and that’s what happened,” Gabel said. He, his wife and their two daughters live in First Baptist’s parsonage.
He knew New England churches did not bring in the same number of people as in other parts of the country.
“People talk about how ministry in the north is very difficult, and I tend to disagree,” he said. “You go down south, and Christianity is still a really big part of the culture. One of the things that you run into is you don’t necessarily know who has genuinely given their life to Christ and who is at church on Sunday morning because it’s still the thing to do.”
In New England, people tend to be a bit more plain-spoken about their convictions.
“Here, you know exactly where people stand,” Gabel said. “And they’re not shy about telling you where they stand when it comes to their faith. And for me, I much rather prefer knowing where you stand.”
Gabel, Davin and Seibert pointed out that, at its roots, Christianity was about those smaller, more interpersonal connections. Over the summer Davin hosted “breakfast church” where congregants shared breakfast outdoors and held a low-key worship service.
“That’s really how Christianity started, really intimate, really quiet, really just lovely fellowship around a meal between people,” she said. “I want to bring a little bit of that back.”
Churches might need to reach out further to younger people. A generation has grown up since news broke about the Catholic Church’s cover-up of priests who abused children, for example.
“I think one of the things that I’ve noticed with, especially millennials, is millennials do not like disingenuous people. And they can smell it a mile away,” Gabel said. “And for so long, pastors have been disconnected talking heads that they don’t know, and that doesn’t work for me. They want to know somebody, to know that somebody’s genuine even if that person doesn’t agree.”
Gabel is honest with people about his past struggles with addiction. He talks to them about the starts and stops he had on his way to entering religious life.
“I tell people, half jokingly, half seriously, I’m probably the biggest sinner I know. It’s human nature. As far as I see it, I am no different than you,” Gabel said. “I have the same struggles that you have. I have the same desires that you have.”
Churches are rooted in tradition and with smaller congregations it can be difficult to keep those up.
Around 90 people regularly attend Our Savior Lutheran; around 60, the Hartland UCC; and around 50 the First Baptist Church in Lebanon.
“The demographics of New England generally are skewing older,” Balmer said. “The younger generation, the younger families are not taking their place in the churches.”
But that dynamic presents new opportunities. Since younger clergy do not have firsthand memories of when church membership was more common, they may be less inclined toward nostalgia and try to find different ways to move forward.
“We grew up in a world and culture in which God or church participation or belief or at least monolithic belief wasn’t a given,” Seibert said. “My understanding of culture is not that church is at the center of everything. I think we’re free from spending energy on fighting some culture wars that for us we’ve never won.”
For example, people used to get upset about youth sports being held on Sundays.
“I’ve never lived in a world without sports on Sundays, so my question is not how can we go back to the good old days … but how can we meet people where they are?” Seibert said.
Changes — whether to a hymn or the time of a service — often meet with a resistance attached to something deeper than stubbornness.
“There’s maybe grief there, or fear they won’t experience God in those same ways,” Seibert said.
That’s why any change needs to be accompanied by an explanation, Gabel said. Coming in and trying to radically change a church isn’t going to go over well with a congregation. Smaller, incremental steps are better.
But some churches exhibit a kind of openness that was uncommon decades ago.
“I think one of the biggest mistakes the Christian church in America made was demonizing the LGBTQ community. Again, a church may not agree with the lifestyle that you’re living, but for generations, the church honed in on the LGBT community … and berated them for … the life that they were living,” Gabel said. “At the same time, they were ignoring the husband who was having an affair on his wife. They ignored the parent who was beating their children, and they never talked about those things, but they wouldn’t hesitate to demonize and chase the LGBTQ community out of their church.”
Instead, Gabel said, people should be welcomed to a church whatever their identity and belief system is.
“If you want to come to our church on Sunday morning because you need some community, welcome. You are so welcome,” he said. “We are going to love you and we’re going to serve you how we can.”
Liz Sauchelli can be reached at esauchelli@vnews.com or 603-727-3221.
