Summer Church

Parish parking gets easier in July

There’s a specific kind of Sunday that happens in July. The parking lot has space. You recognize everyone without having to think about it. The organist is on vacation, so there’s a substitute who plays “Be Thou My Vision” just slightly too slow or maybe a little too fast, and nobody minds.

It’s not a lesser version of real church. It’s a different kind of Sunday with different rules. When there are forty people in a space built for two hundred, the air changes. People aren’t performing quite as hard. The kids can wander a little. The peace tends to go a little longer, because people stop and talk a wee bit longer.

I’ve heard rectors describe August as the month they get to be pastors. Less programming and fewer moving parts. They can sit with someone after the service without one eye on the clock.

Summer also shows you who your core might be. The people who show up when they could be at the beach, when the choir is down to six voices, when the coffee hour is a box of store-bought cookies, those people are your church. They’re just there. That’s worth noticing.

I also know what summer can feel like in a congregation that’s already small or struggling. When your regular Sunday is fifty people, losing a third of them for two months isn’t charming. It can feel like another proof that you’re shrinking, and the summer rhythm that reads as cozy in one parish reads as alarming in another.

What summer reveals, in any congregation, is what you’re there for when there’s no performance incentive. The Prayer Book doesn’t change in July. The summer congregation praying in a sanctuary that’s a little too warm is doing the same thing as the Easter crowd in their Easter clothes, and maybe more deliberately.

There’s something I’ve noticed about people who show up in summer that you don’t always see the rest of the year: they talk to each other differently. The smallness creates a closeness that’s welcomed. You end up next to someone you’ve nodded at for a long time and now hear what they’re carrying right now. The full Sunday crowd doesn’t always make room for that.

If you’ve been showing up this summer, it counts. And if you’ve been away, the door’s open. September will be here before you know it, so enjoy this time and space with however few.