Parishioners at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church received a welcome surprise on Easter Sunday, a surprise that helped them put their 100-year-old church’s history in perspective.
Suddenly adorning a courtyard leading to the sanctuary they found beautiful stained-glass windows dating back to about 1890.
The windows, commissioned in memory of George Kelly Dunlop, the Episcopal Bishop for Arizona and New Mexico, had been featured in the original Trinity Cathedral in Phoenix, but they didn’t fit when the new church moved to its present location.
Mmmm.
Whenever I read this sort of stuff — “And that connection to the past is vital as the church goes through a transition brought on by demographic changes in the predominantly Hispanic central-Mesa neighborhood. Many of the 200 families that belong to the church now live elsewhere in the East Valley, and a largely Latino congregation now uses the facility on Sunday afternoons.” — I smell a tad of revisionist history.
Reminds me of the debacle here in my town of St. Francis, which was a parish that hemorrhaged parishioners in late 03/04 [one guess why!] but whose losses were obscured for the longest by the sudden interest of the diocese in “Hispanic mission” which began at that parish, receiving diocesan funding to keep it all afloat.
A little research makes me even more curious. In 1998, St. Mark’s Mesa had 400 in average Sunday attendance. In 1999, ASA plunged to around 275.
That’s not “a transition brought on by demographic changes in the predominantly Hispanic central-Mesa neighborhood” — although it’s a nice try at spin.
So what happened?
Why did the parish lose more than 25% of its attendance in a matter of a year?