At its heyday in the 1960s, more than 1,500 parishioners filled every seat at Zion. But membership at the historic church — a crucial meeting point for many during the Civil Rights Movement — dwindled over recent decades.
. But patterns of worship are shifting across generations: younger Black adults attend church less often than their elders, and those who attend are less likely to do so in a predominantly Black congregation.
Additionally, many Black working people had jobs deemed essential and were less able to work from home during the pandemic, raising concerns about exposing others in their often crowded households to the virus. Although his congregation has been welcoming to the LGBTQ community, Driskell said that historically that has not been the case for the Black church.
“For a people systematically brutalized and debased by the inhumane system of slavery, followed by a century of Jim Crow racism, the church provided a refuge: a place of racial and individual self-affirmation, of teaching and learning, of psychological and spiritual sustenance, of prophetic faith,” he wrote.
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