The tide of population ebbs and flows. We cannot get the people … in our churches for they do not remain long enough and so we have to do the best we can. Moreover, the community is no longer a community where neighbors know neighbors. To overcome this tendency I have striven in vain. We have shared the general national and social tendency toward no church attendance. A majority of people … attend church only occasionally. Many of them do not go to church at all. The national phenomenon which depleted our local congregations has defied solution. I suppose people do not go to church because they do not want to. Their children will unfortunately inherit their neutral attitude toward religion or carelessness in regard to it.
--Pastor McGuffey, St. James Episcopal Church, Newtown Register, November 20, 1911
