I have heard many of my friends and acquaintances bemoan the decline of religion in our society. As I have visited other congregations in our area, I’ve witnessed firsthand their declining Sunday attendance. One of my friends, who is very active in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Waterloo said, “Families are smaller, and church doesn’t matter so much anymore.”

However, when I began to investigate this phenomenon, I found a more nuanced reality. I began to ponder the question, “What does religion look like in the Finger Lakes, today?”

Society is in constant flux, but it seems that with the influence of social media, our world is changing at a head spinning rate. If we start with the premise that religion is a manmade social institution that helps us make sense of a chaotic world by bringing us closer to a higher power, we can see how churches have changed and evolved over the years. We can see that churches are a reflection of our society and its evolution.

Religion has been the center of society since the beginning of time. It’s how humans try to make sense of the unpredictably of life. In my previous columns, I’ve discussed the importance of churches to our Central New York pioneers. When our pioneer ancestors settled this country, religion was the cornerstone of a family’s social activity.

So what has happened? Are our families less important to us? Of course not. But our society today is definitely different. The family dynamic has changed. We are no longer in a world dominated by men where half the population is excluded from participation.

When I was a little girl, it was still a time of strictly delineated roles for men and women. Growing up, my first experiences were with ministers that were all male. Their wives, while accomplished in their own right, walked in the shadows of their husbands and took pride in the service they did with their husbands. It was a time when, though men were supposedly running........

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