Mennonite Weekly Review

What happened to the Jews of Scottdale?

John Longhurst is director of marketing and sales for Mennonite Publishing Network and a member of River East Mennonite Brethren Church.

That question was on my mind when I came across an abandoned synagogue in that southwest Pennsylvania town. The building is now a private home, but its previous use is plain to see. Stenciled into the brick above the door are the words “Beth Shalom.”

I asked locals about the former place of worship, but nobody had much to offer. A Google search tuned up a Scottdale history site that said: “At 704 Arthur Ave. stands a building originally erected by the Evangelical Church and later used by the Jewish community. This building is no longer used by a religious institution.”

A little more research revealed there are hardly any Jews in Scottdale anymore — less than 1 percent of the population.

What happened? Nobody seems to know.

A few weeks later I attended an evangelical church in Winnipeg, Man. Once one of the largest in the city, today it is in decline. Only about 200 people now meet on Sundays in a sanctuary that holds about 800. Worse, it has almost no youth or young families.

A member told me that if dwindling membership didn’t put an end to the church in a few years, one large roof or furnace repair bill would do the job tomorrow.

That church is dying. Not that you can say it out loud. If there’s one thing Christians don’t like to talk about, it’s church death. But all around us, congregations are declining — and not just mainline churches, either.

It may be small comfort, but this isn’t the first time it’s happened, says Philip Jenkins, author of The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa and Asia — and How It Died.

He writes that while Europe was emerging from the dark ages, the church of the East had bishops in Persia and metropolitans in Turkmenistan and Afghanistan. By the seventh century, the church of the East was pushing deep into Central Asia and China.