Real faith made clear in tragedy

Lots of us remember where we were when the planes hit the towers on 9/11. Do you remember where you were the next Sunday? If you’re like a lot of Americans, you were in church.

I was preaching at the make-shift truck stop chapel at the old Shell Truck Terminal out west of Tucumcari. We normally got between two and four drivers in there to join us. That Sunday morning at 7 o’clock we had close to 20.

I received a report that churches around America experienced, on average, about a 400 percent increase in Sunday morning attendance that weekend.

Maybe also, like me, you watched in bewilderment as federal congressmen from both sides of the aisle broke out, on live television, in a spontaneous rendition of “God Bless America!” Political leaders from the top down asked Americans for prayer, and no one responded by seeking to flay them alive in the media.

It was enough to make this simple man think a silver lining to the attack might be the turning back of the nation to God, in faith and repentance. It wasn’t long after that, though, the same church attendance reports were showing that the big surge lasted about two Sundays, and, in a couple of months, church attendance had settled in lower than it was before 9/11.

This is sad, but not shocking. By the time the book of Psalms was compiled, this kind of thing was so common it had become a meme. Psalm 78:34 says, rather cynically, “When he [God] killed them, they [Israel] sought him.” Literally just a few verses later, we see that this seeking for God was a sham, a lie.

Our instinct, after tragedy, is to look to the place from which we think we might be helped, even if we rarely look that-a-way otherwise. Once the immediacy of the threat has seemed to pass over us, we go back to looking at what we were looking at before.

It’s instructive to compare the national response to 9/11 to the response to the pandemic. There was no widespread increase in church attendance, not even for a week or two. In fact, once the lockdown order came from Santa Fe, less than 24 hours before scheduled Easter Morning services, churches overwhelmingly shut their doors without a whimper of complaint. Now that they’re open again, attendance has not recovered, generally.

No one turned to God, even in a fake show of repentance. They turned to experts. They put their hope in science, so called.

My point is merely to observe that, in two decades since 9/11, our unbelieving nation has become more consistent with its true faith, or lack thereof. We felt threatened, and we turned to our gods, as people always do. None of our leaders bothered with the expected, false display of Christian faith. Even church leaders instructed us to obey the secular gods.

The honesty, at least, was refreshing.

Whatever your personal, individual response to COVID-19 has been, let me urge you to turn to God right now in genuine faith. Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding.

Gordan Runyan is the pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church in Tucumcari. Contact him at:

[email protected]