By Lisa Bortner

As we maneuver through post-COVID times, we are finding that many Episcopal churches have lost membership and are struggling. However, at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Austin, TX, the opposite has been true. This church has actually blossomed and bloomed despite the pandemic. Father Zac Koons credits the movement of the Holy Spirit and economics for the increase in numbers. Let’s hear directly from Father Zac on how this transformation took place.

When you came to St. Mark’s in July 2018, did you feel God was calling you to certain issues? One of the reasons I was attracted to St. Mark’s was that it was not an “issues” church. There are churches that wear their political opinions on their shirtsleeves, and the fact that St. Mark’s was not that way was a big factor in why I was attracted to St. Mark’s in the first place. St. Mark’s is a people-first church.

Did you anticipate such a great increase in new members? To what do you attribute the growth? The easy answer is there are a lot of economic factors that gave St. Mark’s a tailwind for this time. The city of Austin is one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation. We are in a central neighborhood that is very desirable. With those two factors come a lot of new people, and with a lot of new people come a lot of new children.

My first job was to read the room—the room partly being the people that had already gathered at this church, but also the room being the wider community in which that church is situated. There was a lot of change happening in the community in which this church is situated, and we can either choose to see those changes as a threat or as an opportunity. We can either put the walls up or open the doors. I saw growth in the community and felt like we needed to become a place that could be hospitable to those changes. The challenge, of course, is not losing the core of your identity that brought you to where you are in the first place. That has been the big delicate balancing act. For me, the last five years or so have been trying to stay true to the inherited character of this place while also not being afraid of change, which is just another way of saying attempting to be faithful to the mission field that we have been given. We are planted in this neighborhood. We are charged with loving our neighbors. What better way to love your neighbors than to make your church a place to welcome them as well?

When you arrived at St. Mark’s it seemed that you put in a lot of energy to bring the day school into the church. Is that correct? That was a big part of it. It was clear to me that the school and the church needed a super-loving relationship for the strategic, long-term survival of the church. I felt like the day school was shorthand for how the neighborhood was changing. The day school was a small, little parochial kind of tucked-away neighborhood preschool, and all of a sudden it became a coveted destination and that was a consequence of the wider population. All of a sudden in this part of the city the demand for the day school exploded. It was a no-brainer to be known in the school, to be known by the parents, to be known as a nonjudgmental, non-threatening presence and see if they would come. And they came. (There is surely something about being a young priest, and people are not used to seeing a young priest and that does some of the work for you. I’m aware of that.)

When I got here, there were approximately three families with young kids and that’s the hardest part. If you don’t already have the three or four families with young kids, it is really hard to get to that place. It’s really hard to recruit the first few families because they have to be okay with going to a church with no other kids. Once you have that, you have something to build off of because every other new family that visits for the first time with little kids, you have at least one other family that you can point to and say, “Oh, I see you also have kids—why don’t you be friends?” Because that is what we all are looking for when we go to church. We want to be in a place where we don’t feel alone. We want to be known. And church is a wonderful place for creating intergenerational friendships and friendships that are in very different stages of life, but it is not usually the first thing on people’s wish list. They start by getting to know people like themselves who are in a similar life situation.

How did St. Mark’s decide to hold the 9:00 family service outside on the corner at the intersection where everyone passed by? Was it strategic or the Holy Spirit? I think it was both. I’m almost never right when I rely on my own intelligence, but it’s not to say that we didn’t spend endless hours as the staff troubleshooting and brainstorming what to do. Part of what was so exhausting about doing church through COVID was that we were reinventing the wheel every three to four months and we knew that we would never please everybody. We were kind of shooting in the dark, imagining where people were and how they were feeling. Of course, we weren’t seeing many people. We were trying to make decisions without the feedback loops that we normally get by being with people during Sunday or during the week.

I think it was a couple of things. There are mainly two that led to us doing that version of church outside. One was that COVID really was an existential wake-up call to almost everybody. Just in the sense that a lot of us live our daily lives distracted from the big questions. “I’m going to die someday; what does that mean? I’m going to die someday so am I really spending my time like I would like to spend it?” It just shook everybody up and I think naturally when that happens, people go to church or turn to God. When you are in the trenches you are more open to the possibility that God is real than when you’re at the office. So, I think there was a heightened interest in transcendent meaning-making because of COVID.

Simultaneously there was a heightened fear of being inside with other people. And so, we thought, why don’t we do this outside? I think the reason that we wanted to do a kind of family-style, casual, kid-friendly version of an outdoor service was that through the guidance of the Holy Spirit and the long brainstorming sessions of the staff, we got to a place where we realized this was an opportunity to do something different. We moved on from asking ourselves the question, “How can we most approximate indoor church outdoors?” We started to ask ourselves the question, “What could be better about church outside rather than inside?” The number one answer to that is that outdoors can absorb the chaos of children a lot more effectively than indoors can. And it is a much less intimidating space for people who are not comfortable going to church to try out church for the first time.

We live in a cultural moment in the big picture of history of the church, that the majority of the population in Austin, Texas does not identify as religious, but there is enough religion kind of latent in the water of culture that even if they individually do not identify as religious, most of them have some type of religious history, which is a recipe that equals they have some woundedness around church and religion in general. You don’t decide to go to church in the same spirit that you decide to try a new restaurant. It is a fundamentally different thing. If you decide to try a new restaurant you look online and see if the food looks good, does the vibe look like a vibe I would enjoy, does it have good reviews. It is something you could effectively make a decision about in two minutes or less. Deciding to go to church is a totally different thing. It takes so much for the average person that meets that definition. “I have some kind of woundedness around church and religion in my past.” You have to confront at least a bit of that past and decide it is worth the risk to let that kind of general trauma come up again.

It takes a lot of bravery for a lot of people to reenter the doors of a church because they have been hurt, and so this was something that lowered that barrier to entry. It still required for those people who visited us during that time a great deal of bravery to visit us, but I think that as those people were looking online, as those people were again awakened to a kind of existential terror that came up with COVID thinking “Maybe it’s time to try a church again,” as they were on the internet looking for different churches they might try, I think a lot of them tried us because we had an outdoor service that was family friendly. That’s like the least intimidating version of the item on the menu, so I’ll start with that, please.

Obviously when you arrived as pastor at St. Mark’s we were a very established church. We seem to be in a period of growth, especially with young families. Do you anticipate continuing to see that? Where we were is St. Mark’s was a faithful, small, neighborhood church. Where we are going, I hope, is that we will continue to be a faithful, small, neighborhood church. There’s the old philosophical puzzle called the Ship of Theseus. The philosophical question is: Imagine you have a wooden ship sailing from England to America, and on the journey you replace every single wooden plank so by the time it gets to America not one single plank is the same as when you left England. Is it still the same ship? I think the church is like the Ship of Theseus. It is a community always in motion and the people that make up that community change over time, but it is always the same community. It is a community in motion and a community that is rooted to the same geographical spot.

We are in the business of holding the Divine Service on Sundays and programming things around that. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We don’t have to be anything other than the church. I think it’s just about being faithful to the community around it, and because the community is changing, we are currently in a moment of more transition, more people jumping on board the ship than in the past, but I think in one hundred years from now, you’ll look back upon this season of change and transition at St. Mark’s and it will feel pretty unremarkable, and that’s a good thing. The only other option was to put the walls up and focus on who was here and double down on that community, and that community only ends in one way: everybody dies and you close the church and sell it  on Facebook. No church wants that. Everyone, when presented with the options, of course wants to live and grow.

The crucial question is: Can the church bear the wounds that change will inevitably bring for the future good of that community? It is not untrue to say there has been a lot of change at St. Mark’s since I have been here, but I don’t view myself as the agent of change. The change that has occurred here is a consequence of the wider change in the community and having a community that was willing to love that change rather than be afraid of that change. I view it as my job to try to be in the storm of it all and try to love and be faithful to everybody in the middle. I don’t see myself as a prophetic leader—get on board or get lost. It’s about having your finger in the air and trying to read where the Spirit is blowing.