Beach Town Churches' Attendance Comes in Waves

OCEAN PINES, Md. -- Pastor Mik Megary watched the clock in the elementary school gym tick to 9 o'clock. The Fellowship Alliance Church's Sunday service was supposed to begin, but the two dozen folding chairs, carefully arranged into three rows, were empty.

"This is really embarrassing," said Megary, a special education teacher who started the Christian missionary church in Ocean Pines seven years ago.

The church usually attracts about 10 people each week during winter and as many as 40 in summer, but Memorial Day weekend posed a challenge: A few of the regulars were out of town, and no tourists ventured over the Route 90 bridge.

"Well," Megary said to his wife, Karen, about 9:15. "I guess we'll wait until your mother gets here and then start."

Pastors at churches in beach towns such as Ocean City usually spend the winter ministering to small congregations of residents. But then summer hits and brings new challenges: fluctuating attendance, "summer parishioners" who want to feel connected to the church, parking headaches, visiting religious youth groups and an overwhelmingly casual dress code and attitude.

While catering to often larger congregations during the summer, pastors must also ensure they are not neglecting their core members. Each summer, Holy Savior Roman Catholic Church, located just blocks from the boardwalk, adds a Saturday evening service at a Methodist church in Berlin so that residents do not have to battle beach traffic.

"It's a 10-minute trip, but sometimes it takes me an hour and a half. It's much easier for me to go over there than for all of those people to come here," said Father John Klevence, who has worked at Holy Savior 12 years. "Ocean City is a small town, ultimately, and there is a good spirit of cooperation here. There has to be."

Several churches add extra services to their summer schedule to give people more options and prevent overcrowding. Large signs and banners outside the churches advertise these times in hopes of attracting even a few of the thousands of beachgoers.

Klevence says he's always delightfully surprised when he sees a row of teenagers attending church while in town for high school graduation celebrations, and in their honor he tries to keep his homilies short so they can keep to the beach.

"I always make a point of going up to them afterwards and asking, 'Whose idea was this?' " he said, laughing. "They usually always point to one girl or one guy who organized it. . . . It's nice for me because these kids didn't have to do it. Their parents aren't making them do it."

Starting Memorial Day weekend, the First Presbyterian Church of Ocean City bumps its traditional service from 11 a.m. to 10 a.m., and adds an 8:30 a.m. "casual service." At yesterday's casual service, the first of the year, more than two dozen people gathered for a concise, to-the-point service.

"It isn't very heavy. It isn't very structured," said Pastor Alex Ayers, who skips wearing a formal robe and doesn't care whether attendees wear their beach gear because "I don't think God is too concerned about that."

The beach is a strong source of inspiration for the Fellowship Alliance Church, which holds baptisms on the beach and organizes an Easter sunrise service at a yacht club. In summers past, church members have organized a weekly "Beach Church" at the Holiday Inn hotel that lasted less than an hour and didn't include a collection.

"Our whole purpose is for people to not forget God when they get to the beach," Megary said. "A lot of people sit on the beach and marvel at its beauty, but they don't always remember its creator.

At the sparsely attended service yesterday, Megary's mother-in-law arrived about 9:25 and the service began. "Even though we are a small group," he said in prayer with his two listeners, "we're going to lift up our praises."