Reigniting St. Alban's in Newtown Square

When I first visited St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Newtown Square in March, there were 56 people in the pews. The rector, the Rev. Matthew Dayton-Welch, pleased with the attendance, jokingly notified the congregation that it was not Easter yet.

This church community has come a long way, facing an unfortunately common problem. With an average Sunday attendance nearing 200 from the 1980s into the early 2000s, the lifeblood of the church slowly dwindled to a weekly attendance as low as 25 over the course of the following decade. In 2017, when the parish was beginning to come out of the long period of decline (in part due to considerable support from St. David’s Episcopal Church in Radnor) Dayton-Welch was called to come on as rector.

Entering his first post as rector, Dayton- Welch arrived with an open mind, excited about what St. Alban’s had to offer: location and community. More than location, the parishioners were the real draw. The small congregation remained passionate about supporting one another and the outreach ministries that have been central to St. Alban’s for decades. “The church was eager to grow, but not beholden on how to grow,” Dayton-Welch explained. “As long as we tried it together, both they and I were up for anything. ”Despite going through a period of decline, the fire of the Holy Spirit was never fully extinguished. “The message I got from them was that they wanted to be a church, not a community center with a chapel, but an honest-to-God church that did church things: quality worship,