More than 130 years ago, a group of people decided to build a church along a main thoroughfare in a small town I now call home. The land and lumber were donated, and the faithful soon gathered under kerosene lamps. In the following decades, a stout, red-brick church came to life to replace the original wooden structure.
For about a century, the brick church served as a center of congregational life. Newspaper clippings show the church was, for some decades, well engaged in the community, holding events and sending singers and ministers out to other churches.
When I moved to town, the church stood like an aged sentinel, its brick worn, the paint peeling, but the tired building remained home to a dwindling congregation. A few years ago, the congregation of perhaps two dozen people decided its time had come. The estate sale included all the things of church life: pulpits, religious art, pews, hymnals, pots, pans, and children’s toys. The building and property were sold to the technical college next door.
In its lifetime, the church had lived through dramatic change – from horseback to jet travel; through world wars and terrorist attacks; and from hot-metal type to artificial intelligence. Generations of families had run through the church with baptisms, weddings, and funerals.
Now the church had its memorial, and the congregation had dissolved, with plans to merge into something new with a different location and mission.
The property still held memories, though: a place where congregants had worshipped, celebrated, and grieved; where they had given toward a mission that played out in that brick building.
The college tried for a couple of years to hold classes in the old building, but administrators said years of deferred maintenance made it untenable. Over the belated cries of a small group of preservationists and former church members, the college moved to demolish it and move on.
While I don’t celebrate the closure or demolition of a church, I wonder: What was left to preserve?
The congregation was gone, the mission had moved, but the bricks remained.
The memory of place and the things that happened there are powerful, but perhaps we ask too much of buildings when we ask them to hold what only people can carry.
