{"id":19,"date":"2015-03-01T23:32:50","date_gmt":"2015-03-02T04:32:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/practicalmattersjournal.ecdsdev.org\/?p=19"},"modified":"2015-10-10T12:08:06","modified_gmt":"2015-10-10T16:08:06","slug":"i-have-a-brick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pmcleanup.ecdsdev.org\/2015\/03\/01\/i-have-a-brick\/","title":{"rendered":"“I Have a Brick From That Building:” The Deconsecration of Highgate United Church"},"content":{"rendered":"

Download PDF: Stephenson, I Have a Brick<\/a><\/h4>\n
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Abstract<\/h3>\n

Church closure is a prominent phenomenon of the religious landscape in Europe and North America. Demographic and financial pressures, along with cultural changes, have led to the closure of scores of churches in recent years. Christian denominations are struggling to practically manage and pastorally and liturgically respond to church closure, deconsecration, and reuse of church buildings. This paper involves a study of the deconsecration of a small-town, rural church. The author argues that utopian theology and theory is ill-equipped to meet the challenges of deconsecration, since lived religious life, perhaps especially in small communities, is deeply rooted in a locative sense of and attachment to place.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Introduction: Mike’s Carpet Shop<\/strong><\/h3>\n

We can imagine ritual sites as having life histories. After they are conceived, they grow and change; often, they die. Sadly, the latter is often the case due to lack of donations and contributions to the buildings of worship. Perhaps the building is converted for use by another tradition, or adapted to other uses. Parts may be recycled, or the site may be abandoned, left to rot and ruin; perhaps the site is demolished and cleared for new construction. Even when the transformation of places of worship seemingly moves in the direction from sacred to secular, there may be residues of the sacred, in the form of cemeteries or stories, or a change in how the sacred is understood.<\/p>\n

Mike’s Carpet Shop, in Armley, West Yorkshire, England is one such place. Built as a Primitive Methodist chapel, in 1905, it is one of several churches in Armley that in recent decades has become something other than a church. The situation in Armley is not unique. In the past generation, and at a quickening pace, a combination of demographic shifts, cultural dynamics, and economic pressures has led to the closure of scores of churches across North America and Europe; we are going to be visiting one such church shortly, Highgate United Church, located in southwestern Ontario. Cases of church closure are widely reported in the news; photographers and filmmakers are beginning to explore the emotions occasioned by closure and demolition; public and private institutions of heritage and culture are launching preservation and conservancy projects to save threatened church buildings; and Christian denominations are struggling to practically manage and pastorally and liturgically respond to church closure, deconseration, and reuse.<\/p>\n

Though sacred space is now an interdisciplinary subfield of study, church closure has received little attention.[1]<\/a> In my current research, I am examining the phenomenon of church-closure at a number of sites chosen to illustrate the range of transformations taking place. The approach is to use ethnographic and visual methods, focusing on the ritual and performative events occasioned by church closure, collecting stories from congregations and community members, and working to better understand the issues involved in the reuse and transformation of sacred sites. My premise is that such occasions offer valuable insight into aspects of contemporary Christianity and the dynamic interactions between religion, culture, and the public sphere. The study of church closure raises a number of theoretical and theological ideas and issues focused not so much on matters of doctrine and belief as with questions of place and memory, respect and shame, success and failure. The reactions to and handling of church closure is a window on to the nature and meaning of “place” to practicing, contemporary Christians.<\/p>\n

\"Cover<\/a>
Reproduced with Permission<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I stumbled across Mike’s Carpet shop many years ago, on the cover of Steve Bruce’s book God is Dead.<\/em>[2]<\/a> The cover, in combining a phrase from Nietzsche’s famous parable with the provocative image of Armley’s church\/carpet shop, makes a claim: the fact that in western society we find many closed, abandoned churches is a sign that religion is in decline, if not altogether “dead.” The logic here is problematic; much depends on definition. If religion equals attending church and churches are closing then religion is, in some locales, in decline. In any case, I am not a secularization theorist, and my interest in the closure and transformation of churches is not sociological but ethnographic, and informed by the fields of ritual studies and the phenomenology of place. One shortcoming with Bruce’s cover image is methodological: after making its dramatic appearance, the actual place is never seen or heard from again. Bruce’s method is not informed by an interest in what David Hall, Robert Orsi and others have termed “lived religion.” Yet even a quick Google search of “Mike’s Carpet Shop” reveals that the building has had a very robust place in the lives and imaginations of local residents \u2013 showing up in poetry, serving as the model for birthday cakes, and a focus of civic debates over development, heritage, culture, and spirituality.<\/p>\n

The line from the dramatic scene in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science<\/em> that struck a chord with me when I first read it is not “God is dead,” but rather, “What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”[3]<\/a> A closed, abandoned, or transformed church is what Michel Foucault refers to as a “heterotopic” place. Heterotopias are places of otherness, deviation, and ambivalence; in-between, liminal sites, possessing layers of meaning and significance beyond their simple face value, as well as a quality of allurement evoked by their ambiguous, open status; Foucault explicitly names cemeteries as one example.[4]<\/a> If we follow Bruce and Nietzsche in imagining a closed, abandoned church as a kind of tomb, we must nevertheless recognize that tombs and cemeteries are not secular, dead places, but the home of the dead; the locale of ancestors and spirits; repositories of cultural histories and memories; evocations of loss and longing. If Mike’s Carpet Shop is not a church, it is also not not a church.<\/p>\n

The Closure of Highgate United Church<\/strong><\/h3>\n

I want to focus on a particular place and event, the closure and deconsecration of a church in Southwestern Ontario, in the small town of Highgate, located in the county of Chatham-Kent. The case of Highgate is meant to shed light on the broader problems of church closure; in particular, I want to examine the interplay of ideas, theologies, and experiences of place.<\/p>\n

The Christian roots in Highgate extend back to the life of Mary Webb Gosnell, an Irish immigrant who established a Methodist congregation in her home in the early 1830s. Highgate’s United Church was originally built as a Methodist chapel in 1898, replacing a small timber frame church that had existed for a number of decades. Thirty Grand Master Masons led a procession for the laying of the cornerstone, and roughly 2000 people, an enormous number given the place and time, attended the ceremony. The church burned to the ground in 1917, but it was rebuilt the following year, according to the same plan. The Reverend T.T. George, who designed and oversaw the original building, returned to the town to see to it that the church was rebuilt; it seems George had something special invested in the building. In the 1920s, the church was folded into the United Church of Canada \u2013 a union of Methodist, Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches. For decades, the church served as a cornerstone of the community.<\/p>\n

The building itself is architecturally unique; though the exterior walls are square, the building is overlaid with a circular structure, giving the church a rounded appearance. The circular design is complemented by a 75-foot high rounded bell tower entrance fronting the church; a square 16-foot lantern “dome,” set atop a rounded pyramidal base, caps the interior space. The Ontario Heritage Trust recently acknowledged the church as one a very few in North America built along such a unique design. The unusual design, along with a large pipe organ and excellent acoustics, made the church a standout in the landscape of small town, rural churches in the area.<\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/a>
Highgate United Church, Photograph by Ronald Grimes<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Highgate’s is a rather common, small-town story. Fueled in part by the decline of tobacco farming in the region, over the course of a number of years the town lost its municipal building (to county amalgamation), its school, its gas station, its library, and much of its population. In March of 2009, the declining and aging congregation, reduced to worshipping in the basement to save on heating costs and no longer able to maintain the church, made the difficult decision to close. Working with my colleague, Ronald Grimes, four trips were made to Highgate over the summer months of 2010, visiting with congregation and community members, and tracking the various events that were being occasioned by the closure of the church. Taking the name of Mary Webb, a committee was formed, its members determined to save the church by transforming it into an arts and cultural center. (This transformation did occur, Highgate United Church becoming the Mary Webb Centre.[5]<\/a>) The interest of Ontario Heritage led to a conference in the church on the “adaptive reuse” of church buildings. A photography exhibit and concert to promote the arts center was held. Lastly, on June 27, the deconsecration service, described as a “service of celebration and thanksgiving,” took place; it is this latter event that I want to examine.<\/p>\n

The closure of the church generated excitement, energy, and anticipation associated with the possible transformation of the building into something new; but closure also meant a good deal of grief and uncertainty over impending loss. Two weeks before the church was deconsecrated, Ronald Grimes and I sat down with congregation members, after Sunday morning service, to listen and record their memories, stories, and concerns. Although I grew up on the other side of the country, Highgate is a culture and community that I know well: turkey dinners and angel food cake in the church basement, seeding and harvesting, pick-up trucks and baseball games, socially and politically conservative, salt-of-the-earth people, whose church was not merely a place of worship but served for decades as the orienting center of the community. Our conversation with the congregation was wide-ranging and, at times, emotional. Rural, elderly, United Church members are typically reserved; public displays of emotion are not common. On this occasion, however, those attending opened-up, spoke from the heart, laughed and cried with each other, in front of us, relative strangers, and on camera. It was a remarkable experience.<\/p>\n

Below are two short clips from the four-hour conversation. First, you will see and hear Bonnie Fenton, a farm-wife who married into the community, but has been a long-time member of the Highgate congregation. Bonnie spoke eloquently about the pain involved in losing the church. The excerpt begins with her thoughts about the upcoming deconsecration service, and the pain involved in losing what she refers to as “our family church.” The second clip is of Mary Attridge, the congregation’s eldest member. Mary recalls the closure of another church, decades earlier, and the fact that she still has “a brick from that building.”<\/p>\n