A Requiem for My Church

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

The church I grew up in is closing. Founded in 1866, the congregation will soon conduct its last Sunday service and close its doors. Generations of families—including mine—called this place home. I was baptized here as an infant and confirmed my faith as an adolescent. Long before that, my parents were married in the sanctuary; their reception was held in the generously sized Religious Education Building behind it. By all accounts, it was fitting for my recently widowed grandmother to host that reception right where the family—kin and congregation—had gathered some months before for my grandfather’s funeral. My grandparents joined the church as a young couple new to town and ready to start their family. For my nana, with a Methodist lineage stretching back to before this congregation’s inception, there was no question where her church membership would reside. She was a member until her death in 1993. Though her children and grandchildren no longer live nearby and call other congregations home, in many ways, this will always be our family church.

I am making a pilgrimage to attend the final service. I am glad and grateful to do so even though I grieve for the reason. It is fitting and right to gather with others to mark this moment that marked innumerable significant and ordinary moments of so many. It is with these people (and many other dear, departed saints) that I first experienced God. God made himself known to me in countless ways through them and, from time to time, when I served as liturgist. During one particular Advent as I read Mary’s Magnificat, I knew a spirit-empowering presence in my ability to read and speak that wasn’t mine alone. This church is a place where faith was learned that it might be lived out. Week after week, for 155 years, people who called themselves Methodist gathered in this place that they might share their love for God with one another and offer God’s love to others. This is where we learned who we were meant to be as Christians, how to live out our faith, and why our Christian witness mattered.

This place is where I learned the language of Christian faith. As younger kids, my brother and I could, with our mother’s help, manage to memorize a Bible verse in an (often last minute) attempt to earn a gold foil star for Sunday School or VBS. But the words of the Lord’s Prayer, Apostles’ Creed, hymns, and liturgies, regularly repeated in the sanctuary, sank deep into our bones. The congregation promised to support and uphold parents and sponsors who brought babies forward to be baptized. Some years later, when confirmands claimed those earlier promises for themselves, the congregation reaffirmed earlier commitments to nurture and support their newest members, who were typically as adolescent in faith as they were in years. Month in and month out, we celebrated communion, reciting our faith—this time around the bread and cup—that we might be fed and nourished not just for our journey, but for the wellbeing of others.

Here, in this place, we learned how to live out our Christian faith. Ancient practices of the church found expression in local traditions that helped us implicitly embody the commitments proclaimed in corporate worship. Church ladies demonstrated their commitment to nurture through the love language of food. Like any self-respecting church, we had a church cookbook, filled with recipes for cakes, confections, and casseroles that defy present-day sensibilities for their copious amounts of sugar and disregard for dairy and gluten restrictions. There was an annual breakfast for confirmands and their families. Mothers were given a corsage for their tireless efforts, as more matronly church ladies dished out specially prepared breakfast casseroles and the United Methodist Men made sure our dads’ coffee cups stayed hot and full. A few months later, on Thanksgiving morning, they abandoned their own kitchens to come to church and make pancakes, welcoming us back from the pre-dawn, 2.5 mile hike our youth group made with the Presbyterians to a local summit for a sunrise service. They demonstrated the fruit of the Spirit to us—or at least Mr. Shaw did! His kindness and fortitude were exemplary, patiently reminding us teens that volleyballs went back and forth over the net, not necessarily into the light fixtures, inviting the wrath and ire of the trustees. 

In this place, we learned our faith was to be shared with others. We had been taught in Sunday School Assembly that the light of Christ lived within us and that it wasn’t merely for ourselves. We were given the light that we might bear it to others. We all had our own opportunity to serve as acolyte, charged with the responsibility of leading the choir’s procession at the beginning of service to light the altar candles and—even more importantly—carrying the light of Christ out of the sanctuary on behalf of all of us at the conclusion of the service. On Christmas Eve, the translucent stained glass windows were illuminated from within the sanctuary and radiated light as we hurried toward it in the gathering darkness of the winter’s afternoon. We all received candles as we entered in preparation for the climactic moment of the service when electric lights were dimmed and we sang “Silent Night.” Wide-eyed with solemnity and excitement when we were finally old enough to hold a candle responsibly by ourselves, we passed the flame from one to another, so that together we illuminated the sanctuary and each other’s hearts with a warmth that glowed long after we returned home.  

This church is the church that raised me. The people of this congregation instilled lessons within me that became the scaffolding of faith on which I stand. My adult self was offered perspective to reflect on this foundation, first through other congregations that adopted me when I moved away and transferred my membership, then later as a seminary student, and even more recently, doing further graduate studies and teaching seminary. I’ve come to understand that these folks were profoundly influenced by some of the most prominent figures of the 19th and 20th centuries with regard to Christian formation and discipleship. In many ways, the congregation took its cues from Horace Bushnell’s Christian Nurture mantra that a child should grow up Christian and never know themselves as otherwise. I’ve realized that through formation largely accorded to the schooling-instructional paradigm—vis-à-vis John Westerhoff—we were also enculturated as faithful disciples through the practices and rhythms that constituted the rest of our communal life in worship, mission, and evangelism. 

And yet, this church is closing its doors.

It can be tempting—especially in this moment as my beloved denomination is torn from within—to want to find fault and lay blame at someone’s feet for my congregation’s demise. Should we cast aspersions on the bishops and the cabinets for appointing a succession of fresh-faced seminary graduates eager to flex pastoral authority and right every wrong they saw? Not when decades on, those same pastors, now gradually joining the ranks of retired clergy, readily admit that they were as gently and lovingly shepherded by the same flock with whom they also butted heads. Can we cite an inability for a congregation to adapt to change when they enthusiastically embraced indoor plumbing, deliberated (and maybe even dallied) over the decision to be wired for electricity, and fully financed the construction of a Religious Education Building during the Great Depression? The truth is, like many of our own lives, the account ledger for this congregation is not pristine. There are a variety of contributing factors. Membership has aged while younger generations invested in the church have literally moved away. The neighborhood has changed. Culture has changed. This congregation, built in a railroad town, just off the town square with no church parking lot because most members lived within walking distance is, in many ways, for good and for ill, at the end of its natural life cycle.

And, to a certain degree, figuring out a cause of death may actually be an adventure in missing the point.

Unfortunately, despite being the body of Christ, we don’t necessarily do dying well. Sure, rationally we know that death is as much a part of life as birth is. However, often, in our terminal niceness, we assign the heart-wrenching, hard, and messy work of hospice and palliative care to others. But facing death—because we believe in life that continues with Christ after death—is something we need to do! We do well to remember that death is an integral part of our two sacraments. In our baptism, we put to death our old selves that we might be cleansed and know newness in Christ. The bread and cup that nourishes us in communion is made possible by the sacrifice of Christ. Through God’s grace we experience Spirit-empowered lives because Christ has shown us how to encounter death: head-on and with grace and love.

Life that continues in a new way after death—this is what the people of Dunellen UMC have made the brave choice to step into. For quite some time, they have been considering what it is to be caretakers of a legacy handed down to them by a roll call of saints from over the past 155 years. They have prayed and discerned that the Holy Spirit is not limited to this place. They have decided that their most faithful act of stewardship to the Great Commission is to allow the church to transition and begin to live in a new way. The pastor and church have made the courageous decision that they love God and each other enough to let this property and its assets be harvested, that its seeds can be sown to bear fruit elsewhere. Just as they blessed me when I moved away and transferred my membership to another church, and then later invited me back and welcomed me with open arms, they are now choosing to release themselves from this place and allow Christ to be at work and bear fruit in a new way in new vineyards. 

I am unspeakably sad to know that these buildings will close. My nurture as a Christian occurred here, this place known as Dunellen United Methodist Church, but not by these buildings. The church is so much more than a building — the church IS a people! And the people of this congregation, past and present, in countless ways, large and small, knowingly and unknowingly, perfect and imperfect, lived out their love for God and neighbor, here at Dunellen United Methodist Church. I am so grateful to God this place was my home. 

Dr. Tammie Grimm is Assistant Professor of Congregational Formation at Wesley Seminary in Marion, Indiana. She is an ordained Deacon in the North Carolina Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church and serves on the Editorial Board of Firebrand.