One by one, each woman stood up and shared a memory from her days at the Mary Warren Free Institute, a tiny Episcopal all-girls school connected to the Church of the Holy Cross on Eighth Street.
But soon after some of the women began talking on Sunday, the last day of the church’s opening, tears choked their words and they had to sit down.
“My heart will always be here,” said an emotional Mildred Shea of Averill Park, who graduated from Mary Warren in 1949 and was subsequently married in the church and had her four children baptized there.
Shea and about 50 others attended the last service Sunday afternoon at Church of the Holy Cross, which decided to close after congregants there dwindled to about a dozen.
Maybe “hearts will always be here” but bodies were not.
The building has serious problems, insufficient resources to address them and a congregation which has been a mere skeleton crew for many years.
Is the Episcopal Church merely all about nostalgia for some lovely but decaying buildings? That is the challenge of our times. Where [i][b]is[/b][/i] the Church? And I intend that question on all the many levels on which it can be asked.
It looks lovely – what a pity:
http://www.archiplanet.org/wiki/Church_of_the_Holy_Cross
Over here, we are beginning to take churches such as St Peter’s, Brighton which are at risk and planting seed congregations from those strong on people and resources:
http://stpetersbrighton.org/
However, the sheer scale of the problem is daunting and we are only now beginning to see church plants outside the major cities, so this is very much experimental. In the cities the policy has been successful so far.
My hope for all the Episcopal and other mainline churches that are closing is that they will be now be bought by Christian congregations. In my area we have a lot of new churches that meet in school cafeterias and movie theaters because they cannot find available land for a building. I’m sure many of them would jump at the chance to buy this church if it were available here.
#1 Yes, we are the church and we have work to do! (Jn 6.29)
It was a lovely building and it is difficult to forget Herbert reciting the seven deadly sins and finishing with “Sloth!” as we slid into the back pew after the service had begun.
Sadly this building will not be bought by another church. It will most certainly be purchased by RPI and torn down or used for some secular purpose. The only church building on campus was used as a computer center in my day. … talk about strange symbolism.
‘… closing in Troy..’ – a metaphor for Tec, I’m afraid.
Beware of Greeks bearing ‘gifts’.