A Holy Place: Preserving Historic Churches

This article is republished from The Anglican Compass, to read the piece in full click here

A few weeks ago, my church took a field trip—one that went over the road and almost 200 years into the past. A small group of us met in one of our village’s oldest buildings, a tiny stone chapel constructed in 1853 to serve the tiny population of English settlers who’d brought their faith with them to the New World. 

Long since abandoned by its growing congregation, Christ Church now serves as a museum and event space except for the four Sundays in the summer when it sheds its modern guise and reverts to form, becoming a place of worship once again with an early Holy Communion service led by the local Anglican priest. 

Walking through the doors on a cloudless but cold June morning, it seemed as if past parishioners were peering over my shoulder, their dusty fingers impatiently rifling through the Book of Common Prayer, or perched beside me on the hard wooden pew, looking out at the ramshackle graveyard gently sloping towards the river. 

We raised our voices as the pump organ began sounding out the first notes of O For a Thousand Tongues. Our minister, visibly moved as she delivered the homily, called the chapel a “holy place.” She confessed that she felt more nervous preparing for this service than she had on her first day on the job. 

Sacred Sites

As Anglicans, we’ve become accustomed to our sacred sites—you don’t join a 600-year-old church and expect to worship in a shopping mall conversion. However, we take these spaces for granted. All over North America, we’re losing our churches. Researchers predict that the United States is on course to lose up to 100,000 churches by 2025. There are no figures on how many are historic, but it stands to reason that these are the most difficult and costly to preserve. The gates of hell will not prevail against the church, but the ravages of time won’t spare its buildings. 

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