We are entering a transition period for Community Church. We are coming to the last few Sundays to be held in this building, after which we’ll worship across the street, maybe for as much as 5 years, or at least until we find something better. Our offices and gathering spaces will be gone, so we’ll exist on the top two floors of building #24, which is right next door, and in cyberspace until our new building is complete and we will have a home again.
It feels dramatic. It feels frightening. I can’t help but think about Moses leading his people in the desert for 40 years. Even for those of us who are excited about the new building, this transition is awkward and possibly uncomfortable. But, when we look at our 200 years of history, it’s not all that important. This church has weathered far more difficult storms.
After a proud beginning starting in 1825, an opening sermon by Rev. Channing himself, and pews filled by NY’s most fashionable, we hit some hard times. In 1848, Rev. Osgood was called to this pulpit, but he didn’t much like Unitarianism. The church members voted him out, but he stayed another 13 years after that vote, finally leaving when the church was deep in debt. The next minister felt similarly about Unitarianism and tried to convert the entire membership on Sunday morning to Orthodox Christianity, something the New York Times called, “an extraordinary scene”. They ousted him, too, but the next minister only stayed two years, declaring publicly that this church will never be a “useful religious body”. The next few years were equally tumultuous with ministers coming and going and the church sinking deeper into debt to the point of thinking we needed to close.
What kept us open were some very generous gifts made by a couple of key donors, All Soul’s Church, The Women’s Group which raised a small fortune, and the denomination. Without this sudden, generous influx of money, this church would have been an interesting note in the history of All Soul’s Church, our original progenitor.
There have been other changes. We opened our doors on the corner of Prince and Mercer. We sold that building and bought another further uptown on Broadway. We sold that building and bought – or maybe built – another on the corner of 34th and Park. After that one burned down, we spent decades meeting at City Hall while raising money to build the church we’re currently in.
We changed our name. In our nearly 200 years, we have been known as Second Congregational Church, The Church of the Messiah and Community Church of New York. We were Christian when we started, shifted later to being what was called unorthodox Christian, not an uncommon term for a handful of liberal churches, and then joined the Community Church movement which took us out of the Christian line and onto a multi-denominational tract. We rejoined the Unitarians just as they were joining the Universalists, having caught up to this wider way of thinking.
None of this was easy. None of it was without anxiety. I’m sure every one of these changes, every move, every vote, every new location and name was met with a cadre of people angry about it, and while I don’t have the numbers, I’m guessing people left over it.
Here we are again, making hard choices, facing difficult decisions and opting for change. I’m not one who pretends things are rosy when they’re not. Community Church is in a difficult spot. Once the largest Community Church in the movement and the second largest Unitarian Church in our history, we’ve lost hundreds of members over the last few decades dropping from a high of over 1600 people to fewer than 200. And while we have plenty of money in the bank, the cost of our aging buildings is suffocating.
So, we’re making some hard choices, but we’re doing it before the crisis really hits. We’re still solvent, we still have plenty of members, we have competent, stable leadership and we have options. In some ways, that makes it more difficult to argue for change. When we start laying people off and shutting off the heat during the week to save money, it’s easier to convince people something has to give. Instead, we have members with foresight and courage who have been working hard for a long time to ensure we never find ourselves in such dire straights. Because of their proaction, and because of your support of a new vision, we’re taking the difficult step of letting go of our building, entering a period of transition, and reimagining a new Community Church.
How long it takes is an open question. Two years? Four? Six? Whatever it is, it’ll feel like a long time. It might be a blip in the history of an institution, but in a single human life, it will be significant. It will be easy for any one of us to leave Community Church, and I suspect some will. Some will say that they don’t like afternoon worship which we’ll have for a little while, or they don’t like the church across the street or they don’t like that we’ve had to sell our property or they don’t like the focus on technology or they simply don’t like transition and many of these people will say that they’ll be back once things have settled down. And they might. You might be expecting me to make an argument for those people to stay, but I’m not going to. Everyone has to take care of themselves. If you aren’t in a place where you can be present to our shared faith and life through this transition, you should do what you need to do. We are only going to get through this if we are true to ourselves and to each other. There will be no blame and you will be welcomed back with arms wide open.
Those of us who stay through this transition – and I hope that’s nearly all of us – will need to be flexible and creative. We’ll have to be willing to try things out. We’ve done it before. Through 200 years of history, this congregation has weathered quite a few storms – and fires and insolvency. We’ve had first hand experience for the last 18 months. Had I told you in February, 2020, that we were moving church to Zoom, you’d have told me that was the end of us, but move we did, and without a moment’s notice. We almost immediately became a 7 day church, alive and well through one of the most trying years in our city’s history. So, we’ll get creative. We’ll see what hybrid church might look like, with some people in a room and some online. We’ll livestream events and worship and meetings. We’ll gather at different times, in a variety of locations, and we’ll keep our eyes on each other, always loving, always caring for those who are suffering in our midst.
And we’re doing that because what’s next will be worth the pain of waiting. Community Church is poised to become a powerful force in NYC and in Unitarian Universalism. It’s not just about our building, but about our mission, increasingly necessary in the world.
One of the greatest legacies of this church was the ministry of Rev. John Haynes Holmes. As one of his successors, I think often about the world he dreamed about and how he set me up to continue his work of building a society grounded in non-violence, racial and economic justice. In some ways, he was a creature of his time, He held on to fairly traditional gender roles, and spoke with the common accent for educated professionals and dramatic speakers of the early and mid 20th century, a little tidbit I picked up when Erol unearthed a voice recording of him. But, in far more ways, Holmes was unusual. He took seriously the liberal theology, generally called the Social Gospel, written in the late 19th century that calls on people of faith to shift their eyes from questions of personal sin and on to the sinful social systems that make up our societies. Stop worrying about whether you’re lusting after your neighbor’s wife and worry instead about the lust for power your nation has or the covetous eye they have on a smaller nation’s resources. Holmes defined the life of the activist minister for Christians everywhere while also embodying an interfaith life by partnering with a local Rabbi, Stephen Wise, one of his closest friends, and then opening his own church to a broad understanding of itself as a Community Church, seeking what was considered radical inclusion by asking the question “Who are our neighbors and how to we welcome them all?”. He supported women’s reproductive rights while understanding that a woman, Margaret Sanger, was the leader of the movement and it was his job to simply let her lead. He co-founded the NAACP while understanding Black members were the ones to define the mission and ministry of that group. He supported a transformative labor movement, again in an active and passionate supportive role, putting the workers at the front so their voices were heard best.
This is all part of our legacy and it will help propel us into what’s next.
This nation is hurting. The city itself is in a defining moment, one we seem to find ourselves in every few decades and which we seem to recover from, often quite beautifully. We could say the same thing about the nation, but I’m less confident about the grace with which we’re going to recover. Between radical economic disparities, intentional threats to our democratic systems, and the speed of climate change, tensions are running as high as they were in the 1850s. What seems most clear to me is that communities like ours will be increasingly necessary in the years to come, and we need to be on top of our game. Covenanted congregations, people of faith who have committed to partnership, shared leadership, and genuine care with and for each other, are required, even as we are all in decline.
Unitarian Universalism is necessary in this world and in the one to come. Our message is our salvation, but we here at Community Church haven’t been living into our greatest potential in recent years. In the next few weeks, we are taking the massive steps to turn another page and begin a new chapter. It’s exciting and terrifying and complicated and liberating. We are the next chapter. In 100 years when someone else is preaching from this pulpit, they’re going to tell the story of the congregation that could see the future, that supported a big vision and made the sacrifices to see it to completion. It’ll be another turning point in a long line of turning points. This, too, will be part of our story.
As will I. As will all of you. It’s your voices that will be heard, your pictures people will observe in gratitude as the ancestors for their next generation. The way I know they’ll hear your voices is that a group of our leaders and staff have been recording them. These are the voices, the stories, the people who will lead us into whatever’s next for this groundbreaking community of faith and love.