“When you are downtown, you cannot close your eyes to the needs that are all around you.”
The Rev. Ray Stewart
Covenant Presbyterian Church
SPRINGFIELD — The Rev. John Pollock’s sister usually attends modern, relatively sparse churches.
So when she walked into Pollock’s church, the historic St. John’s Lutheran in downtown Springfield, the ornate sanctuary impressed her.
“She walked in, stood at the door and said, ‘Now this is a church,’” Pollock said.
Across the country, those historic, downtown churches have struggled to survive. The National Trust for Historic Preservation placed urban houses of worship on its most endangered sites list in 2003.
Locally, many historic churches continue to soldier on downtown, while some have moved out and some have merged with other congregations. At least two churches downtown have been empty for a few years.
Religious groups often played a role in a community’s development and its downtown, said Kevin Rose, president of the Springfield Preservation Alliance.
Their buildings also reveal Springfield’s history, both of immigration and industrial wealth.
“There’s something powerful about a beautiful building. ... These structures are a vital part of our community,” Rose said.
Tough choices
Suburbanization has been a trend affecting churches for the past 50 years, said Mayor Warren Copeland, who is also a Wittenberg University professor of religion and urban studies.
As congregations moved farther out from cities, Copeland said, churches often felt pressured to also move and be closer to their members.
“For many churches, it’s a choice between their sense of mission to the neighborhood in which they’re located and the sense that their membership has moved elsewhere,” he said. “It’s a tough choice to make.”
First Christian Church faced that issue. In 2006 it moved from High Street after at least 50 years there to a new church on Middle Urbana Road.
The relocation was prompted by a desire to be closer to where its members lived, as well as a need for more room, the Rev. Craig Grammer said.
“But we didn’t want to pull out of the neighborhood,” he said.
So First Christian still runs its Good Samaritan Outreach Center downtown, a block from its former church, which provides services such as a food pantry.
It also sold its former building to another church to be reused.
The new location allowed them to serve an area of town where it could reach more people, Grammer said. Since moving, the congregation has grown from about 1,000 members to about 1,700.
“It was a strategic location,” he said. “We thought we could really impact the community in a very powerful way.”
Its new location has 47 acres, as opposed to the 2 acres downtown.
“Part of our dilemma was we looked at expansion downtown. ... We were totally, 100 percent landlocked,” Grammer said.
Changes
That’s an issue that High Street United Methodist Church faces.
It also wants to expand, especially to create the type of space it doesn’t have now, such as a family life center and outdoor recreation areas, the Rev. Cary Simonton said.
“As society changes over generations, the church has to change as well,” he said.
The congregation has discussed relocating in the past, but decided to stay downtown.
So its long-term planning calls for expanding down the hill behind the church.
“They decided they were committed to the city of Springfield. ... They also knew that making that decision would mean lots of unique challenges,” Simonton said.
Overall, he said the downtown location is an asset for High Street Methodist. Some of those challenges, though, include room to grow, parking and that not many members live downtown.
For St. John’s, those challenges also include the costs of upkeep for the older building and the deterioration of the surrounding neighborhood over time.
In the winter, heating bills can run a couple of thousand dollars, Pollock said.
“The people who built this church probably never dreamed that to heat this thing would cost more than their whole budget when they built it,” he said.
Pollock is a Kentucky native who came to St. John’s nine years ago. He attended seminary at Wittenberg and remembers when downtown had more activity.
Now the church is surrounded by empty industrial buildings. He is hopeful about the hospital construction nearby and other projects such as a planned ice rink.
“It will bring people back downtown,” Pollock said.
St. John’s is an anchor in its neighborhood, Rose said. He pointed to it and Covenant Presbyterian Church as a model of how to use a large church, both of which host community groups, pre-schools, pantries and more.
“There’s always activity in that building,” Rose said.
Ministry
A lot of that activity is ministry, which both churches cited as a major reason for staying downtown.
“When you are downtown, you cannot close your eyes to the needs that are all around you,” said the Rev. Ray Stewart of Covenant.
Covenant also faces some of the challenges of downtown, including maintaining its historic building.
The congregation wants to be part of Springfield’s vision for its future, Stewart said.
It runs a walking tour of downtown for third-graders to open their eyes to what’s going on in the city core.
“This congregation always has had a great commitment to the city of Springfield,” Stewart said.
Different kinds
Downtown has different kinds of churches, Copeland said.
Those that have historically had ample resources and membership have been able to carry on, he said, while others that never had that status have a harder time surviving.
Mergers are common for some downtown churches, Copeland said. Central United Methodist, which is downtown, recently combined with Story-Hypes and Lagonda Methodist churches to form Faith United Methodist Church.
Religious organizations can bring people downtown, he said, serve those in need there and be committed to having a strong city core.
As churches evolve, Rose said he’d like to see vacant historic buildings reused, including by newer nondenominational churches that traditionally haven’t set up in downtowns like the older congregations.
“These type of churches are certainly welcome in downtown,” he said.
Keeping the buildings active is vital to a downtown, Rose said.
“That’s kind of the last straw in many towns,” he said. “When your religious structures leave, your downtown is dead.”
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