(By Katie Nix, The Chronicle Telegram). LORAIN, OHIO — Phyllis Minor has a lifelong connection to First Presbyterian Church.
Her parents took her there from the time she was born, along with her six brothers and sisters. Christmases were celebrated there, along with Easters. Some of her siblings were married and many of the family’s babies were baptized there during the church’s 117-year history.
“I wasn’t married here, but my kids were all baptized here; and I’ve been a member since I was born,” the 82-year-old Lorain resident said. “We all used to come every week and practically take up two pews with just our family, and there were so many then were the exact same way.”
While Minor’s family, and many others, always will have these connections to the church that sits on the corner of East 30th Street and Seneca Avenue, the congregation has disbanded and the church has closed.
At its final service Sunday, congregation members, both current and former, shared memories from their time there.
“I remember doing all sorts of charity work here as a child, like Feed the Hungry,” Natalie Haggett, of Strongsville, said. “This is a big day. It’s strange to see something that was such a big part of your childhood close.”
Haggett attended the service with her daughter, Caroline, who she said chose to tag along.
“I gave her the option and she said she wanted to come with me,” Haggett said. “I think she wanted to see this part of our family history.”
Clerk of Sessions Robert Dunfee also has been a member of the congregation for most of his life and said the day was a sad but necessary one as the church’s membership had dwindled to eight or nine members.
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Now project the town, the story, the narrative, to a thousand, ten thousand different PCUSA churches in town and cities big and small and you get the current trajectory and path of the denomination. When you either fail, or do not attempt to give people an overall compelling reason to go to church, folks tend to drift off or simply do and go on to other things in life. I doubt very much Lorain Ohio became Portland Oregon or the West Side of Manhattan overnight in people’s religious behaviors. There is only so much and so long the PCUSA can trot out its simplistic post-christian or post-modern nonsense to explain the collapse of the denomination. The Mormons LDS, Pentecostals, and evangelicals to name a few, exist in the same culture and society and seem to be doing quite well enough.
Now granted the Presbytery in question can flip the real estate or re-purpose well enough for a short and one time cash infusion. But for every closed or non-functional church the lost per capita, payments into the Board of Pensions, Missions, ceases forever. Now times this by 1,000, 10,000. And sooner or later those shoes will drop.
That PCUSA banner on the wall says it all – you snooze on the Gospel, deny Christ, glorify sin, and praise a denomination with a banner like that on your wall and your end is sure.
Sad. Like Macy’s and many other entities, as the economist Joseph Schumpeter talks about Creative Destruction, denominations are now a brake, an obstruction to, in my opinion, what God is doing in and within the church. Non denominational churches will be to the denominations and Amazon is to Macy’s . One is growing and the other is on the catapult to oblivion. So relax, there will be many churches from which to worship in. They just wont have the name of the big and getting smaller all the time, the big denominations. I know, I was a life long P. and after moving to Houston and visiting some, I cut the emotional chords and began attending Lakewood, Pastors Joel and Victoria Osteen. Would never go back.
Exchanging one False Gospel (Social) for another (Prosperity). That’s truly sad.