Gone for Good [2024, Eerdman]

I am doing something I have never done before—review a book after reading just the first half. But I am preparing to leave in a few days for a month in Europe, visiting Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Fatima, Notre Dame, Avignon, the White Cliffs of Dover, and the Eiffel Tower, among other sites. The Catechist Café will publish frequently, hopefully daily] from overseas for the next four weeks. I’m flying red eye from Orlando to Amsterdam, and I promise I’ll finish reading this book on the plane…unless there are good movies.
 
 
I can see it now…most bishops, pastors, and laity would need smelling salts after reading section one of Gone for Good: Negotiating the Coming Wave of Church Property Transitions [2024, Eerdmans] by Editor Mark Elsdon and contributing partners. While circumstances differ from diocese to diocese in the United States, and from region to region, it is true that many Catholic parishes have closed their doors for good, with the congregations summarily dispatched to neighboring parishes, in many cases against their will. That sort of ordeal has never occurred in my present diocese, Orlando, nor have I heard of such a thing in present-day Florida, where the Census Bureau reports that 1,218 people per day emigrate to the “Sunshine State,” a sizable number of them Catholic. But clusters of parish and school closures have been announced in dioceses including New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, New Orleans, and Chicago, to name just some.
 
With that in mind, I turn our attention to the author, Mark Elsdon. If you Google his name, you will get descriptions such as “cofounder of RootedGood, which supports catalytic and innovative church leaders working on property development, money and mission alignment, and social enterprise. He is also executive director at Pres House, the Presbyterian campus ministry at the University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus, and of Pres House Apartments.” From the portions of his book I have read to date, he strikes me as a highly energetic individual with several agendas sacred to him: expanding the healthy potential influence of Christian churches rather than closing them; assisting pastors and congregations to re-imagine the use[s] of their property, establishing congregations as closer partners within their neighborhoods in meeting standards for a higher quality of life in their neighborhoods, and developing the charitable outreach of all communities bearing the birthright of Christian baptism.
 
I knew I would enjoy this book from the start when he introduced the “halo effect of local churches.” Bottom line: churches, in their mission and planning, do not consider their influence in anchoring the adjoining physical community’s identity. Churches in fact are particularly important to their physical surroundings, hence Elsdon’s term the “halo effect.” Elsdon’s surveys cover all Christian denominations, so it is impossible to extrapolate Catholic parish numbers for the most part. But in most cases, Catholic parishes, in my recollection, used to be “community connected.” Part of this was due to ethnic community identity. In one major study, a count was done on the number of people who set foot on a church’s property in each week, and then the attendance at church in the same week. Nationally, of the folks who visited the property, only 9% of them attended Sunday service [or in our case, Mass]. It sounds crazy until you expand your thought horizon a bit.
 
Who are these 91%? In our case, every child and parent in a Catholic school who does not attend weekly Eucharist. Or the men’s club which plays basketball every week in the school gym but miss Mass. Or any kid who plays any sport on parish grounds. Or weekly AA, NA, or grief groups, using church facilities. Or those seeking counseling, those who receive food subsidies [which in my parish can attract several hundred cars periodically], those seeking social services through the St. Vincent de Paul Society or other established outreach, customers of the parish book store, visiting school athletic teams with families in tow, rentals of the church’s social hall for wedding receptions at rates exponentially lower than Disney Destination wedding rates, etc. A church near my house has been a voting site for all civil elections for years.
 
Some readers may highlight the Catholics among the 91% who, by this survey, don’t worship at weekly Eucharist. Elsdon makes the case that the church is an important external mover and shaker in the broader community, and probably more so in economically depressed areas. He would encourage pastors and church ministers to become “civil figures” in addressing community needs, in league with neighboring pastors of other traditions, city officials, and private charities and foundations. He believes that community involvement builds the pride and evangelical mood of lethargic congregations, ultimately reinforcing a church’s sense of mission. At my last pastorate, the principal of the parish school became the first woman member of the city’s Rotary Club, and she invited the city mayor to serve on the parish school board. [Ten years later, she became my wife, too, but that is a story for another post.]
 
Both Catholic and other churches can be “narrow thinkers” where the use of land and buildings is concerned. The author describes a dying church of another tradition whose surviving membership instinctively opted to remodel the worship space as a way of increasing the membership. But a faith-based consulting firm put the church on to the idea of using the money to construct a small but multifaceted market center on land it owned, for a variety of services not available in the economic “desert” that inner cities have become—a barber shop, for example, or a fresh food shop. [Interestingly, there are public and private funds available to participate in varying amounts to those who know where to look.] The congregation was deeply divided on the plans--I imagine mine would be, too—but the mayor of the city is quoted in the book as grateful for what has proved to be a small but successful regeneration of a stagnant part of his city.
 
As a child growing up, my parish in East Buffalo was a neighborhood “hangout” for kids with six basketball courts and a deli across the street. But the pastors of my youth had no sense of interracial cooperation with community leaders or politicians as Buffalo went through a hard “white flight” process and my parish closed in the late 1970’s. The church and property were sold to a Baptist Church which remodeled the worship structure and appears to be healthy and thriving. See the drone video of how my old church dominates my childhood neighborhood today. I notice, too, that several aging structures have been demolished to increase parking spaces, so the church must be full on Sundays; the website notes multiple community ministries.
 
Drones can point out the importance of Catholic churches in our neighborhoods, but the technology is far ahead of our thinking on the identity and mission of our parishes’ existence. When I get back home, I will expand on several other aspects of Elsdon’s ideas, points we will want to take into the future of American Catholicism.