Three-week-old Nolan Lambert cried lustily on Dec. 11 when Rev. Jeff Barlow dabbed water on his forehead to welcome him into the flock at St. Andrew’s United Church in the Montreal borough of Lachine.
Nolan was too little to know it, but his introduction to religious life was the last goodbye for Montreal’s oldest United Church.
Facing dropping attendance, rising repair bills and little prospect of renewal, the stone church closed its doors on Dec. 18 after almost two centuries of existence.
Founded in 1818 by Scottish Presbyterians, St. Andrew’s dates back to the fur-trade era, when Lachine was the gateway to the continent.
Now, the heritage structure, built in 1832 by famed architect John Wells, faces an uncertain future.
“I wish it would just stay a church,” said Nolan’s mother, Jenny Rich, 32, who was married in the sanctuary three years ago and felt strongly about having her son baptized there. We really like the minister and the atmosphere. You just feel like you’re coming home,” said Rich.
St. Andrew’s is among dozens of English-speaking congregations in Quebec facing agonizing choices over buildings that no longer suit their shrinking numbers and limited means.
Hit by a double whammy of declining anglophone communities and falling religious observance, Protestant denominations are shuttering places of worship from the Gaspe to
western Quebec.
But as organized religions walk away from their heritage buildings, the question is who will step forward to preserve that architectural legacy.
Faced with the sheer enormity of the problem, main-line denominations increasingly view their landmark buildings more as liabilities than assets.
“Many congregations have developed what we call an edifice complex,” said Fred Braman, a member of the United Church’s Montreal Presbytery and chair of the United Church of Canada Foundation.
“They spend a lot of their human capital and money capital in preserving a building that is no longer sustainable,” he said. “They’ve become white elephants to maintain.”
Fewer than 5% of Quebecers were Protestants in 2001, a 6.7-point drop from 1991, according to Statistics Canada.
Hard hit by the exodus of anglophones from Quebec in the 1970s and 80s, many Protestant churches have managed to survive against all odds, Braman said.
But there is only so long you can postpone the inevitable, he said.
“Now we’re arriving at a point where the old folks have got very old and they’re having to let go. They’ve managed to struggle through the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s and the first part of the century and now they’re just at the end, where they just don’t have the energy to continue to maintain this building,” he said.
The United Church’s Montreal Presbytery, covering the western half of the province, has 70 churches — half as many as 25 years ago, Braman said. The number of traditional church buildings will drop precipitously in the next decade, he predicted.
One in five Canadians attended religious services weekly in 2005 — down from one in three 20 years earlier, according to Statistics Canada.
Braman, who talks about “preaching places” rather than “churches,” believes the Christian faith must shake off its association with pews, organ music and buildings with steeples and reach out to people who are not comfortable in the traditional church, like gays, lesbians, single women and men in distress.
He envisages a future where worshippers gather in homes and shopping-mall storefronts, and focus on outreach and community work instead of on raising funds to repair the church roof.
“The only people comfortable with a church in a nice building with a service at 10 o’clock and organ music are the people who are there, not the people who are not there. And there are an awful lot more people that aren’t there than are there,” Braman said.
Even though church attendance has fallen to all-time lows — especially in Quebec, North America’s most secular society — it would be a mistake to assume that people don’t care about church buildings, said Jocelyn Groulx, director of the Conseil du patrimoine religieux du Quebec, which provides expertise and funding to preserve the province’s religious heritage.
“There is a great preoccupation on the part of citizens towards these buildings,” Groulx said.
St. Andrew’s is an exceptional heritage site and a rare example of Regency Gothic architecture, said David Hanna, a professor of urban geography at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal and past member of the religious-heritage council.
In such a case, the local municipality should work hand-in-hand with the church to find an appropriate use for the building and ensure its protection, he said.
The religious-heritage council helped restore the church in the 1990s, so the public has a stake in ensuring it is preserved, Hanna said.
“You cannot allow a key building like this to be tossed aside as if it were nothing,” he said.
Closing St. Andrew’s was a painful decision for the 25 to 30 members who regularly attend services there, said pastor Barlow, 79, a former English teacher who was ordained four years ago.
Most are pensioners with an average age of almost 80.
“People have been worshipping there and praying there for 190-odd years. It is sort of holy ground,” he said.
The congregation simply couldn’t afford to fix the leaky roof, said Barlow, who hopes the church will be preserved as a cultural centre, museum or library.
“The money is just dwindling month by month. Financially, it’s become inevitable,” he said.
The same drama is playing out across the province.
In Trois-Rivieres, Que., in November, the Anglican Church turned over its oldest church in the province to the municipality, which will restore it as a cultural centre.
The French-speaking congregation of about 30 was unable to come up with the $2.5-million needed to repair the historic building, built in 1754 by the Roman Catholic Recollet order.
In return for ceding St. James Anglican Church to the city, the parish retains the right to use the sanctuary in perpetuity.
But in rural areas, where many congregations have as few as 12 members, the outlook is grim, said Dennis Drainville, the Anglican bishop of Quebec City, whose diocese stretches from Trois-Rivieres to the Lower North Shore and from the Maine border to Schefferville.
The diocese counted 25,000 members 50 years ago; now the total is about 3,000.
Rural depopulation particularly affects English-speaking communities, Drainville said. “All numbers are declining in the region but the anglophone population is declining at a 50% faster rate than the French-speaking population,” he said.
Eight churches in the diocese closed this year and Drainville predicted that 50 of the remaining 80 will shut down over the coming decade.
While selling urban real estate can help boost church coffers, there are few takers for isolated country churches, Drainville said.
“I sell a church in the Diocese of Quebec and I’m lucky if I have 50 cents for a coffee,” he said.
In the Lower North Shore, near Labrador, 10 isolated Anglican churches are dotted along a coastline accessible only by air or water, Drainville said.
“Some of those communities have almost no children left in them. So the handwriting is on the wall. Those communities are going to die,” he said.