In Victoria, few Congregational churches remain in 2009 as the meeting-place of the Uniting Church. Some now hold new communities; the beautiful golden-orange brick church at Castlemaine, for instance, is the home of continuing Presbyterians, Wyclif (Surrey Hills) is the national headquarters of the Armenian Orthodox Church, Camberwell houses a German Catholic church.
Some former Congregational churches, including the Canterbury and Geelong Congregational church buildings, have been demolished. Other churches have been deconsecrated and now have secular uses. The former Black Rock Congregational Church is home to a ballet school, Augustine (Hawthorn) was purchased by a company of designers, and the historic Williamstown Congregational blue-stone building has been bought for commercial development.
Those of us who grew up in the Congregational tradition have a sense of rightness when we enter a Congregational church building. The wide barn-like proportions of the rectangular plan are familiar, the twin aisles formed by the pews, the central communion table, and the prominent pulpit, choir seats and organ pipes.
When the Uniting Church came into being and decisions needed to be made about the rationalization of buildings, not only were Congregationalists very much in the minority, but we had few architects who might have joined the decision-making committee.
I do not suggest for one moment that the Methodist architects who helped to choose which buildings would be retained for worship in the Uniting Church said, “We are Methodists. We have the numbers. We will always choose a Methodist building over a Congregational one.” I notice the care with which stained-glass windows and memorial tablets were often incorporated in a former Methodist building before the Congregational building was closed.
But I recently worshipped at the Augustine Centre, Hawthorn, a part of the Uniting Church which meets in a former Congregational hall. We sat in a circle of chairs near one end of the building. Around us was an art exhibition; the walls were painted pink and teal. So much about the building was unlike the Congregational churches of my childhood, and yet, and yet, as I walked in I felt an unmistakable sense of rightness and familiarity, a feeling of homecoming to the building, which suggests that at a deep subconscious level we retain a feel for the proportions of our childhood churches, and at some irrational level, when we encounter these proportions again, we feel “Ah, I’m home. This is the way a church should be.”
Methodists on building committees at the time of Church Union must have similarly been drawn to the buildings of their own tradition. However much time was spent in analysing spaces available, repairs needed, and convenience of location, I suspect that a far stronger subconscious factor was also at work when Uniting Church decisions were made to close so many Congregational churches and to meet in the buildings which were formerly Methodist or Presbyterian.
One participant repeated what we were all taught as children, The Church is the people, not a building. Of course. But as people of the Church, how strong and subtle are our connections with the spaces of our past. How precious are those spaces in which, when we entered, we felt a sense of homecoming to ourselves and of ease. How much we miss those places when they are lost to us. And how beautiful our churches were to us as Congregationalists, because they were our places.
Compared to the attachment which most of us continue to feel to our lost Congregational buildings, one participant has genuinely relinquished the buildings of her Congregational past. She wrote,
Buildings have caused heartache. In the Uniting Church we had a possum in the roof. It had eaten through the wiring. Peter the Possum Man came. In the end it cost $1000. We also have a second church building to maintain. Buildings are a burden. We deal with buildings and hold meetings when we should be out caring.In Caroline Springs there is a new ministry to that shopping centre. They have no building. They work in a prefab. They will never have a church building.
But for most participants who lost their church building when they entered the Uniting Church, pain remains. One woman said,
I went to church in my mother’s arms. My father was a deacon and Sunday School superintendent. I was married there. It was friendly; I knew everyone, visited everybody. I taught Sunday school. I was in a youth club with a group of young people. I started the basketball club. I played badminton in the hall. I cleaned the church. I felt it was my place, and I lost it. Even now I still find it a heart-break to think that they sold it. I don’t know what they will do with it but it won’t be a church.
From top: Brighton, Camberwell, Wyclif (Surrey Hills), Yarraville, Castlemaine, Collins Street, Burwood, Seddon, East St Kilda, Black Rock, Brighton.
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