By Catherine Litt
Kamloops Daily News Staff Reporter
On a Wednesday morning two weeks ago, eight women met in the main hall of Church of Cleopas.
They pushed two tables together, set out a tray of cookies, a pot of tea, some pens and paper, and began to finalize the details for an event none of them thought they’d ever have to face.
Gathered around the tables were some of the parish’s longest-serving members, 30-year veterans like Mary Rolston, Betty May Gore and Margie Jones, 20-year members like Verna Albright, and some of its newest parishioners — Carol Greenhalgh, Lorna Turnbull and Carol Keillor.
They had come to this hall on a cloudy weekday morning to plan the final Sunday service.
“How are you all feeling about these?” asked Rev. Canon Barbara Stewart, who read to the women a list of possible hymns for the service. “Are you OK with these?”
They narrowed the list to five, paying particular attention to the final hymn of the day — Lift High the Cross.
It would be the last one they’d sing here in this beloved church of theirs.
When Church of Cleopas opened in 1967, it was a time of great celebration for Anglicans in Westsyde — and for some the culmination of many years of waiting.
The community’s eldest members still had memories of the visiting minister who travelled by horse and buggy to preach at a nearby school.
Even in 1962, when Anglican parishioners moved into a temporary home on Serle Road — the crypt as they called it — it was a welcome change but nothing like the homecoming they felt that day in 1967 when Church of Cleopas opened at 3041 Westsyde Rd.
Betty May Gore remembers attending her first service in the early 1970s, shortly after moving to Kamloops.
Having grown up in churches in Toronto and Montreal, she outfitted herself the way she always had for Sunday service. She wore her best dress, three-quarter-length fur coat, leather gloves and purse — only to find herself in a congregation more accustomed to button-down shirts, cowboy boots and denim. Today, Gore laughs about how she had misjudged her new parish’s dress code, and she recalls fondly the depth of hospitality shown to her that day.
“After the service, they came up and they were so friendly,” said Gore.
“They came and put their arm around you. It was just so warm and welcoming. I thought, ‘My gosh, they’re going to love me anyway.’ “
In the years that followed, Gore became a key member of the parish, helping to organize events and ministry projects — helping, too, when parishes across the Interior were forced to reorganize after the Diocese of Cariboo closed in the fallout of a residential school lawsuit.
She couldn’t have known it at the time, but the experience of closing the diocese would prepare her for something much closer to home and to her heart a decade later — the closure of Church of Cleopas.
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“So we have everything we need for the bundles,” said Rev. Stewart, as the women of Cleopas checked off a long list of items during their planning meeting two weeks ago.
“Wonderful. Wonderful. That’s really great.”
There was much to do and they weren’t wasting any time.
Their church was closing on April 27 and they had only a couple of weeks left to make sure everything was in place — the guest list, the greeters, the readers, the sermons, the words of farewell, and the final act of closure: the deconsecration of the building.
Of course, there would be closure of the emotional kind but that would take much longer.
They had known for some months this day was coming. Church of Cleopas had long been a victim of declining membership, due mostly to an aging congregation and a lack of younger families filling the void.
Where once Cleopas had filled its pews without trouble, it now saw a scant 20 or 25 worshipers on Sunday mornings.
Even holiday services such as Easter were dwindling in numbers. The church’s vestry book told it all: 39 parishioners at Easter service last year, down from 83 in 2000.
It was difficult to keep a church going with so few worshipers and Cleopas’s finances were where it really showed. The church had been running a deficit for years. “Forever,” said Margie Jones.
A church may run on faith but faith doesn’t pay the bills.
And so the congregation gathered not long ago to have the toughest talk of all, to decide whether to prolong the slow death of Cleopas or to close it with dignity.
“The congregation is aging, there’s no question about that,” said Stewart, a Sorrento-based priest who was called out of retirement by Bishop Gordon Light to help close the church.
“And it is becoming more difficult to do the ministries that they do here, and they’re very active in ministries in the community, this congregation.”
Carol Greenhalgh and her family began attending Church of Cleopas almost five years ago.
She was keen to start a Sunday school when she arrived but that never happened.
“We would like to have a legacy to pass on but we don’t have any young people at this church,” she said.
“And for whatever reason we have not been able to attract young people.”
She speaks wearily now about those efforts, about the willingness of some to open Cleopas to younger families but of the resistance from others.
Of the closure, she says, “To me it’s a bit like when you’ve decided to leave the family home and move into a condo because you’re tired of keeping the grounds.”
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Verna Albright sorted through photo albums and documents last week, gathering some of her church’s records for a history presentation she planned to give to the congregation.
She’s been a member of Church of Cleopas since 1978 and conducts services as a lay-minister.
Letting go of Cleopas has been a difficult process, she says. There’s a sadness they all feel, like a part of them has died.
“For a lot of the older people, the church has not just been their religious life but it’s been their social life,” said Albright.
“All their social contacts were at the church, not like people today who are more mobile. These women got together and became friends and they did things together. There’s been real ties.”
The ties will be broken this coming Sunday when Cleopas’s eldest members, its youngest members, and everyone who has had any link to the church over 40-plus years, stand by as Bishop Gordon Light deconsecrates the sanctuary and the building.
The church will no longer be considered a holy place after Sunday.
Its sacred items will be removed — its altar rail, its pulpit, the ornately carved deacon’s chair. Those will go to other churches as gifts. The historical documents and photographs Albright uncovered will go to an Anglican seminary on the Lower Mainland.
And the building — the building where so many worshipers prayed on Sunday mornings, where so many parishioners celebrated baptisms and weddings and mourned the passing of loved ones — will be torn down. Someone has already bought the land for development.
When they are ready to move on, the parishioners of Cleopas will go to other Anglican churches in Kamloops — St. Paul’s Cathedral downtown or St. George’s on the North Shore.
They will give themselves time to grieve, said Betty May Gore. They need to do that. Even Gore, whose older sister Carol says is quiet about her feelings right now, admits the grief will come when the full weight of the closure finally hits her, when there are no planning meetings to keep her mind busy.
“It’s afterward,” she said. “It’s afterward when some of us will grieve, not that there isn’t some grieving happening now, but it’s a process.”
Lorna Turnbull, who has been a member of Cleopas for three years, crystallized for many the source of their sadness: April 27 will be the last time they meet, she said.
“That’s the issue more than the building,” said Rev. Stewart.
“It’s the community.”
There are lessons to be learned in the demise of Church of Cleopas, lessons about change and the willingness to do it, say some of the members.
A church can’t survive on faith alone. Even the money isn’t so much the issue. A thriving church needs a “farm team” of young families to draw from, as Greenhalgh put it.
The women who are now planning the church’s closure are careful not to blame but there is the consensus that things might have been different if the congregation had only been more willing to offer a place for families and children.
Christian rock bands, youth programs, Sunday school. Those sorts of attractions.
“We’ve always said we wanted to grow,” said a congregation member who didn’t want to be named. “But we’re very comfortable where we are.”
There are indeed lessons to be learned, says Rev. Stewart, and she is considering developing a case study of Cleopas for other churches to contemplate.
But there is a time and place for that kind of analysis and she knows this is neither.
The focus now is on the final service and the deconsecration this coming weekend, on the task of saying goodbye to a place of worship that has been a centrepiece to so many lives.
“I want Sunday to be very upbeat and not one filled with great sorrow,” she said.
“I said to the people ‘We’re going to celebrate who Church of Cleopas has been and the work they’ve done all those years.’ And that’s something to be happy about.”
© 2008 The Daily News (Kamloops)
Posted on June 4, 2008
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