The sense of adventure and excitement carried through the rest of Sunday afternoon and evening and then Matt began to worry again. Worry became a drumbeat for him--and it was frustrating because there was nothing I could do or say to comfort him. He could intellectually affirm that God is sovereign and in control and loves us, but emotionally he seemed not to see any other possibility than the slow dissolution of the congregation.
"God loves people who get run over by trains too" he would say, or some variation on that theme, in response to my every encouragement. At some point, I just gave up and started quoting scripture at him, 'you are commanded in Scripture not to worry' I would say, which I am sure was very helpful.
Monday was the day Matt was supposed to speak with Fr. Meaghar about renting St. Andrew's. He fretted about it until mid-morning, preparing at the same time for services the second week at Conklin Ave. Baptist church...
From Matt
The rectory garage fronts the church parking-lot, so if you're backing your car out from the garage (a feat that is only possible if you can actually park your car in the garage which, filled with furniture and boxes as it was, we had yet to perform) you don't pull out into the street, you back into a parking lot.
A view of the rectory taken from the church parking lot
There is also a door to the left of the double garage doors with a doorbell--that has the same sound as the doorbell at the front door...which is some distance away. So, every time the door-bell rings there is a scramble to figure out which door to open.
The Rectory front yard
The doorbell rang at about 11:30am on Monday the 19th of January--I'd been procrastinating all morning. I had a lot more to do that day besides call Msgr Meaghar.
Our move had been so quick, both from church and home, that we really didn't have time to sort stuff. I was afraid, and later my fears proved founded, that people were not really understanding the implications of the court order. I'd written a letter describing what we could and could not remove from the church--personal items, items lent but not given, items that were bought privately but not by the church, could all be removed by owners. But items that had been bought by Good Shepherd or belonging to Good Shepherd, no longer, according to the court order, belonged to us.
The most difficult items to explain were those that people bought in memory of deceased relatives. It was incomprehensible to many of my parishioners, that a chalice, to cite one example, bought exclusively through monies donated by one of our parishioners in memory of his departed grandmother, would have to be given to the Diocese of Central New York. We'd lost our building, our rectory, and all of the assets, but it was the surrender, willing though it was, of the memorials that caused, I think, the most visceral outrage and sorrow in the congregation.
Nevertheless, the court demanded a full accounting of all assets and personal property of the parish and so we had to get together as full a list as possible.
That was my biggest task beginning Monday. I believed, due to the misunderstandings above, that in the rush to leave there may have been things taken that should have stayed. My plan was to write a second, more detailed letter describing what could and what could not be taken, and then to go back to the old church, we still had the keys, and list all the things present.
Empty hallway inside the old Good Shepherd--taken the day we returned for the final accounting
We hoped to have a full and complete accounting done by midweek when we hoped to turn over the key to the church to the Diocese of Central New York.
When the door bell rang I opened the front door only to find myself staring at a vacant porch, then ran back to the garage door and opened it to find Msgr. Meaghar.
I greeted him, a bit embarrassed by the garage packed full of boxes and furniture and asked him to come in.
We sat in the living room.
After pleasantries and more expressions of gratitude, I dove right in. We needed, I said, a place to worship and were willing to pay the full rental value not only for the rectory but also for the use of the church building from 7am to 2pm on Sunday mornings plus utilities, bills, and snow removal costs.
We were also, I told him, interested in discussing the possibilities of purchasing the property.
He'd known this of course. As early as last year when we heard about the merger of St. Andrew's and St. John's, our wardens had broached the subject with him but things were still up in the air and the Catholic diocese was not in a position to negotiate.
Our purchase plans were now in disarray. The older plan drawn up by John Chaney (Jr. Warden) assumed a court victory. It would no longer work given the loss of our assets. At this point, the only thing we had going for us was the $100,000.00 parishioners had saved up autonomously during the legal battle. It was not much considering the $700,000.00 price tag for St. Andrew's.
There were several ideas floating around:
1. We spend the year in the gym with low overhead, raising an additional 50 to 100K and, in the meantime, negotiate some equity with the Catholic Diocese of Syracuse by seeing if they would lower their asking price. Then at the end of the year, seek a bank loan. We would then seek a renter for the school building which would help us pay off the mortgage.
The west side of the church building taken in early Spring 2009
The school building
2. Pay the full rent for St. Andrews which would make it more difficult to raise the necessary money for a loan, but we could offset that problem by seeking an agreement with the Catholic diocese whereby the money we would pay for the year in rent would go to the purchase of the property. Meanwhile we would save what money we could and approach a bank at the end of a year or possibly two. Having an actual church for a meeting place, also, it was supposed, would make for increased income and prevent a much larger loss of membership.
3. A very far fetched thought was that perhaps the Diocese of Syracuse would agree to hold the mortgage for us at lower interest. This would allow us to move in immediately and start paying a mortgage instead of rent, perhaps at a lower set interest rate.
4. Ask the Diocese of Syracuse whether they would be willing to split the property, allowing us to buy only the sanctuary, parking lot and rectory and leaving the school building, storage facility and field to be sold separately.
The storage facility stands on the west side of the property in back of the school.
In this photo taken in late January, you can see the school in the right foreground, church building standing to the right in the background, and the rectory to the left of the church building
This would allow us to rent St. Andrew's, raise money for the year, keep more parishioners, and go to the bank much sooner to seek a loan.
The vestry planned to meet in the next week to discuss purchase strategies but there were strong proponents of each strategy and it promised to be a difficult meeting.
Of course, I did not share our plans with Msgr. Meaghar, I only indicated our hope to negotiate for a purchase.
Msgr. Michael Meaghar
I tend to speak very fast and bowl people over when I'm excited about something or have a lot of information to pass on. So I'm constantly telling myself to shut up and listen when I'm with him. This conversation was no exception.
After laying out all of our hopes, offers, and dreams, Msgr Meaghar reached into his pocket and pulled out three keys. One, he said, was an extra key for the rectory. The second was a key to the church and the third was a key for the school building.
"We'd like to offer you use of the entire property rent free for as long as it is on the market. We only ask that you pay for utilities."
He'd managed to leave me speechless again, for a moment. He smiled. Regaining myself I asked, "What can we do? There has to be something we can do? I mean this is incredibly gracious, please tell us what we can do to help you if anything?"
"There's really nothing at this point that we need," he said, "I do think we should set up a meeting at some point soon to discuss your purchase proposals. What does your calendar look like?"
We ended up setting a date for our first meeting on Friday March 13th, 2009 which would give us the time to sort through our finances and come up with a feasible proposal
As soon as Msgr Meaghar had gone, I sat down and dashed off this quick email to the entire parish:
Dear Good Shepherd,I made a point throughout the year to communicate bad news clearly, quickly, and without mincing words. But I also was sure to broadcast every bit of good news, however slight to the hilt with bells and whistles, using every bit of media possible. This provided a great deal of encouragement to the congregation during the dark days to come (and there were many). And, I later discovered, it evoked all kinds of exasperation, perplexity and bitterness on the part of those Episcopalians in town who were waiting expectantly for our demise and dissolution.
Great news. It is confirmed that we will worship at St. Andrew's this Sunday...thanks be to God and many thanks to Msgr Meaghar of Sts John and Andrew Catholic Church.
In Christ
Matt
Only eight days after losing our building and home, God had set us down, at least for the moment, in a very good place. On Sunday we would worship in relatively recently built, much better maintained worship space four times larger than our old one, with exactly ten times the parking capacity. My family went from a split level home with one bathroom, three bedrooms, and one car garage to a two story home with finished basement and laundry, four bedrooms, three bathrooms and a two car garage. And we had the keys to the school building should we, somehow, ever need space.
Interlude: The Trauma of the Cat (by Anne)
Bander is a young, black, silky ridiculous animal we had aquired in a fit of tragedy for my mother, whose own cat in Kenya met a difficult and unhappy end. She, my mother, was here in Binghamton, awaiting the birth of Rowan and helping me cope (it was another moment in our lives when Matt had to go to General Convention and I was hoping to have a baby any day). Before Rowan was born she received news of her cat and so the obvious first response was to rush out and buy her a kitten she could take back to Kenya.
But on the eve of her flight, a young gentlemen in London attempted to ignite a bomb made from various liquids. Suddenly, at 1 in the morning before her flight, she was trying to shove all her carry on luggage into clear plastic bags and remove all gells and liquids. There was no way she was going to be able to take a cat.
So, Bander became a permanent part of our household, the only cat who would sit on a lap, and one deeply in love with all babies, but essentially shy.
Bander before the move
Rewind to Thursday afternoon the 15th of January 2008 our last day living in the old rectory, the week before the first worship service in the gym. Matt and the men from church were toward the end of the great task of moving the the bigger items out of the rectory. All the animals (we had three cats at the time including Bander, and an elderly dog named Maggie) were spooked. We'd shut some of them up in a bedroom but we could not find Bander. Had I had my wits about me, which clearly I did not, I would have packed him up in his box Thursday morning, before anything was moved anywhere. The great numbers of people packing and move all week had already made him extremely nervous and I should have been paying better attention.
I'm pretty sure it was the moving of the washer and dryer that terrified him. That was where he was last seen, hiding behind the washer. When the men lifted it, he shot out accros the floor in a flash of black fur and nobody saw where he went. To my horror, the back door had been left open. During the summer it would have been far less worrying, but temperatures that week hovered around 0 Fahrenheit. Cats generally have good sense so I persuaded myself that he would not have sought refuge outside but at the same time, there was literally nowhere to go in the house to get away from people...people were everywhere.
I had no idea that Matt, at 6pm that very evening would say, "Why don't we go sleep in the new house. Let's just get out of here. It will be better in the long run."
I couldn't think of any reason why not. With so much of our furniture gone, walls bare, and pets hiding, the old house was empty and sorrowful. It just seemed like the good thing to do.
My cat and Emma's cat obediently and angrily allowed themselves to be shoved into the carrier and then we all went searching for Bander. We couldn't find him at all but as we had to come back in the morning anyway, we decided to go without him.
By 9:30pm the car was packed with children and animals. It was snowing and frigid as we pulled away from the curb and that was that. We never spent the night in that house again as a family.
Besides putting the children in the wrong rooms (we accidentally switched the boys and girls, you'd have to be here to see how wrong it was) causing much much much wailing and weeping, we basically got through that first night in the St. Andrew's rectory. In the morning, Matt went to Men's Bible Study and then back to the old house to keep loading while I stayed at the St. Andrew's Rectory and tried to unpack essentials.
Micah and two of the kids on the day after we moved in
Gwendolyn and Rowan during moving week
The cat was not anywhere to be found all day, although everyone kept watch, and the carrier stood ready for him.
And so began a long season of checking the house three or four times a day, every day, in hopes that he would come out and come home. Unlike the church building, we did not have to immediately hand over the keys to the rectory. We had access to the house until mid-February.
Throughout the month, I made frequent trips, walking up and down and around the block, asking neighbors whether they had seen our cat, asking them to keep watch. I set a safe racoon trap. Left bowls of food and drink laying about in the house. Some mornings it looked like food had been eaten and on others it was obvious that it had not. I prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed. And finally, the last night before we were required to turn in the keys, I slept in a thick sleeping bag, next to the back door just hoping and praying that he would come to me.
But he did not. When morning came I despaired of ever finding him. I locked up the house and cursed the day I was born.
The cat, for me, came to stand for the whole black week of the move. On the one hand, God had so over extended his grace and love for us. We were in a warm, comfortable well laid out house and we were all together. Church life was all around us. We had a place to worship on Sunday mornings, Morning Prayer met every morning in the basement, all five Bible Studies were up and running, the youth group was meeting again, and so many people were busy giving their all to serve and help in so many ways.
The rectory basement set up for Morning prayer and bible study
Men's bible study meeting in the finished rectory basement
And yet, all this time there was the black smear of this cat gone missing.
Threads of Anxiety (Matt)
Though the events of week two were overall encouraging, our arrangements with Msgr Meaghar were, at the moment, tentative and temporary. Our position, realistically, was incredibly tenuous.
Money: We needed it desperately and we had little of it. If membership and pledges decreased in keeping with our pre-departure projections, it would not be difficult to burn through a good chunk of the 100K in a year's time. We not only needed to save the money we already had, but we had to find a way of making at least $50,000.00 more if we hoped to have any chance at securing a bank loan to purchase St. Andrew's within the year. How could we possibly hope to do that?
Property: Meanwhile, we were sitting on some of the most valuable real estate in town. And it was for sale. On Friday the 23rd, the end of week two, a realtor showed up at the rectory front door with some prospective buyers. They looked very interested. Rumors were flying around town that an Orthodox congregation and a Pentecostal congregation were both looking seriously at the property. The Catholic Diocese of Syracuse had been incredibly gracious, but they too had fiduciary responsibilities. If another church or company made the right offer, Syracuse would, it seemed, be obligated in all fairness to accept it...and we would, once more, be without a home.
Identity. Even if, by some miracle, we were able to raise the money to make an offer and seek a loan, how on earth could we ever hope approach a bank or lending institution? We'd just been thrown out of our buildings by the court. We had no loan history, no equity, nothing at all to show ourselves trustworthy. Who were "we" anyway. Having lost the first three counts of the lawsuit, could we still claim to be "the Church of the Good Shepherd" or had we lost our corporate identity? Would we need to form a new incorporation? And if we did what would that mean for the ongoing legal fight?
Legal troubles: The next court date was Friday March 20th. The judge would hear arguments regarding the $600,000.00 bequest and review our accounting. Our legal standing before the court was already compromised. What would happen when we turned in our accounting? The diocese was expecting at least $150,000.00 in assets. That's about how much money was on the books when they filed the lawsuit in April of 2008--that's also when, knowing their financial contributions might end up enriching the Episcopal Diocese of Central New York, the vast bulk of parishioners (with the exception of two individuals) refused to give any more money to the Church of the Good Shepherd. In order to maintain contractual obligations, pay the bills, and maintain the property, the vestry was forced, throughout 2008, to spend close to $98,000.00 of the $150,000.00 in savings. Would the diocese object to our accounting and try to sue us again for the money we spent during the lawsuit? We were told it was a possibility. The vestry took care to spend money thriftily, half-expecting the diocese to seek some kind of injunction or freeze our assets after the one attempt to negotiate some kind of agreement fell through in May of 08. They didn't. When they received less money than expected from their court victory, would they come after us for more?
Broken Pipes: On Tuesday January 20th, the day before we turned the keys into the Diocese of Central New York, two longstanding members of Good Shepherd, a husband and wife, decided to give the church building one last walk through. While there, they noticed that the office area was extremely cold. This was not unusual. The furnace that served that section of the building was prone to frequent malfunction. The usual procedure had been to open the doors leading from the offices to the sanctuary which was always quite warm. This usually brought enough warm air into office area to keep pipes from bursting. So that's what they did. They also tried to call the Diocese of Central New York to warn them of the problem but nobody answered. The next day, the temperatures rose and they figured, as usual, that all was well. Unfortunately, the hard freeze the night before had been enough to cause the pipes in the office area to burst. We found out about it a week later through our attorney. Ultimately our insurance was able to pay for the damages, but to this day, many Episcopalians in town are persuaded that we deliberately trashed the place. That false impression would come back to hurt us later.
Shepherd's Bowl: At midday on Thursday January 22nd, the day after we'd turned in the keys and accounting to the Diocese of Central New York, a parishioner stopped at the old building in order to put up signs on the outside of the windows and on the door, directing people looking for their usual warm meal at our soup kitchen to Sts. Andrew and John Catholic Church just up the street. Msgr. Meaghar had, once more, stepped up and agreed to host the Shepherd's Bowl temporarily until we found a more permanent location. By 5pm, judging by the footprints in the snow, someone with a key had entered the old building. And all the signs pointing people to the soup kitchen had been taken down. Many of our soup kitchen regulars arrived that evening only to find a dark, cold, locked building. They went away hungry, having no idea that a warm meal was waiting just one block away. Before we lost our building, we'd been the only soup kitchen operating on the south-side of Binghamton on Thursday nights. A good number of people depended on us to make ends meet. What would happen to this program? Was there any way to keep it going long term?
Mission: Good Shepherd is a church. Our primary mission is not survival, but making disciples, baptizing, and teaching all that Jesus commands. Somehow we had to move from thinking about survival to thinking about mission. God had set us down in the perfect neigborhood for it. St. Andrew's stands only one block away from a public housing complex with a good number of Muslim residents. The neighborhood beyond the public housing center is largely lower middle class, and largely unchurched. There was and is a great deal of resentment and animosity between the two demographics. The neighborhood around us was not just a setting, it was a calling. If ever there was an opportunity for a church to bring the gospel of Jesus Christ to bear on a community, this was it. And here we were.
Things had gone very well so far, much better than anyone expected. But we were still in serious trouble. We had no equity, no property, an ongoing court battle, a full accounting to defend, uncertain corporate identity, no possibility of getting a bank loan, and no firm grasp for how many people we would have with us in two to three months time. I couldn't sleep at night and even though I prayed like crazy, I felt no peace, no sense that all would be well. I remember these as some of the most despairing days of my life.
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Comments:
but also, to see how God has worked in spite of and through your weaknesses, and how He has brought beauty out of the ashes of all you lost, suffered, grieved.
Incredible that someone with a key—apparently from the diocese—would have the malice to enter the building and remove those signs knowing it would cause poor hungry people to walk away hungry and dejected! It defies the imagination.