The congregation of First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Chicago Heights has a history that predates Dixie Highway, the 100-year-old road that has brought members to their place of worship for 58 years.
It is the third church site in the congregation’s 112-year history. The first was a tabernacle on Otto Boulevard, and the second was a church building at 16th and Vincennes, which the congregation outgrew, longtime church member Pat Paulsen, 88, said. The current building went up in 1957.
But longevity, tradition and beliefs — staples of most established churches — have not been enough to sustain the church. The familiar A-frame building at 1045 Dixie Highway is for sale and the congregation and their pastor, Denise “Denny” Whiteside, do not know what the future holds for the membership.
“The finances of keeping up a building as our congregation continued to shrink has just been overwhelming for us,” Whiteside said.
The membership has dwindled to about 50 active members, Whiteside said, with 20 to 25 people attending Sunday worship service in a sanctuary that once held hundreds.
She said most of the organizations — church groups or nonprofits — that rented space at the site, subsidizing some of the church’s expenses, are gone, and “we actually ran into a situation where, all at once, we had no renters.”
The congregation voted in March to sell the building, one of several options which included merging with another church or remaining a congregation at a much smaller venue. Shortly after the building went on the market, other churches showed interest, Whiteside said, but to date, First Christian Church has had “no firm offer yet.”
In the meantime, loyal members are left to ponder the reasons for the decline in membership that has led to the church’s financial problems.
“As our families matured, there were few children coming along, so age-wise we were not able to replace ourselves,” Paulsen said. She said many members died or moved away.
Chicago Heights resident Georgeann Skowronski, 69, agreed.
“Young families don’t want to come to a church that has no children,” Skowronski said. “That was our biggest challenge. We’ve had several families join the church. … But not enough to keep us going.”
Dale Grupe, 63, of Homewood, who is Paulsen’s daughter and a lifelong member of the church, said the problem began years ago.
“My guess is that we’ve been struggling for about 20 years to keep our heads above water,” Grupe said. “Over the last 20 years we’ve examined and re-examined our ministries and our outreach and how best to grow our church, and we did from time to time change things up a little bit to try to be a church who was living in our community and doing for our community and trying to be out there.”
Nothing seemed to work, no matter how well-meaning.
Whiteside said when she became the pastor at First Christian Church about three years ago, she looked at what already had been done by the pastors and congregation to increase the membership and remedy the financial situation.
“Over the last 20 years, when I look back at (church) records of the things that they’ve done, they were doing all the right things,” Whiteside said. “They really were.”
She said records show the church requested that the central office in Indianapolis explore the demographics of the Chicago Heights area and find out where “outreach efforts need to be focused.”
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Whiteside said over the years through the work of several ministries, the church has actively tried to support the needs of the community.
South Suburban PADS, an organization founded in 1990 to help those who are homeless or in danger of becoming homeless to find emergency transitional and permanent shelter, became a First Christian Church ministry when it was founded 25 years ago. From the beginning, Paulsen was in charge of directing the Monday night shelter for homeless men at the church, a ministry so much a part of her life that it has “left a big hole” now that it has ended because of the uncertainty of the church’s fate, she said.
“That was one of the hardest conversations that we had in the spring,” Whiteside said.
Whiteside said a huge concern for the congregation is how to handle letting go of the ministries while they wait for the building to sell.
“How do we do this with dignity?” Whiteside said. “How do we continue to be a service point … a value to the community in that interim?”
Whiteside may soon have that conversation with another outreach program, she said. Respond Now, a nonprofit in Chicago Heights that provides essentials for living to those in need, according to its website, has “always” held its annual Christmas store at First Christian Church. The program allows shoppers to take home donated Christmas decorations, toys, food, clothing and other items so that those who would otherwise do without a holiday can have one.
“They are quite worried about not having a location for that this year,” Whiteside said. “If we haven’t sold the building, it will be here for them to use. We just may not have any money to pay the light bill.”
Whiteside said recent attempts on her part to boost the membership through community outreach have not been successful.
Because the First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) Chicago Heights’ denomination is “radically independent” and “extremely liberal in our theology,” Whiteside said, she was able to reach out to the LGBT community in the area and invite them to attend services.
“We are open and affirming,” Whiteside said. “I am openly gay, and we have really not been able to tap into that community here like we thought that we would.”
Without new members, there is little hope of saving the building, she said, and they have done everything they can to keep it afloat, including pay cuts for all the staff.
“We’ve done everything that we can to eke out, keep that cash flow as long as we can,” Whiteside said.
She said she believes the church will “run out of cash” by the end of the year. Even if an offer to buy the building were made now, the likelihood that the sale would close before the church ran out of funds to sustain the operation of the building “is getting slimmer and slimmer,” Whiteside said.
Still, there is no desire to give the building away. The congregation definitely knows the building’s worth, Whiteside said.
“The building is a great asset location-wise as well as what it has to offer,” she said. “In this market, it’s not priced at what it’s really worth. Somebody is going to be able to make an impact out of that location. It’s so well-situated.”
Open to any help they can get to keep running as long as possible, Whiteside and the congregation are hoping a celebration scheduled for Sunday to open the time capsule from the church’s 1957 cornerstone may bring some former members back to First Christian who may want to help.
Whiteside said that kind of generosity wouldn’t be out of character for anyone once affiliated with the church. She said despite the inevitability of the building’s sale, some members who already have found another church to attend continue to honor their annual pledges, as do those who have remained.
“The congregation has a history of being very faithful tithers,” Whiteside said.
The problem is that there are so few of them left.
“The smaller it gets, the sadder it gets,” she said.
For more information, email Whiteside at [email protected].
Ginger Brashinger is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.