{"id":3899,"date":"2016-02-19T19:02:03","date_gmt":"2016-02-20T01:02:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=3899"},"modified":"2016-02-20T07:56:08","modified_gmt":"2016-02-20T13:56:08","slug":"mass-in-the-shadow-of-the-k-mart-building","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2016\/02\/mass-in-the-shadow-of-the-k-mart-building.html","title":{"rendered":"Mass in the shadow of the K-Mart Building"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

So last weekend, we were visiting my parents, having last been there at Thanksgiving. \u00a0And Sunday morning, for church, we paid a visit to Christ Our Light! Catholic Church<\/a> (yes, you need the exclamation point there just as much as when writing about Jeb! Bush).<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the story behind this church:<\/p>\n

Up until 2013, this was St. Alan\u2019s Church \u2014 but in that year, at the command of the Archdiocese of Detroit, this parish merged with St. Columban of Birmingham, a bit over a mile away as the crow flies. \u00a0As described in the suburban Oakland Press<\/a>,<\/p>\n

Joe Kohn, spokesman for the Archdiocese of Detroit, said that decisions are well-planned in advance. In this case, more than a year of planning happened.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the case of St. Columban and the parish closing, or merging with St. Alan, the decision was made because of long-term trends and it was made between the parish faithful and their pastor. \u2026 (In recent years, there has been) fewer parishioners and an aging of parish population,\u201d Kohn said.<\/p>\n

There was no present financial issues, but the number of parishioners declined from 600 to 400 in the past five years, Kohn said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The the article further reports that the \u201cvast majority\u201d of parishioners were expected to make the move to the new parish, though for those coming from the west, there\u2019s another church a mile away that might have likewise been a natural choice.<\/p>\n

So what happened?<\/p>\n

Christ Our Light!\u2019s priest, on their home page, says this:<\/p>\n

Christ, Our Light! is a small community of 800 families surrounded by larger Catholic parishes. The first question is \u201cDo you want smaller?\u201d Our worship space has been beautifully and comfortably refurbished. We are blessed by two very talented Ministers of Music, an active Ministry of Evangelization and Service, a strong program of Religious Education and Faith Formation for adults, children and Special Needs families and their children.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And the church does look nice and fresh. \u00a0Their bulletin isn\u2019t jam-packed with activities, but they\u2019re having a St. Patrick\u2019s Day party, and jointly sponsoring a blood drive with a nearby Lutheran church, as well as collecting for a food pantry and preparing meals for the rotating-church homeless shelter. \u00a0The church was reasonably full, the congregation did an acceptable job singing, and even (you know this is coming) stayed in their pews until the end of the closing song.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s their future? \u00a0If St. Columban had 400 members, and Christ Our Light! has 800 families, then either St. Alan was already healthier than St. Columban, or the article\u2019s statement of 400 really already referred to families, and, if St. Alan was similarly sized, then their numbers held steady. \u00a0And perhaps the decline \u2014 which must have been occurring at both parishes, or else the merged congregation wouldn\u2019t fit comfortably into the newly merged (but renovated in the same footprint) building \u2014 was a matter of demographics, if the neighborhoods were simply aging and now full of empty nesters.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s also entirely possible that the drop in numbers is due to the younger generation still living nearby (there is, after all, a massive apartment complex<\/a> across the street, likely the home to lots of young adults) but simply having left the church.<\/p>\n

Hence, the K-Mart building \u2013 that is, the now-abandoned former World Headquarters for K-Mart Corporation.<\/p>\n

OK, it\u2019s not literally in the shadows of the K-Mart building, but very nearly so, half a mile away. \u00a0And, as it happens, I grew up similarly in the \u201cshadows of the K-Mart building\u201d in the opposite direction. \u00a0My younger brother even worked there for a time, before it closed in 2006<\/a> when K-Mart moved its headquarters to Sears\u2019 suburban Chicago location during the merger of the companies.<\/p>\n

And, despite the merger of the two companies, neither Sears nor K-Mart has been able to find their way, as each year brings new reports of closing more locations. \u00a0K-Mart has not managed to find a way to compete with Walmart (other than, \u201cmaybe one of our locations might be closer to your home\u201d), and Sears has not managed to find a new niche when its old one (that is, one stop shopping for everything from tools and appliances to clothes and linens) became obsolete in the era of big-box stores. \u00a0Perhaps the merger has prolonged their slow decline, but they don\u2019t seem to have stabilized.<\/p>\n

So is this merger a path forward \u2014 a way to manage what you might gently call demographic shifts, and restore vitality? \u00a0Or is it merely a way to manage inevitable and long-term decline?<\/p>\n

(Incidentally, whatever problems Catholicism and Christianity are having in the U.S., a recent article on the Church of England<\/a>\u00a0reports that they\u2019re much further down the path of managing the decline \u2014 with the number of Brits attending church on average per week consisting of 1.8% of the population, forecast to drop to 1.0%, and with only 40% of Brits even professing a belief in Christianity.)<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So last weekend, we were visiting my parents, having last been there at Thanksgiving. \u00a0And Sunday morning, for church, we paid a visit to Christ Our Light! Catholic Church (yes, you need the exclamation point there just as much as when writing about Jeb! Bush). Here\u2019s the story behind this church: Up until 2013, this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[8,327],"class_list":["post-3899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-catholicism","tag-parish-closings"],"yoast_head":"\nMass in the shadow of the K-Mart Building<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"So last weekend, we were visiting my parents, having last been there at Thanksgiving. \u00a0And Sunday morning, for church, we paid a visit to Christ Our\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2016\/02\/mass-in-the-shadow-of-the-k-mart-building.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" 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