Like A Leaf Falling to the Ground: Saying Goodbye to our Milwaukee Parish

The last of the warm Wisconsin breezes are bringing down the very first yellow ash leaves of Fall this week. All summer I’ve been trying to find the words to write about our local Anglican parish closing, to explain something so big and complicated, private and yet at the same time a deeply shared experience. Finally, the metaphor that I’ve landed on is a leaf falling from a tree.

In the Fall the leaf dies, but the tree lives. Our parish closing is sad, a little death like the death of a leaf, but the Church Universal, the great tree, lives on. It weathers season after season, strong and secure and beautiful. A tree cannot live without its leaves. Leaves bring in the energy from the sun, and the Church Universal is made up of little parishes each doing the essential work of proclaiming the gospel, celebrating the Eucharist, and offering the family of God to people in specific and personal ways. Parishes matter, our parish mattered, but we are also part of something rooted and ancient and enduring.

Our parish, Christ Redeemer Anglican Church, started a few years before we moved to Milwaukee with people excited about living in the neighborhood of Riverwest and bringing Jesus and some liturgy to a neighborhood with very few churches. And for the past eight years, people met together, first in houses for evening prayer, and then on Sunday mornings in community centers (an opera house and then a youth center). Our parish was officially born just about the time that it seemed like half the families were having babies—a whole crop of little boys who just turned six now, but were all just starting to toddle around the back of the opera house when we came.

Christ Redeemer outgrew the beautiful little opera house and moved into the gym of the youth center a few weeks after we started attending. They had four part time pastors for a church of less than a hundred. It was unorthodox, but the community was too. We were full of great music and people who proselytized for their favorite tattoo artist Laurent. We gathered around the altar to receive the body and blood of Christ, and after the service drank locally roasted Colectivo coffee and let the kids run wild in the gym.

Eighteen months later we had one pastor — one had been asked to leave, one got PhD dissertation-writing funding and requested no other employment, and one went to spend time in alcohol and drug rehabilitation—and our deacon who left really wasn’t in a place where taking on a full time pastoral work was wise. But everyone tried hard to make it work, to be supportive and understanding, believing in God working in the hard and tender places in our lives. Five months later, our rector returned and our remaining deacon tried to take a much-needed break.

But over the next few years people slowly left. Some simply moved away for work reasons. But our laity came from so many different backgrounds, drawn together because of the people and the place more than the theology or the denomination. So people began to leave because those differences, trajectories that had once intersected, grew further apart. Some people left because we were too conservative, some because we were too liberal. People found new church homes in an Eastern Rite Catholic Church, an Orthodox Church, an Episcopal Church, a Reformed church, an ELCA Lutheran church, a large non-denominational church, and no church.

The fact that some people haven’t found a new church and might never is one of the hardest and saddest parts of a church struggling and closing: people left without a new church family. Even our rector came slowly came to discern that his vocation as a rector was coming to an end, and he left. And while those who remained came together and tried to make it work for another 16 months with help from our diocese, it still wasn’t enough, and our leaf dropped off of that great tree. 

Each family leaving was hard and sad. Even if it was a good choice for that family, it was so hard because they were my friends. And even though we’re still friends, it’s different because we don’t gather together weekly.

There are, of course, a dozen smaller stories within this larger story of reasons people left, many of them hard and painful. Some of which I know bits of, but are not my stories to tell. I’m also sure there are private hurts that I’m completely unaware of—Lord have mercy—we are able to hurt each other so deeply even when we are trying to do everything right.

What I do know is this: there have been church plants and parishes that have closed having faced lesser trials and challenges than ours, and there are parishes and plants that have gone on to thrive despite greater trials and challenges than ours. Whether an individual church proclaims Christ crucified and risen for a short or long season, it does so in God’s mercy.

It is more remarkable to me that more churches don’t fail. Left on our own, we all fail. Some parishes collapse under scandal, some wither away slowly because of heresy or apathy, or simply because people move. That God continues to choose to use us meeting together in word and sacrament to spread the Good News and baptize new believers is truly remarkable.

Keeping the image of individual parishes and church plants being like leaves on the great tree of the Church Universal has helped me make peace with our parish closing. Sometimes, leaves fall early in a summer storm, or because of some blight, or just because it is Autumn and it is time for old leaves to die before new leaves bud in the spring.

A leaf falling to the ground is not a felling of a great tree. All parishes have a lifecycle; there are few two-thousand-year-old churches. And even seemingly unassailable cathedrals like Notre Dame can nearly burn to the ground.   

I do not like this. I do not like change. I have the temperament of someone who would have happily been baptized in the same church that would bury me, and it would be even better if my great-grandparents had been there too. But I’m 34 and this is the 13th church that I’ve said goodbye to, and I’m not sure that I could accurately tell you what denomination all my great-grandparents were a part of, let alone where their churches were.

All living things change, and all change involves a bit of dying and growing and new beginning.

Five and a half years ago, we moved away from our beloved DC church, and I wrote a goodbye letter I read at a church dinner and then put up as a blog post. And strangely enough, since then, that post in particular has been my most popular. I don’t think that is because people really resonated with my musings about what six and half years of doing life with our church meant to us, but more the title: a goodbye-love letter to church. People were searching (literately googling) for how to say goodbye to a church.

It’s hard to know how to say goodbye whether to a person or a church family.

One of the things that I am most grateful for in the experience of having this Milwaukee parish church close is the grace of a good ending. One of the wonders of the world is that in the Fall so many leaves turn such brilliant colors before they die, a last unexpected bit of beauty to offer the world. And in our parish, I feel like we got a little, unmerited beauty in our ending. Our leaf turned a lovely gold our last six months when our interim priest walked us down the path of closing with a gentle and steady presence.

 The last 16 months of our church we were without a rector. Our deacon and staff worked so hard to help us have Sunday services with pre-sanctified communion or supply priests. Then last November we got an interim priest. He came into our church with such a big heart to care for us. He met with each family and heard their stories—their hurts and hopes. He helped piece together what had happened, communicating with our diocese and vestry and helping us walk the road to discerning if we should close.

Then in February a large, unexpected utilities bill came in that made it clear that we had simply run out of money with too few people to continue. He helped the vestry decide to close. It was announced right before Lent began, and we had all of Lent and Easter Octave to prepare. He ditched his prepared Lenten sermon series and embarked on learning how to lament, with the Psalms of lament as our guide.

I told him that he was like our church hospice chaplain. He helped us to have a good death. I know that’s not what he wanted, any more than it’s what we wanted. What we all wanted was a miracle; we wanted resurrection and new life. But the road we had to walk together was the road of letting the leaf fall from the tree.

I have come to appreciate the blessing of hospice care. In the past three years, our family has had to say goodbye to all three of Jackson’s remaining great-grandpas: Great Grandpa Hays, Great Grandpa Denny, and Great Grandpa Lattea, and each of them had their remaining days made easier and better with hospice nurses and doctors walking us all through the process of dying.

This summer, Evan and I made our own estate plans, naming guardians for our children if we die and creating a revocable living trust so that everything is in order for their care and upbringing. I read a few books to help us, but Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande was by far the most deeply moving. Parts of it are an ode to hospice care, to not fighting death so hard that what remains of life is unlivable.

For our church, those remaining weeks in Lent, when we knew we were closing, but hadn’t yet, were bittersweet. We got to both lament and mourn together and to remember the beautiful things that had happened in our parish over the past five years.

Primarily, when I think about my own time at our church and how I’ve grown at our time there, it is wrapped up in motherhood.

Our time at Christ Redeemer were the years when we waited for and rejoiced in having our two children. This was the church where they were baptized.

It’s the church that I paced the back lulling a baby to sleep in the ergo, or wrangled a squirming toddler bent on running down the aisle, or didn’t make a service because of skipped naps, or running noses, or too much snow.

These were the people who prayed for us to get pregnant, who we texted that we were at the hospital about to have our baby, who brought us food and baby clothes and threw us parties. It’s the place where I learned how to become a mother, watching close up every Sunday the ways that women ahead of me instilled grace and discipline their children, nursed them under a scarf during the sermon, explained a theological mystery during Godly Play, gave me permission to have real and upset kids, and encouraged me when I preached sermons with motherhood metaphors.

Those are gifts that I get to take with me. The grace we receive in hearing the gospel, in taking communion, in living life with a church is real. It changed us. It formed us more into the likeness of Christ. There is grief in losing Christ Redeemer because it was a real thing. But because it was real, bits of it endure to continue the work of the Church Universal. Even fallen leaves nourish the ground of the forest, returning minerals and nutrients to the soil. 

During our very last (tearful) service, I had this image of our church as a tiny seed pearl in the midst of a beautiful crown laden with precious stones and metals.

It felt like a reminder that while we were saying goodbye, gathering around the table for the last time as this particular family, that we would someday all gather together at the great feast and every tear would be wiped away.

And in the five months that have passed since we’ve closed, I have been surprised by the sweetness of our new parish, of its distinctive personality, of having a host of spiritual parents and grandparents for us and our children. It’s not the same, in both good and hard ways.

But it’s God’s grace to us and our home for this season. Fall is both full of endings and dying as well as gathering in warm places, cozy and thankful. I feel that I’m holding both in my hands, new beginning and endings, sadness and gratitude, a picture of all the messiness and grace that being a part of the church entails.

Have you walking through a church plant or parish closing? Or how have other endings resonated spiritual with you?