The good:
We’ve spent the last 18 years fixing up our 104 year old building so that it’s now a pretty nice worship space. It’s full of memories for many of us – weddings, baptisms, funerals, Lents, Paschas. It’s not so much to look at from the outside, but it sure has charm inside. We also now have the outside working for us, landscaped and shade and places for the kids to play.
And besides all that, although it’s a continual resource draw for repairs, it is fully paid-for. And also there’s the really cool fort under the stairs!
Use the comments section to add what else you like that I missed.
The bad:
Size: Obviously the size, especially downstairs, isn’t working for us any more. In the winter many people won’t even stay for coffee hour because it’s too loud and crowded, and that’s sad to me, because that’s where/when I get to meet and catch up with everyone. This pandemic period of NOT having that time together has strengthened my resolve about how important that meal together is. Sunday school for multiple classes at once has become rather difficult. (we checked with the Church next door about using their facilities too, but it was a bit of a mess so we passed.) And of course for many in our parish being crowded together as we have been will be even more problematic than it’s been before due to covid.
Parking: nothing can be done about parking spaces without spending lots of money on asphalt due to the city’s legal requirements for parking lots. A year or two ago we got a quote for around $110K for both lots. And that wouldn’t even give us more parking, it would just be pavement over the space we already have. (in theory the city could make us stop parking on the grass lot too, if they were in a bad mood.)
Hazards: we’ve long since exceeded legal or safe numbers in our building for fire codes concerning number of exits and so on. I haven’t lost sleep over it, but I’ve been told we could be shut-down over this if the city choose to do so (no grandfather clause for this one).
There’s also all the hollow spots under the downstairs floor, which is currently being held up pretty-much by prayer alone.
Handicap: There’s the unsolvable handicap accessibility problem. More than a few have not visited or attended because of this.
I suppose we could list smaller annoyances as well: the too-close busy street, the loud trucks, and the trash regularly thrown into our yard.
If you have more issues, add them in the comments.
Could our current building be expanded? Could handicap access be added?
I guess not everyone is aware of this, but over the last 10 or so years we’ve been exploring all the options for expansion and ramps and so on. I’ve talked to builders, Bill (Jongling) and I played with many ideas, I’ve got some measurements and plans drawn-up somewhere for some ramp options, once I even had an unofficial expert on ADA stuff come and measure everything and come up with some ideas. We are bound in on 3 sides to do much expansion with ramps, which have to wind back and forth given our space and the allowed ramp angles. We had a quote once for $100K to put in a lift to just the upstairs (not even the bathrooms downstairs).
So, long story short, given all the limits of our building’s structure, tied together with all the legal entanglements, any reasonable option ended up being so much money, and solved such a small percentage of our issues, that they all pretty much shrugged and said forget it.
In spite of all that I gave it one more try and invited an architect over to look at our building one more time (On Wed Jul 8th). Jeannette Woodard is an architect in Jackson who built the monastery’s church. Matushka pressed her, but she said the same thing as everyone else.
Nonetheless, if anyone else would like to invite a builder over and run your ideas past them, please feel free to do so. I’d be super happy to be totally wrong about this. I just learned that there is a good builder at our neighboring parish, St. Demetrious, ask me if you want his contact info.
Can we take it with us?
A few people asked me this. I have no idea if a building like that, with its height and filminess, could be picked up and moved. (the top part anyway, obviously not the basement.) Maybe somehow it could be incorporated into our new plans? Or used as-is? Since the upstairs church space itself is the least bad of our space problems, it could theoretically work. I’m skeptical (and busy) enough about this idea that I probably won’t look into it, but if someone wants to check it out, fantastic, let me know what you find out. It would be a kind of delightful solution.
Could we buy the baptist church next to us?
If we could buy it, maybe we could use it as our hall and solve some of our issues? I recently called Pastor Charlie and asked him. He pretty resolutely told me to forget about it. He also wanted me to know what he tried to buy our church 30 years ago, and also got a resolute “no”. 🙂
What about another space in town?
I’ve always checked them out as they’ve come up. Nothing usable ever cross our path. We toured the old beautiful Catholic Church once, which is a fantastic church building. Unfortunately it’s legally unusable until it gets a few million dollars of asbestos mitigation and handicap stuff.
How about building a hall in our empty lot?
Checked into that. Something like 200K, if the city lets us. Removes the little bit of parking we had. Helps with our eating space and also storage and so on, but doesn’t solve any of the other issues (see above).
What’s been done on our building so far?
Matushka asked me to add a list of all we’ve done on the building since we got here in 2002. Here’s what I can remember:
- replaced the furnace, twice, with duct work,
- added all the walls on all sides of the basement, and turned the back storage room into a bookstore/library, added a drop ceiling.
- full kitchen remodel, added coffee station,
- replaced all the tables, added built-in benches,
- turned office into coat-room,
- built two bathrooms from scratch,
- refinished both floors – basement and upstairs,
- filled all the walls and the attic with insulation (they were all empty),
- all storm windows replaced,
- roof replaced,
- sidewalk replaced,
- garage replaced by shed which was replaced by another shed,
- swingset built, and other random swings,
- front steps fixed multiple times,
- landscaping,
- entire outside building scraped and repainted, dome too.
- almost all the iconography we have now has been added in the last 18 years, along with the borders, etc.
- choir books, choir stands, reader stand,
- painted every inside surface multiple times,
- added a sink in the altar,
- replaced all the chandelier light fixtures and switches,
- replaced all the vestments and altar table and all the colored church cloths and the tomb,
- removed pews, added rugs instead,
- new lot bought and cleaned up,
Any more questions or issues on this topic? Put them in the comments.
Adding a note here after having Andrew Gould to our parish on August 7/8, 2021.
Andrew really loved the space we have, and how we’ve maintained it and beautified it, and the atmosphere for worship we have there, as do most of us. So he and I had a discussion about all the particular problems involved with doing an expansion in place (all those things listed above).
Generally his view was that a lot of those dead-ends I reached could be overcome with the proper greasing of wheels at the appropriate levels of governmental administration. He seems to have had good luck with getting variances and exceptions and so on for similar situations.
I don’t really know if he’s right or not. Maybe we need someone better at being tenacious with all this red tape than I am. But he’s also not from here. I have dealt with the city of Albion for 20 years on very simple things and have had very little success getting anywhere with them. I could tell you stories. So I do not share his optimism.
Whereas, when dealing with all the planning commission stuff from Sheridan township for the new building, we flew right through.
Furthermore, there is very little appetite for pursuing these avenues in the parish. Literally no one has volunteered to follow up on any of them (with the exception of Billy looking into the “moving the building” idea.). If everything with the new building fails, then I’ll pick those things up again myself, and hope that he is right.
He also expressed, as have others, something akin to, “If we’re going to spend X amount of dollars on a new church, that would easily be enough to make X, Y, and Z changes to our current parish instead.”
True enough, but that’s not how fund-raising works. It’s hard to raise money for causes like, “help us expand our building 20 feet”, as opposed to, “here’s a picture of the beautiful new vision we have for a new church.” I myself would be much less enthused about asking for money for shoehorning additions and fixes to a building full of other problems.
So, it’s not like the goals and fund-raising are interchangeable parts.
At some point the repairs on your old car add up to more than the payments on the new car. If we keep punting, then the next generation gets to deal with that problem. Maybe punting will end up being the right thing, or the only thing, we can do. That’s fine if it works out that way. But I’m willing to spend some effort making things much better before settling for “it’s fine for now”.
More “goods” that I think a) explain some of the “mystery” of why people end up at Holy Ascension rather than other Orthodox churches in the area (or in the nation!) and b) could for the most part be replicated in a new building:
1) pewlessness
2) natural light (Admittedly, we’d lose some nice morning and evening rays in moving from north-facing to east-facing.)
3) aesthetic warmth – wood floors, primary colors in the iconography and bordering, deep red rugs
4) sense of height – I think particularly because of our rather tall iconostas and three-step-up ambon
5) places to be a little set apart without leaving the nave – The stairs to the balcony aren’t cut off, and the balcony is open to the worship space (great for naps for all ages…); there’s a not-quite-inside space created in the back by the overhang of the balcony, where visitors may feel less conspicuous.
6) 104 years of old incense smell – We’ll have to do some work to replicate this.
7) choir on the floor and in the midst of things
8) sense of interior orientation – I think due to the stained glass
9) beeswax candles all over (relatively) and at different levels