You see them in the neighborhoods, stone and mortar giants rising up from rowhomes and rubble. Philadelphia`s innumerable churches seem out of place, beautifully crafted testaments to religious faith surrounded by burned-out shells and boarded-up windows. Looming over the tree at 12th Street and Lehigh Avenue is Cookman United Methodist, an 84-year-old relic.
Some of the masonry in the high arched windows is crumbling away, and rusted air conditioners hang precariously from the walls, but the building maintains a regular presence in a region where far too many houses and far too many lives have fallen to pieces.
As school lets out on a spring afternoon, kids in blue uniforms from nearby George Clymer Elementary file past Cookman. Last year, the church itself was filled with youth after school, working inside or just hanging out on the steps. On Sundays, dozens of people still came for services. Today, no one stops. The church doors are locked, the calendar board outside empty, just naked brown plywood inside the gray wood frame. A crossing guard helping the kids across Lehigh says the deserted church was bustling just a few months ago.
"I don`t recognize what happened," she says. "They were having programs there _ next thing I know they were closed."
In February, Cookman shut its doors for the final time, depriving the region of its spiritual rock and set of worship, to say aught of critical community services. But Cookman`s story is just one fall in a dribble of church closings in Philadelphia that could soon turn a flood. And some church leaders feel betrayed that wealthy congregations aren`t contributing more resources to retain their inner-citycounterparts up and running.
The doors have already closed on many churches throughout the city: St. Peter`s Episcopal in Germantown; Metropolitan AME Zion in South Philly; Mars Hill Baptist in North Philly; 40th Street Methodist in West Philly; and St. Boniface in Norris Square. The worst-case scenario is when a construction is in such bad repair that it is destroyed, such as in the character of Metropolitan AME. And the soaring Church of the Assumption on Spring Garden Street is currently awaiting intelligence from the Department of Licences & Inspections as to whether it will be demolished.
Civic and spiritual leadership are looking the alarm. "Our practice seems to be a withdraw from traditional places where we have relationships with a high density of poverty," says Robin Hynicka, senior minister at Arch Street United Methodist, just north of City Hall. "I see it, but I`m not willing to have it emotionally and spiritually. Ultimately, the masses who have depended on these centers for service are left floundering."
"The community will be missing an innovation that actually provides some fantastic resources in price of office of meeting, in price of stabilizing communities," says former Mayor W. Wilson Goode, currently a rector at the First Baptist Church of Paschall in Southwest Philly. "Youth groups, job training, job development, re-entry, mentoring programs, places for masses to meet. The chief matter is the world needs to recognize this is taking place," Goode says. "The better answer is to throw light on it."
Hanging in a dark, seldom-used stairwell is a plaque that reveals Cookman`s origins. Originally a mission founded in 1871, members then built a chapel and after a church on Lehigh Avenue. After a fire ruined the old facilities, the current edifice was put up in 1927. Hynicka himself had been minister at Cookman United for 15 years, arriving at the church in 1978 when a congregation that had once numbered in the hundreds was gloomy to a bare handful. Five people showed up for his first sermon.
"I was assigned for two days to take myself available to the ministry that was passing on," says Hynicka, who was 24 and clean out of seminary at the time. Undiscouraged by disrepair-when he arrived, the front room of the church housed construction debris and a bathtub-Hynicka got to form building on the elderly and youth programs.
"We sort of focused on children and young and their families," he says. "We developed an after-school program with emphasis not just on assisting elementary aged children with homework, but also a leadership development component with young and teens."
Money issues were ever-present. The big stone construction was expensive to passion and maintain, and the small, low-inget congregation had no way to come up with the necessary dollars. But the church scrounged the money to remain open. "We were always finding creative ways to support the building safe and usable to people," Hynicka says. The pastor even learned to fix a constantly on-the-fritz furnace and run to a leaky roof.
Hynicka stayed in the church and the region until 1993, when he touched on to the Frankford Ministry. By then, the faithful at Cookman had grown to 100, with 50 or 60 showing up for services on a given Sunday. The pastor`s departure from Cookman was featured in journalist Buzz Bissinger`s portrait of early `90s Philadelphia "A Prayer for the City," which quotes from Hynicka`s final sermon: "Today is not a day God has brought us to say `It`s over, it`s finished.` Today is a day God has brought us to say `It`s new, it`s a beginning.` Are you ready?"
"His chorus of desire was appropriate," Bissinger wrote, "but in that elementary church built for another time and another era, it was tough to bed exactly what would happen."
After Hynicka left, Cookman was in risk of closing altogether, but another ambitious new minister was assigned on a part-time basis. Donna Jones, now 54 years old, remembers her maiden days at the church after she finished seminary, transitioning from a calling in pharmaceutical sales. "When I came, the purpose of the bishop [from Cookman`s parent organization, the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference of the United Methodist Church] was to conclude the church," Jones says. "It still wasn`t self-sustaining." However, the church received enough support from the league to check on, and Jones took on the ministry job full-time.
In 2004, Jones says life got more difficult. "The mode of the state and the mode of the league changed," the pastor recalls, saying that the parent church got tired of propping up congregations that weren`t bringing in enough money to keep themselves. "The conversation about Cookman being a welfare church started to actually take traction." Nevertheless, shecontinued scraping by with the assistance of some suburban churches. As of last year, Cookman was still offer a wealth of programs for the community-an after-school center, teen education and mentoring programs, addiction programs, re-entry programs for ex-offenders and a soup kitchen. The Dollarboyz youth club held activities in the church every day after school, and the local chapter of the Black Nationalist Uhuru movement planned a national convention in February. A faithful of 40 to 50 was even showing up on Sunday. From the outside, the church appeared well-utilized, succeeding as both a space of adoration and a community center. But lurking beneath the open were irresolvable tensions that would shortly put it all out of concern for good.
"It`s heartbreaking," says Ellen Arttaway, who has lived near Cookman since the 1950s, and has been a member since 1987. "I figured in my old age, I was safe. I had a church to go to, a church home within walking distance." Now 74, she sits in the living way of Gloria Graham`s rowhome, around the tree from Cookman, along with another neighbor and other church member Ellis Pryor. Arttaway and Pryor sit on a plastic-covered couch, Graham in a folding chair on the former face of a glass coffee table. A child`s push toy props the doorway opened on a strong spring afternoon.
"But as it stands," Arttaway sighs, "the members that were there, that were left- we could not express it."
The church roof was in dire motive of repair. The edifice had a mold problem. There was no money to pay for heating or hot water, and no time to try to make up a new congregation to help defray the costs. "And this is the beat of winter," says Arttaway. And money wasn`t the sole beginning of conflict. Neighbors also objected to disruptions from the youth programs, including parties that brought teens in from all over the city. "It wasn`t that we didn`t want parties, it was the fact that the parties needed to have been monitored," Arttaway says.
"They fought, they jumped on people`s cars and stuff, on people`s properties," Graham says. "Half the time, people riding on the street, you couldn`t go by, because they`re all in the middle of the street."
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