Vanishing churches reflect shrinking rural communities

The fact that we drive past them is part of the problem.

Congregation members have been driving past and not stopping. They’re on their way to children’s football programs on a Sunday morning, or even on their way to a more comfortable church, where they have air-conditioning, a working PA system and modern toilets.

On Sunday, April 10, Cooma Uniting Church became a casualty of change.

The last service attracted 200 people, curiously the same head-count as the opening service conducted in 1926.

The 10 pews were all filled in the church, lit by a bright autumn sun spilling through the stained glass windows.

The windows tell their own story of personal sacrifice and dedication to spiritual mission, permanently etched in glass.

The building occupies a rural block with a defunct hall, 33km west of Shepparton, in a dairy farming area.

With just a fire station and recreation reserve, Wikipedia records a population of about 100 for Cooma, but that might be optimistic.

Rural populations are declining, so where there were once four or five families living on the old square-mile blocks, today there is only one.

Churches used to be built within an easy buggy ride of a group of houses or farms. Today we cover 10 kilometres in a few minutes in a car, so many people opt to find a place that is comfortable and close to other facilities, like shops.

It follows other closures in northern Victoria including the Katandra West Uniting Church last year, the Kialla West Uniting Church in 2018 and the Nagambie Presbyterian Church in 2019.

Uniting Church moderator for Victoria and Tasmania, Reverend Denise Liersch, said there had been a move towards closures of some rural churches and acknowledged the sadness and sense of loss this engendered.

“It’s occurring not just in Victoria but in Australia and the whole of the Western world,” she said.

Rev Liersch, whose role is the Uniting Church’s spiritual and pastoral leader, said the trend reflected changing social patterns and spiritual needs. Old approaches to spiritual communities did not necessarily reflect modern needs.

She said rural communities were also facing closures of their other services — including schools, banks and shops — as populations changed.

Many of the churches were established early last century and often around how far a person could ride or walk in a reasonable time.

“Meeting with others in regional centres is not such a big disadvantage as it used to be,” Rev Liersch said.

Congregants left without a building have been offered pastoral care to transition to other church communities, and in some cases — where Uniting Church alternatives were too far away — assisted with an introduction to other Christian churches.

As for the fate of the closed buildings, Rev Liersch said there was no specific policy of public auction and there was some flexibility around who the property was sold to.

Meanwhile, the ecumenical Cooma Male Choir, which led a number of hymns at the closing service, may still continue to be heard, as there was such a positive reaction to its performance.

Worshippers may have taken some solace from the hymn sung by the Cooma choir, It Is Well, With My Soul, written by a man who had lost his son in the Great Chicago Fire and then his four daughters in a shipwreck. The hymn was written as a call to faith in a time of hardship.