Good Bye to the Little White Church on the Cliff

To everything there is a season. A church is the people. The little white church on the cliff no longer has people and it is sad.

The one roomed building needs so much care and there are no longer the people to care for it. One by one the  shingles fly off in the magnificent winds. The foundations crack as the land shifts. The edge of the cliff moves imperceptibly closer. The walls need paint, the old oil burner is no longer legal and the outside privy has been neglected for years.

Almost all of the people who gave life to this church are gone.

For over one hundred and fifty years the church served the community and so many people served the church.

The church in its simplicity remains beautiful inside. The hard, straight backed pews were built by and for the hardworking, no nonsense Methodist people of a time gone by and have changed little from that time.

When I first arrived in Harbourville, the small, devoted congregation included many for whom the church had always been part of their lives. They had a fierce loyalty to the place. To a certain extent the matriarchs spoke and there will was done. This was not an oppressive situation. There was a sense that this was as it should have been. Those matriarchs are gone now and there are not others to take their place.

As someone from a different time and a different place I cannot speak with their voice, but a piece of my heart will remain with this church. No one else seems to claim the voice.

Throughout the years, the church has filled on Christmas Eve. The building gets this one night to remember what it was to be filled. One night is not enough.

We few are too few.

Others will make the decisions on what the future will hold in the seasons to come.




........ to be continued