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White Marsh United Methodist Church in Lancaster County held its final service June 30. An elderly and dwindling congregation, financial difficulties
Ann D. Watts' headstone indicates she was one of the early members of White Marsh.
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Second in a series on the struggles of two small, rural churches.
Story 1: The end of White Marsh
Story 2: An 'agonizing' decision
Story 3: Hopes for revival
THERE ARE MANY threads in the shroud of White Marsh United Methodist Church, but its story ends the same no matter which one you follow.
Some threads are old, such as the 210 years of White Marsh's history, its ties to the founders of the Methodist Church and its tree-shaded walls of brick and window, now, always and forever linked to the hundreds of graves in the cemetery behind it.
Other threads are common to the present-day Northern Neck, such as the aging and dwindling of its native people, the lack of leaders, the dearth of children, the struggle to pay the bills and the difficulties of assimilating re-tirees now streaming into the peninsula.
Other threads involve the ways of modern church management, such as White Marsh's zeros and low numbers in column after column of annual statistics that raised the eyebrows of Methodist managers, the role of a new minister out of sync with a congregation twice his age and the series of difficult meetings that led to White Marsh's death as an active church.
Many of the threads are emotional, such as the guilt and shame felt by some members when they realized that a church they had loved but had not supported was about to die, the pall of quiet grief that has fallen over the church's neighborhood of Brookvale in Lancaster County and the shock felt by many members when they realized that losing the Methodist franchise meant losing the church building their ancestors had built and nearly everything in it, including communion silver stamped "1770."
Most of these threads were cut forever June 30 when a district superintendent, who had struggled for months with White Marsh's problems, conducted its final service.
The next day, the locks were changed and practically every old member was locked out.
The United Methodist Church is 8.4 million members strong. At its end, White Marsh United Methodist was the spiritual home of only 25 of them.
C.E. Thomas was one. He lives on land in Lancaster County that has been in his family for 300 years. Years ago, his father built an interdenominational chapel at Merry Point so families in that area could walk to church. Not many of them had other means of transportation, Thomas recalled.
Thomas was baptized at the Merry Point chapel by a Meth-odist minister, "and I've been a Methodist ever since. All I've known my whole life is to support the church."
Now 90, Thomas reckons at some time or another he has held every job in White Marsh church except "I never would take the job as treasurer."
"This mess has just about driven me crazy," he said of the church closing. "I've been associated with the Methodist Church all my life and never gotten in such a mess as this.
"I've got a temper. It's a good thing I'm old and not as strong and capable as I was at one time; there would have been some clamoring going on, I can tell you that."
Behind Catholics and Baptists, Methodists are the third-largest Christian denomination in the United States. They have 36,000 churches, 400 nursing homes and hospitals, and 123 schools and colleges.
The total value of Methodist church property in America is $37.3 billion.
In 1999, U.S. Methodists spent $4.5 billion on all their causes. They also lost 175 churches as a result of mergers, discontinuances and abandonments, a church official said.
Last year, 12 members of White Marsh United Methodist Church showed up for worship on the average Sunday. By this year, the number had dropped to eight to 10.
On Saturday afternoons, Margaret Haynie Jett fixed the altar flowers for Sunday worship. She became a White Marsh member 55 years ago when she married.
Her husband died 35 years ago and is buried in the White Marsh cemetery near his parents and many other ancestors. Two of Jett's daughters and two granddaughters were married at White Marsh.
"There was just not enough money coming in to keep it going," she said. "The treasurer would sit and cry when she didn't have enough money to pay the bills.
"On the first Sunday of the month, when the old folks had gotten their Social Security checks, we'd get a good collection. But other Sundays, we'd only get $40. We needed about $1,600 a month to keep going."
White Marsh's Sunday school died out years ago, Jett said. "It dwindled down to three or four people, then stopped completely. There were no children for Sunday school. When you run out of young people, you're in trouble."
Among the youngest to grace White Marsh's beautiful sanctuary in its final days was 44-year-old John H. Biondolillo, one of 44,000 Methodist ministers. His relative youth and more modern style did not sit well with many in the elderly congregation.
Technically, he is a licensed local pastor with 10 years of study ahead of him before he can be ordained as an official Methodist elder. "Pastor John," as he prefers to be called, spent nine years in the car business before becoming a preacher.
He was appointed to the two-church Lancaster Charge two years ago. On Sundays, he would preach at White Marsh at 9:30 a.m. and at Irvington United Methodist Church at 11 a.m.
At White Marsh, a Victorian chair and sofa for the preacher sits behind the pulpit in front of exquisite old pews. Delicate wrought-iron railings trim the pulpit and the galleries upstairs. Electrified oil lamps hang on the galleries' slender iron columns.
On Sundays there, Biondolillo and his handful of worshippers could glance through the rippled old glass of the church's 18 windows and see an unchanged Northern Neck vista of trees and a graveyard encircled by a hundred acres of soybeans.
Irvington is only seven miles away, but it has come to feel like a very different part of the Northern Neck. Next door to the Irvington United Methodist church is the Hope and Glory Inn, where a room billed as "rather hopelessly romantic" costs $200 a night. A suite down the street at The Tides Inn costs $850 a night.
Across the street from the church is the Trick Dog Cafe, with wines costing as much as $220 a bottle. Next door to the cafe is Maybebaby, a shop featuring "gourmet baby clothes."
At an August worship service at Irvington United Methodist Church, 38 people--including former White Marsh member Thomas and his wife--were in the congregation. According to a posting of its offerings, the Irvington church was $2,643 ahead of its year-to-date need of $32,460 and $346 ahead of its weekly budget of $1,636.
As sunlight filtered through what one member called "about the prettiest stained-glass windows I've ever seen," the black-robed Biondolillo fanned himself while a lay leader with his shirttail out played the guitar and sang "Life is Like a Mountain Railroad." The pastor later referenced Bob Dylan and the Beatles in his remarks.
Afterward, he talked to a reporter about White Marsh.
"They depleted their savings. Other churches, like this one, were helping them pay the bills. Fund-raising letters didn't take. Its members were expiring and not being replaced.
"Other people are more attracted to churches with better facilities and programs. Besides, there is a tremendous shortage of ministers in the church. In the next decades, things are going to change for a lot of little churches like White Marsh."
Some White Marsh members thought things changed for the worse when Biondolillo arrived in 2000. Soon afterward, four or five families--about half the active members--stopped attending and contributing.
Among other things, they didn't like his omission of the Lord's Prayer in most of his sermons.
Biondolillo shrugs off the criticisms of those White Marsh members he calls the "rebels."
"I don't know what to say any-more. The more I try to defend myself, the more I look guilty. They thought they were going to hurt me, but they ended up hurting the church.
"I guess I can understand the way they feel. It's tough on everybody when all that history and emotion is tied up with it."
Charles H. Callaway, chairman of White Marsh's board of trustees, said the church's closing can't be blamed on the pastor.
"Pastor John is a young preacher, but it was the duty of the older members of the church to guide him. You just can't blame it all on him.
"The way things were going, the closing of White Marsh was in-evitable."
THE HISTORY of White Marsh United Methodist Church goes back to the beginning of Methodism in the United States.
Methodism began in England in the 18th century as a movement led by John Wesley to reform the stale practices of the Anglican Church. Following the Revolution, when the newly independent American states repealed laws that had long supported the English church, Wesley directed American Methodists to form their own church.
They did so at a conference in Baltimore on Christmas Eve 1784. The Methodist Episcopal Church was proclaimed, its first ministers were ordained and Francis Asbury was elected bishop.
An English disciple of John Wesley, Asbury gets equal credit for the founding of the Methodist church in America. From his arrival in the Colonies in 1771 until his death in 1816, he rode thousands of miles on horseback to spread the Methodist word from Maine to Georgia, Kentucky and Ohio.
It was the time of The Great Awakening, a period of religious ferment that coincided with the political ferment of the American Revolution.
Exhorted by charismatic preachers such as Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield and many others, Americans by the thousands abandoned the hierarchy of the established church to become Presbyterians, Baptists and members of other upstart denominations that preached salvation as a private matter between individual Christians and their God.
In May 1785 Asbury was in Urbanna, warily looking across the Rappahannock River at the Northern Neck shore four miles away. For all his traveling, Asbury did not like ferries.
On that day, he wrote in his journal that he "was apprehensive of a gust while crossing the Rappahannock" to the Northern Neck.
Asbury was on his way to visit Councillor Robert Carter III in Westmoreland County. It would be Asbury's first visit to the Northern Neck, but not his last.
Carter, one of the richest planters in Virginia, exemplified The Great Awakening through his own religious quest. In 1778 he had betrayed the Anglican trappings of his aristocratic class by becoming a Baptist--a faith then spreading like wildfire among tenant farmers, indentured servants and slaves.
Asbury found Carter "a man of most excellent spirit." The two men, Asbury wrote in his journal, "had much free conversation on the subjects of religion, Churches, and slavery."
But a very different side of the Northern Neck greeted Asbury while waiting to cross the Potomac River at Hooe's Ferry in King George County. The people there, he wrote, were "vulgarly wicked, drinking and swearing: we paid a dollar for our ferriage, and left them."
The visit made a lasting impression on Asbury: "Perhaps the providence of God led me this way, that I might see and learn to pity the state of the people in the northern neck of Virginia. I have been sensibly affected with their situation."
Six weeks later, Asbury appointed Joseph Everett and Lewin Ross as ministers to the Lancaster Circuit. At first, the two preached to people in their homes, in barns or brush arbors. Occasionally the Lancaster Methodists gathered at a Presbyterian meetinghouse that dated back to Whitefield's visit to the county in 1765.
Soon the circuit included 27 stops in Lancaster and Northumberland counties that took the ministers a month to cover. They took one day off each month to rest and wash their clothes.
As time went on, meetinghouses were built on parcels of land given by friends of the Methodists.
On his next visit, in January 1787, Asbury was able to report from Lancaster County that "The Lord is at work in the Neck: more than one hundred have been added to the society since conference, who are a simple, loving, tender people."
"We had a crowd," Asbury wrote, "many communicants, both white and colored."
In December 1787, Asbury was back. Three hundred people attended the service despite snow.
A year later, on Christmas Day 1788, he noted "the offensive smell of rum among the people" at a sermon in nearby Northumberland County.
Two days after that, "at the Presbyterian church in Lancaster, there was a divine Stir in the congregation," Asbury wrote, but "envy" over the Methodists' success and "disputation" over an item of Methodist doctrine had upset the Presbyterians.
"A house of our own will alone fix us properly," he wrote.
In Lancaster County, White Marsh Methodist Church would be that house.
