How to run a railroad
Recently I had a conversation with the rector of an Episcopal church who had been at that parish for seven years. He told me that in his first weeks on the job, he spent a late evening in the building by himself, wandering the halls, looking into closets and corners, and was startled by the messes he found. Closets were crammed into uselessness, and entire classrooms were so full of junk that you could hardly turn around inside. He told me how he vowed to himself that in two years, every inch of the building would be contributing to ministry. Seven years later, there are a half-dozen twelve-step programs meeting there, an active program of feeding the hungry, and countless other examples of meaningful use of the building, besides the usual activities of the parish. It’s a modest place, but today, the hallways, classrooms, offices, closets, kitchen, and restrooms are all clean and inviting.
I know I’ve shared this wedding story before. I received a panicked call from an organist, “The wedding starts in thirty minutes and the organ won’t play.” I raced to the church, arriving at ten past. There was a row of limos out front, and bagpipes playing in the yard. Running up the stairs to the organ loft, I could tell that the blower was running, so I went to the basement where I found a card table sucked up against the blower’s air intake. That’ll do it.
I’ve also shared the hay bale story before, the one where the Christmas decorations were stored in the attic near the door to the organ chamber. The hay bale from last Christmas’s manger was there with smoke rising from it as the hay decomposed. I wrestled the thing down the ladder and went to the office to ask if the custodian could dispose of it. When I got back from lunch, the hay bale was back in the loft.
I served a church in suburban Boston as organist and music director for almost twenty years. It was a large building, the quintessential white frame building with a steeple on the town square, but it was more than meets the eye. A new commuter highway was built in the area in the 1950s, and the parish expanded dramatically. The intimate nineteenth-century sanctuary became the chapel when the much grander new church was built. The people who had been leaders of the parish during that ambitious building program were still around, and there was a lot of pride in the place. The sure sign that it was a new and well-planned building was that there were electrical outlets under every window for the Christmas lights.
But the day I auditioned for the position, I noticed that the stalls in the men’s room were rickety, coming loose from their moorings, and the doors wouldn’t latch. I mentioned it often during my tenure, but they were never repaired. Everything else in the place was in crackerjack condition. There was some kind of block about that men’s room, a strange way to welcome visitors.
My usual routine of consulting, tuning, repairing, installing, and dismantling organs takes me in and out of hundreds of church buildings. Perhaps fifty of them are regular clients, where I visit a few times each year, some of those for more than thirty years. I know the buildings well, usually better than the custodian. And I’m always visiting buildings that I’ve never seen. I can tell a lot about the state of a parish by the state of its buildings.
Real estate rich
Our church buildings are our treasures. I know that some are rough around the edges, and some have outdated and unsafe mechanical systems. Some parishes have small buildings that are inadequate and less beautiful, while others are ironically burdened with huge buildings that were built in an earlier age and are now unsustainable. It can cost a million dollars to repair a leaky stained-glass window. But I marvel at how many parishes, both large and small, operate bustling buildings that provide space for dozens of community activities that would otherwise struggle to find affordable space. Alcoholics Anonymous and the Boy Scouts of America would be different organizations if they hadn’t had access to affordable space in church buildings.
I was struck by the comments of the space-conscious rector who saw the messes in the building as wasted resources. His comments reminded me of the value of the real estate that we might take for granted. As a teenager, I certainly took it for granted that I could have unfettered access to church buildings so I could practice the organ. The cash value of such a resource never occurred to me.
There are hundreds of magnificent church buildings in New York. Some are free-standing, iconic places along the big avenues, but by far the majority of New York’s churches are nestled on the narrow numbered cross streets. A church’s grand façade has townhouses pressed up against each side, and you can’t get more than 50 or 60 feet away, the width of the street and two sidewalks. Many of those buildings are more than 150 feet long inside, and the illusion of the interior space is heightened because you haven’t seen the length of the building from the outside. It’s a great sensation to walk through a doorway on a narrow street into a cavernous room, in a city where space is so valuable that many people live in apartments smaller than 500 square feet. A 150 by 80 foot room, 60 feet high could be developed to 720,000 square feet.
In New England and small towns across the country, church buildings dominate “downtown.” Countless little burgs through New Hampshire and Vermont have three white churches with steeples surrounding the town green: Congregational, Baptist, and Unitarian. The Episcopal church is a stone building with a red door, half a block up, and the Catholic church is a little further out because the Protestants got there first. There weren’t many Roman Catholics among the early colonists.
I’ve lived most of my life in northern cities, where the boundaries are determined by geography. Both Boston and New York are surrounded by water, so there’s no room for expansion. When I’m traveling, I marvel at the sweeping new campuses built by congregations in areas like Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, or Phoenix, places where future streets are laid out, ready for growth and expansion, unheard of where I live. If a church in New York City had a 500-space parking lot, no member would ever have to fill out another pledge card. A parking garage in mid-town Manhattan gets $30 an hour—a white-striped gold mine.
For the sake of the little ones
Many of the buildings in which I work house daycare centers or nursery schools. In some, classrooms are used for daycare during the week and Christian education on the weekends. In others, a parish simply doesn’t need a dozen rooms dedicated to Sunday School. Some parishes operate daycares themselves, others rent the space to companies from the outside. In either case, a daycare center changes the dynamic of a building. Most, if not all states and towns require certification of facilities that offer daycare. Buildings are inspected, locks are changed, security protocols are established. No daycare employee is pleased to see a troupe of organbuilders walking in unannounced.
The parish where I grew up, where my father was rector, has a grand gothic-inspired brick sanctuary, a two-story “gothicky” brick parish house attached, and a newer parish hall with a lofty A-frame ceiling. The parish hall is a lovely space, large and airy. There are French doors along one wall that open into a cloister garden, the new parish hall added to the rest to complete that enclosure. There’s a fountain, a statue of St. Francis, and gardens that my father tended personally during his tenure—he was a prolific, joyful gardener. He instituted the Cloister Garden Concert Series for summer evenings. The whole thing is very elegant.
But the planning of the new parish hall included classrooms in the windowless basement. When I was appointed at the position with the big new building, I took Dad to see the place. He marveled at the lovely, breezy, well-lit classrooms on the second floor of the new parish house, beautiful environments for the children of the parish. It was a lesson for me about priorities of planning a new building.
Turf wars
Space is at a premium in most church buildings. I’m not thinking of the campus that has a hundred-seat amphitheater for a choir room. I’m thinking of the place where Sunday School classes are separated by vinyl accordion doors that don’t quite work, and where the custodian keeps his tools and supplies in the organ blower room. In one building I know, the sacristy has an outside door, and the custodian keeps a snowblower there in the winter. I know a lot of altar guild members who wouldn’t stand for that. (My mother-in-law served on altar guilds most of her life. When she claimed that adding gin to the water made cut flowers last longer, I suggested that was an excuse to have the gin bottle out on Saturday morning.)
Altar guilds and music departments often wind up at odds. The sacristy is usually adjacent to the chancel, a perfect place to store music stands. And what’s it like when the organist has to practice on Saturday morning? Does he have a fit because the altar guild is chattering, or does he find another time to practice? We’re all here to worship. Work it out, people.
The sacristy really gets threatened when we start to plan a new organ project. Remember, it’s adjacent to the chancel. If we add the sacristy to the organ chamber above, we’ll have space for 16-footers. Oh no, you don’t.
Row with the oars you have
Through forty years of working with parishes, installing and caring for their pipe organs, I’ve seen significant changes in how they manage themselves as businesses. Churches that used to have a secretary in the office 9–5, five days a week, now have an answering machine. We have office equipment in our homes more sophisticated than the church office of a generation ago. It’s easy enough to run off bulletins yourself if you have to. At least the names of composers would be spelled correctly.
Alongside the functions of faith and worship, a church is a corporation. In some denominations, the priest, rector, or minister serves legally as a CEO. In others, the leadership and management is run by an elected board, sort of like an old-fashioned town meeting. Some of those CEO pastors are savvy businessmen and women and are able to oversee and delegate the management of functions of the business besides worship. But others fail terribly, knowing nothing about the mechanics or structure of a building, and nothing about managing employees and their tasks. How many seminaries offer courses in building management?
Instead of a full-time custodian, some churches hire cleaning companies who send a team for half a day a week. Not bad, as they can really get the place clean in a hurry. But who is looking after the mechanical systems? Any church building of any size has equipment far more complex than we have at home. Three-phase electricity, industrial HVAC equipment, elevators, tower bells, commercial kitchen appliances, and, oh yes, pipe organs require professional attention. In the old days, the custodian would have had a sense of that, and a schedule for regular maintenance. Today, those important functions are often the responsibility of a volunteer property committee.
There have been many churches where I thought it would be better to assemble volunteers from the parish to do the cleaning and hire a mechanical contractor to manage the physical maintenance of the place. Property management firms have specialists who can assess all the equipment in a building and develop a regular maintenance plan. It’s certainly less expensive to have professionally managed maintenance than to be rebuilding complex air-handling equipment because no one oiled the bearings.
Church bullies
If you’ve never worked in a parish that has a bully, you might dismiss the idea. But if you have, you know how destructive it can be. I’ve worked for quite a few churches with resident bullies, but one stands out in particular. He was a powerful professional who retired from business and moved to the town where he had always vacationed. Since he had attended services during summer vacations, people in the parish knew him and were excited at first that he would be around all year. He was appointed to committees, joined the choir, and roared enthusiastically into the life of the parish. A building project was in planning stages, and he volunteered to participate, logically getting appointed to, and then becoming chairman of the building committee. By then, it was too late.
I’ve been maintaining that church’s organ since it was installed in the 1980s, coming twice a year to tune, but because the organ had to be removed to storage during the building program, I was in the building more than usual. There would be some modification to the organ’s location to make maintenance access easier, so I attended a couple meetings of the building committee, and, of course, worked there for weeks dismantling and then re-installing the organ.
I saw this guy reorganizing the parish bulletin board in the hallway outside the office. I saw him haranguing the parish administrator, calling out mistakes in the bulletin, and criticizing her methods of running the office. The long-time organist was in tears every week because this guy was so domineering during choir rehearsals. The rector became meek and withdrawn. We had words when he challenged my approach to the care of the organ.
The rhythm of the place changed. While there used to be a pleasant stream of parishioners coming and going during a weekday, chatting in the office, dropping something off in the sacristy, or preparing the kitchen for a parish supper, now the halls were empty—except for the bully. It took less than a year for one person to change the life of a parish.
Caring for the organ all those years, I built up a nice friendship with the organist. She had built the choir program enough that they had a tour one summer, singing in English cathedrals. It was painful to share her distress as her twenty-plus year tenure seemed to be going up in smoke.
If you’re unfamiliar with this syndrome, and especially if you think it’s going on where you work, give “church bully” a quick google. You’ll learn right away that it’s a “true thing,” that it’s very common, and that there are methods and programs designed to steer bullies away.
The whole package
In every church where I’ve worked, the pipe organ has been my mission. It’s not my job to meddle in how things are being run, in the condition of other equipment, or getting rid of a bully. But I care about the church, about its rites and traditions, and its importance to the social lives of its people. It has been part of life since my parents brought me home from the hospital to the rectory. I can’t help mentioning the hay bale, because protecting the organ from damage is my direct responsibility. I can’t help mentioning the dry bearings on the furnace fans, because a failed furnace spoils the tuning. And I can’t help mentioning the bully, because the thriving music program of that small local parish, built so happily by the dedicated organist and her friends in parish, was falling to pieces.
Everything in your church building was purchased with donated money. The parishioners contributed to the building fund, and that money paid for every light switch, every toilet, every folding chair, and that pipe organ that is so central to your work, to your career, to your art. Here’s a scary one. Is the organist at your church ever a bully?
