They bow their heads and raise their voices as others before them have done for the past 200 years.
But the congregation that gathers inside the chapel of St. Luke and St. Simon Cyrene on South Fitzhugh Street these days is sparse. Sunday mornings find a little more than 30 people in the seats and draw a few dozen more online.
Two Saints, as the Episcopal church is commonly known, is the oldest public building in Rochester. The first sermon was delivered from its three-decker pulpit on Sept. 4, 1825.
This is a building and a place steeped in the history of a city that has grown up around it, and it is showing its age. The church complex needs more than $1 million in repairs, much of it to the exterior.
“When we get a heavy rain, you’ll see little pebbles, which is actually sandstone breaking off of the building,” said the Rev. Keith Patterson, who leads the church.
Here and elsewhere, the escalating maintenance costs for these towering, historic religious centers are being borne by increasingly smaller congregations. And a decades-long decline in church membership is continuing across most religious groups nationwide.
While half of all Monroe County residents said they belonged to a church in 1980, barely one-third do today. In sheer numbers, the falloff in Episcopal Church attendance locally has been surpassed only by that of the Catholic and Presbyterian churches, according to the U.S. Religious Census.
Last month, the Episcopal Diocese of Rochester put St. Stephen’s Church on Chili Avenue up for sale. Dwindling membership forced the church to close during the pandemic. Some of its members now worship at Two Saints.
“No one wants to see an empty building. But to see an empty church, I think, is more pitiful,” Patterson said. “A lot of those churches that closed provided feeding programs (and) clothing. When a church closes, it has a significant impact on the community.”
A storied beginning
Col. Nathaniel Rochester, the city’s namesake and one of its founding fathers but also a slave owner, helped start this church. He was a parishioner, and along with Charles Caroll and Col. William Fitzhugh, offered up the land in 1820 to the first religious society to claim it. That required getting the signature of Caroll and Fitzhugh, who lived in Geneseo.
The Catholics sent a messenger to do so, while the vestry “dispatched Mr. Henry E. Rochester, a lad of 14 years (and Col. Rochester’s son), on a fleeter horse with a similar object in view,” Patterson said, reading from a book of church history penned in 1917. “And the latter succeeded in overtaking and passing the other person from the Roman Catholics, who had stopped in a tavern for refreshment.”
In those early days the congregation included the likes of Jonathan Child — another founder of Rochester and the city’s first mayor — along with a host of other civic leaders.
“A lot of names and intrigue,” Patterson said, closing the book. “That’s kind of a fun part of the history of the building, how the building came into being.”
The original church was St. Luke’s of Genesee Falls, a wood-frame structure that the congregation quickly outgrew. It was, according to church history, the first Episcopal church in Rochester and “the second church of any kind.” The one that stands there today cost $9,000 to build, records show.
St. Luke’s would later split, and part of the congregation would found St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, which sits roughly opposite the George Eastman Museum on East Avenue.
St. Simon Cyrene was a Black church that, in its early years, was hosted at St. Luke’s and in other churches. But the members had to worship separately from the white congregation, and St. Simon ultimately found a home across the river in the Upper Falls neighborhood. It was a vibrant parish in the 1960s, home to a number of Civil Rights and community leaders.
The merger came in the late 1980s at St. Luke’s behest, and not without tension. The congregation of St. Simon’s was larger, but the building on Fitzhugh Street was historic and larger. They brought their altar and stained-glass windows. And for the first service, the two congregations entered through separate doors, joined in the center aisle, and alternated back and forth to either side as they were seated in the pews.
‘We’re not museum curators’
The Right Rev. Kara Wagner Sherer, the Episcopal bishop of Rochester, will tell you that a church is not the building, it’s the people.
She took the reins last summer and is the first woman elected to lead the diocese.
The diocese numbers 43 chapels and churches from Brockport to Lyons and down to Corning. She has spent these initial months making official visits to each congregation. Her scheduled visit to Two Saints happened in mid-February.
There is significance in these structures, Wagner Sherer said, in the history, the beauty, the place each holds in the community served.
“But if you don’t have people, you don’t have a church,” she said. “What’s important to me is not how many people are in the pews, but how many people in the community are served by the people in the pews. So, I tell every congregation if there was a rapture, and your church with everyone in it was the only thing that disappeared, who in the community would miss you? And if the answer is no one, that’s a problem. If we’re only doing this for ourselves, we’re doomed.”
It’s an outlook shared by members, who talk about the welcoming nature of the congregation, the diversity, about the community and the programs. And when they talk about history, it’s not just the structure, but who worshiped here and what they did.
“That means a lot to us, that we’re the oldest (church),” said Madeline Gamble, 84, of Chili, who joined St. Simon’s roughly 50 years ago. “It’s very important to us that we take care of that location and honor the historical value of the church itself.”
A recent assessment of all the diocese buildings put the combined maintenance needs at $7 million, Wagner Sherer said — which highlights just how extensive and costly the repair bill is at Two Saints. Those expenses fall largely to individual congregations.
To help, the diocese has assembled a working group of people in construction, real estate and finance who can serve as consultants to help congregants maintain their churches. But, Wagner Sherer added: “We’re not museum curators, so we don’t exist just to keep the building open — even as much as we love our buildings.”
Work to do
Two Saints has roughly 80 active members, mostly seniors. Half now attend Sunday service online. Fewer are giving to the church than in years past, but Patterson said that individually they are giving more.
To raise additional funds, the church has tried concerts. Rochester’s own Danielle Ponder performed to capacity audiences. Renting out the church as a wedding venue brought in more than $60,000 to help with roof replacement costs. And while they apply for grants, Patterson said they struggle without a dedicated person in-house who has that expertise.
The outstanding maintenance needs he said are “critical,” including repairs to window frames holding the church’s towering stained-glass windows.
“I don’t know where the wherewithal within the city is for preserving this. I’ve sat in my car and watched people just walk by,” Patterson said. “I’ve had people say, ‘Oh, I thought this church was closed,’ on more than one occasion.”
That is concerning, as he and Wagner Sherer both speak about the need for the church to look outward, to be a greater public resource than it is now.
“It’s amazing,” Patterson said, “to be in a place that has as much history.”
Yet while they have some community programs — including a popular monthly Friday service with live jazz music — they are admittedly fewer and less impactful than in years past. And instead of two services, Patterson now does one. He begins that service recognizing the Seneca Nation on whose ancestral land the church is located.
“The history has lessons in it, and also beacons of hope,” Wagner Sherer said of Two Saints.
She is invested in keeping that history alive and staying in the physical space while continuing to minister to the people both in the immediate neighborhood and back in Simon Cyrene’s original neighborhood of Upper Falls.
“So, yes, we have to work on preserving the building, it’s important,” she said. “More important is the work of that congregation in the city.”
Brian Sharp is a reporter for WXXI/CITY. He can be reached at bsharp@wxxi.org.
This article appears in Dec 1-31, 2024.
