CHICAGO (WLS) — On this Palm Sunday, there was a community effort to help restore a church in Chicago’s historic Pullman neighborhood.
Over the past couple of years, Greenstone United Methodist Church has fallen on hard times. It’s behind on its gas bill and also needs maintenance work on its roof.
Neighbors are now doing their part to help the church that they call a cornerstone in the community.
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It’s been two winters since the members of Greenstone United Methodist Church were last able to worship together inside the sanctuary during the cold-weather months. Services were suspended after People’s Gas turned off the heat as the church’s gas bills at one point ballooned to over $18,000.
“We were on a payment plan. We missed a payment,” Pastor Luther Mason said. “When you’re on a payment plan, it automatically knocks you off.”
Hoping to help the church re-open on a full-time basis, members of the Historic Pullman Foundation, which for years has included the church in its house tours, launched a GoFundMe page one month ago. Cindy McMahon, a third-generation Pullman resident, got married there, even though she’s Catholic.
“As a young girl I would walk by and go inside the church and it was on hot summer days it was nice and cool inside the church,” MCahon said. “It was a beautiful service. The organ was fabulous.”
Greenstone Church has sat at the corner of Lawrence and 112th streets since 1882, built as part of the original plan for the town of Pullman. But as the cost of maintaining a more than 140-year-old building has risen, the church has fallen on hard times.
Originally built to accommodate 600 people, they last counted around 25 as members. And have lost most of their shared space partners. The GoFundMe is now around three quarters of the way to its $20,000 goal.
“We’re grateful for their efforts, and we appreciate their efforts,” Pastor Mason said. “We will be right back here. Not only will we be back here, programming will resume.”
For those who live in Pullman and consider the church an integral part of their community, whether they worship there or not, that is all they want to hear.
“We all consider Greenstone Church our church because it’s like a community center/church,” longtime Pullman resident Roderick Lewis said. “Whenever there is an event like a community dinner, choir concert, organ concert, Boy Scout troop that meets there, the church has always been accessible to us.”
Paying its gas bills however are just the tip of Greenstone’s challenges, which for years has been engaged in an effort to replace its roof and repair its bell tower.
The church is still waiting for a million dollar grant the city seemed poised to give them under its adopt-a-landmark program, but which was later tabled indefinitely by City Council.
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