The sun has set on Rosedale Congregational Church in KCK, but its legacy will endure
When the remaining members of the Rosedale Congregational Church lit candles and sang “Silent Night” to end the service on Dec. 22, it also marked the closing of a religious community that came into being 113 years ago.
People first came together on Dec. 6, 1906, to organize a church in the southern part of the small town of what was then Rosedale, Kansas. In 1908, they hired their first minister. In 1919, construction was completed on the redbrick structure the church now occupies on Lloyd Street, and within a few years, Rosedale merged into Kansas City, Kansas.
My family moved into the neighborhood and joined the church near the end of World War II, in time for me to start first grade at a school a block away. The church became central to my life: lighting the candles, singing in the children’s choir, Sunday School, weekday Bible school, church camp, high school baccalaureate, my brother’s wedding, and the aging and deaths of my parents.
Today, the church’s denomination is officially known as the United Church of Christ as the result of mergers with other small, mainstream Protestant groups in the 1950s. It embraces “progressive, open and affirming” Christianity.
Nationally, our history began with the first Pilgrims and Puritans to step ashore in the New World. Two of our congregations in the Massachusetts colony did not exactly do honor by themselves in the Salem witch trials, but after that we began to atone.
Our fingerprints are on the creation of Harvard and Yale Universities and other fine educational institutions. We were at the forefront of the abolition movement before the Civil War. One of our members, Harriet Beecher Stowe, was described by President Abraham Lincoln as “the little lady who started the Civil War” with her powerful novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
Abolitionists brought the denomination to Kansas in the 1850s. Beecher’s brother, the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, raised money among his congregants in New York’s Brooklyn to send rifles to support the abolitionists in Kansas, where the weapons were dubbed “Beecher Bibles.”
In the mid-20th century in Rosedale, we sometimes struggled to find the path of our convictions. When schools in Kansas City, Kansas, were integrated, some in the church grumbled about the occasional black student who showed up at the church. But gradually we learned to reach north across the intersection at 43rd and Lloyd — Rosedale’s mini-Troost Avenue — into the historically black enclave.
I was away from Kansas City for 40-odd years, first studying then working in Ohio, New York, Washington, Boston and throughout much of Latin America. My mother updated me on the church in our weekly hourlong phone conversations.
The church welcomed it first gay pastor, selected women as ministers on three occasions, expanded the idea of vacation Bible school to become healthy kids club emphasizing nutrition and exercise, and continued traditional events such as the annual Thanksgiving dinner, at which at least 1,500 turkeys were cooked and consumed over about 75 years.
The congregation of 2019 reflected the neighborhood. When we sang of “the glory on each face” as we began each service, the faces around us were black, brown and white. We also found space in the two-building complex for three small Spanish-speaking churches, led by ministers with their origins in Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala.
At the same time, our core congregation grew smaller and older each year. People with the skills and means to keep a church going seem to prefer megachurches in the outer suburbs or personality-led religious movements.
So a few months ago, we made the reluctant decision to close. Paradoxically, we are not out of money; we’re just out of people. We own the main building and an education building sitting on eight city lots, plus two small rental houses and a six-figure investment account. When the properties are sold and the last bills paid, we will disperse the assets in ways that will carry on the legacy the church members can no longer do.
About one-third of the assets will go to the Kansas-Oklahoma Conference of the United Church of Christ for use in youth programs at surviving churches in the region. Most of the remaining two-thirds will go into a scholarship fund to be administered by the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation for the benefit of young people from the Rosedale and Argentine neighborhoods, or others with recent associations with the church.
It is our hope that, for years to come, a number of deserving young people will know that somebody was watching over them.
Shirley Christian is a former journalist and author. She lives in Overland Park.
This story was originally published January 2, 2020 at 10:01 AM with the headline "The sun has set on Rosedale Congregational Church in KCK, but its legacy will endure."