The Last Warm Room: What Is Happening to the Small Churches of America($13.99Value)

Description

Somewhere in America, a church closes its doors every few hours. Most are small. Most are old. Most stand in towns the country stopped driving through a long time ago. In Adler, Illinois, the boiler dies on a January morning, and a congregation of sixty-two faces the question it has spent a decade avoiding. Restore the building, merge with another dying church, give it over to the town, or close the doors for good. They have until June to decide, and no one is coming to decide for them. The Last Warm Room follows one small congregation through a single hard winter to tell a national story: what becomes of the thousands of small churches that were once the food banks, the polling places, the recovery meetings, and the only warm public rooms their towns had. We meet the bivocational pastor working a second job to keep the lights on, the treasurer who has quietly covered the shortfall out of her own savings, the trustee who knows the building is losing and cannot say so out loud, the man who came for the basement recovery meeting and stayed, and the young mother deciding whether her children belong in a cold sanctuary or the bright church up the interstate. Grounded in the work of the country's leading religion researchers and built on a disclosed composite congregation, this is a clear-eyed and humane account of what a community loses when its last shared room goes cold, and what a stubborn few are doing to keep it warm.