“Here's some good news!” announced the stated clerk of Classis Hamilton in a mid-September email sharing an invitation from Hagersville Community Christian Reformed Church. The small, aging congregation with a weekly attendance between 25 and 35 was celebrating “the blessing of our new location”—a 141-year-old former Presbyterian church directly on the town’s main street. Hagersville Community CRC purchased the building from the Presbyterian Church in Canada in the spring, spent the summer renovating, and hosted its first worship service—with about 90 in attendance—Sept. 22. The Presbyterian congregation had disbanded in 2023.
“This allows the building to continue to be a place of worship, it gives us a spot right on the main street, and possibly allows us to do more ministry than in the former location,” said Pieter Wonder, chair of the church’s board. Wonder explained that although the congregation is small they still have “quite a few willing volunteers.” The more prominent location, a building that was already equipped with a lift, and a larger kitchen and fellowship hall (added on to the original structure in the 1970s) were all encouraging pluses for the move.
Hagersville Community CRC, before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, had been putting together some funds for a potential new building, after having received a gift of land a few years back, Wonder said. When the congregation met in person again after being closed during the pandemic, fewer than half of the attendees returned, owing to several things including the church being without a pastor. “There were not enough of us to build new,” Wonder said. “Humanly speaking it was impossible with who we had left.” Although the now smaller congregation no longer needed a larger sanctuary, its building wasn’t fully accessible to all its members, and the quoted price for a lift was a quarter of a million dollars.
Purchasing the Presbyterian building made financial sense, said Hagersville Community CRC’s pastor, Steven Eckersley, who was installed a few months before the church board proposed the move. “But the big thing for me was that we’re trying to get more community awareness, so saving the oldest building in town as a church, I thought, would be really good for the community as well as just getting us out there—which has really worked out—a lot of people have heard of us because of this.” The Haldimand Press, a local newspaper, covered the renovation and the first service in the reclaimed building.
The building that Hagersville Community CRC occupied before the move was built in 1966 and was purchased from a Pentecostal church that was building new at the time, Wonder said. Hagersville Community organized in 1990, a church plant of Ebenezer CRC in Jarvis, Ont.