Shuttered churches find new callings
Places of worship reborn as cabarets, cheese plants and rock ’n’ roll shrines
Night peering through the stainedglass windows, the dancer preens like a burlesque black swan at what was once the Mackenzie Memorial Gospel Church in Stratford, Ont.
It’s the SIN Burlesque Erotic Cabaret at the Revival House, and the hall known as “the sanctuary” is packed to the refurbished pews.
In a sultry feathered fan dance, the performer sheds her avianinspired leather getup, tufts of plumage falling to the floor, until all that remains is downy lingerie.
This playful tension between the sacred and the sensuous is one of the selling points of the Revival House, said Rob Wigan, who coowns the cathedral-turned-venue with his wife.
“We’re kind of playing off that contradiction,” said Wigan. “I often wonder if somebody is having too good of a time, would they look up and think, ‘Uh oh. I don’t know if I should be doing this in here.’ ”
The cultural destination is one of scores of shuttered churches across the country that have been resurrected as public monuments to secular devotions ranging from cheese making to rock ’n’ roll idolatry. According to the U.S.-based Pew Research Centre, roughly one in four Canadian adults surveyed said they attended religious services at least once a month in 2010, a drop of 16 percentage points over 25 years.
While experts say these ministerial makeovers reflect Canada’s shrinking and shifting congregations, Wigan insisted that the 19th-century Gothic cathedral has retained many of its soul-fulfilling functions in its current incarnation.
Rather than offering communion, he said the venue fosters spiritual connections through communal experiences, playing host to glitter-spackled drag shows, wedding bashes for brides and pre-theatre cocktails at its bar backed by dark-wood organ pipes.
“Part of our story is bringing that element of community back to this beautiful place of worship and place of gathering that kind of lost its touch,” he said. “There’s a spiritual element to it without it being incredibly religious.”
Roman Panchyshyn, owner of Wild Planet Music in Winnipeg ’s Osborne Village, has a more irreverent take on his business’s hallowed heritage.
The sprawling store is a retail shrine to Panchyshyn’s rock-star idols, lined with rows upon rows of records and blasphemous musical memorabilia, including a T-shirt that reads: “Smile, Satan loves you.”
“It’s a place of worship, but it’s rock ’n’ roll worship rather than religious,” said Panchyshyn. “If people have disapproved, it’s been nothing harsh ... because I’d have to send them to confession.
The Theatre Paradoxe, formerly the Notre-Dame-du-Perpetuel-Secours in southwest Montreal, boasts an eclectic events calendar. But for director Gerald St- Georges, these off-kilter affairs serve to fund what he sees as the theatre’s higher mission: providing at-risk youth with technical theatre training to help keep them off the streets and in the workforce.
“We do the same work the church did before in the sense that it’s for the community,” said St- Georges.
According to the Quebec Religious Heritage Council, 547 churches in the province have been closed, sold or transformed as of April. The provincial government has allocated $15 million in funding for restoration projects this fiscal year.
Church-flippers have turned this towering real estate into high-wire enterprises like a rock-climbing gym in Sherbrooke, a circus school in Limoilou and an indoor “vertical farming ” startup in Saint-Pacome.
In Ontario, only half of an estimated 12,000 historically religious properties still serve as places of worship, according to provincial heritage officials.
In cities with sky-high housing markets like Toronto, a number of defunct churches have been retrofitted into luxury residences, said urban geographer Jason Hackworth.
The University of Toronto professor said these religious developments can pit a community’s conservationist instincts against the desires of congregants, some of whom would rather their church be razed than turned into a “yuppie playground.”
Fourth-generation dairy farmer Jean Morin brokered an unlikely pairing between church and cheese in his hometown of SainteElizabeth-de-Warwick, a village in central Quebec. Having purchased the property for $1, the owner of La Fromagerie du Presbytere spent an additional $1.2 million to transform the church into a multi-purpose facility that could accommodate 40 congregants and tens of thousands of tonnes of ripening cheeses.
While some parishioners have bristled at the strange subdivision, Morin said the symbiotic setup has given the church “a second life.”
“I have the benediction of the community,” he said. “It’s very important for me to keep the heart of the village.”
Part of our story is bringing that element of community back to this beautiful place of worship.