The greying of rural N.L.

It’s been a steady progression. Or maybe a deconstruction.

It started a couple of years or so ago, right at the top of the back wall on the left-hand side, looking from the road.

Just one hanging strip of vinyl siding — white, like the clapboard beneath.

The old United Church on the road to Adam’s Cove, Conception Bay North, is shedding its skin, day by day, week by week. Now, there’s a clear patch as tall as one of the long windows on the side, from the edge of the roof down to the windowsill, where a longer run of vinyl seems to have delayed what almost seems inevitable.

It’s a boxy church on the shoulder of the main road: word was that it was bought years ago by an American after it was closed, but nothing much ever happened to it. The grass in narrow front yard went wild, and now thatched timothy pokes through the low chain-link fence. It was for sale for a while in the $60,000 range — now, it’s up on Kijjiji, in all its fractured English glory: “Let your imagination run free. This 3,700 sq.ft. former United Church in Blackhead, Small Point, Adams Cove on Hwy 70 just 22 km from Carbonear. It sits on a beautiful level lot with ocean views available from the second floor. Covert the church into your dream home or summer home, or home and business. Building has electrical service and double oil fired forced air furnaces in place. Fabulous open plan with easy access to add bathrooms, bedrooms, and kitchen and still have lots of open space — $40,000.”

It’s only a stone’s throw away from another, more recently used church for sale, the United Church in Broad Cove. The newly vacated Broad Cove church is a much bigger building, a traditional, steepled church, now on the market at $119,900 for 6,7000 square feet of living space. Its realty ad shows a delightful fondness for alliteration: “Pews and pulpit part and parcel of sale.”

Congregations are aging and thinning out — church buildings, as a result, are too big to maintain and heat. And churches have gone on the market up and down the coast of Conception Bay North; the aging churchgoing population is not only smaller, but potential religious recruits aren’t appearing. Part of it is that younger people aren’t going to church. The other part, painfully obvious in Conception Bay North, is that there just aren’t as many young people there anymore. A springtime stroller and baby on the shoulder of the road can literally stop traffic.

A church in Ochre Pit Cove is now Ochre House, a vacation and studio retreat. Another church in Northern Bay has been repurposed into a family home.

In Western Bay, near the river swimming hole known as The Overfalls, Mcdowell United Church — at least up to last summer — still warbles out Sunday hymns through speakers in its spire.

The Blackhead-western Bay Pastoral Charge website tells congregants that, “The church news for the current week is displayed below. Browse through in case you couldn’t make it to this week’s service.”

There’s no church news this week. Nor last week.

The last week that church news was posted, accord to the site’s archive, was the week of March 31, 2014.

The religious deconstruction isn’t just a Conception Bay North phenomenon.

First United Church in Grand Falls-windsor had its last service on March 19 and the building is to be put up for sale.

Its congregation chair, Jennifer Pilgrim, told the CBC, “We are a declining enrolment and aging population and we just couldn’t keep up the church. … The building needs a lot of repairs and with so few people we can’t afford to (do) the repairs on the church. We all saw it coming, we didn’t want to admit it, I guess.”

We all saw it coming.

But there’s part of what’s coming, and what’s already here, governments and politicians like to avoid looking at. Declining church attendance is one thing. The rapid aging of our population is another — and while the provincial government wants us to think about our rapidly aging population province-wide, they’re not so keen to point out another fact: that the aging and the hollowing-out of populations is happening much faster outside the overpass.

It’s changing the entire structure of this place.

The old United Church on the road to Adam’s Cove, Conception Bay North, is shedding its skin, day by day, week by week.