In 2012, lightning struck the bell tower at Quapaw Quarter United Methodist Church. Now the tower is crumbling, and water sometimes leaks inside.
With its aging building plagued by decay, the congregation has decided to sell the historic structure. The Rev. Keith Coker handed out ballots after his service Sunday. The congregation sang “Once in Royal David’s City” as he announced the tally.
"I heard faltering voices," Jenny Armstrong Boulden said. "Some people were too emotional to sing."
She added a broken heart to her ballot before casting her vote to sell the 90-year-old building.
At one time, her church drew more than 3,400 people, more members than any Methodist congregation in Arkansas. But attendance began to decline in the 1960s as people moved to west Little Rock suburbs. In 2012, the church had 100 members. On the day of the vote, fewer than 60 arrived for the Sunday service.
"It is plain now that the future needs of this building are more than a congregation of this size can manage," Coker said.
Boulden wept onto her ballot.
Her mother and father were married in the church. Her great-great-grandfather joined the congregation in the late 19th century, when it was called Winfield Methodist Church and the congregation met at a brick cathedral on the corner of 15th and Center streets.
The congregation moved to its current location in 1921, when work began on a five-story building complete with Gothic windows, buttresses and an elaborately ornamented tower. The church is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
As a child, Boulden gazed up at the four angels lining the top of the sanctuary and told herself their stories. Some nights, her grandparents would take her to nighttime choir practices and set her loose in the five-story building. She wandered up the winding staircases, through pathways she imagined to be secret and forbidden. To ward off ghosts and bats, she walked on tiptoe across the balcony.
The bats were a real problem, said Anne Armstrong Holcomb, Boulden's aunt and a former pastor of the church. They got into the organ pipes and would chitter during weddings. Her father spent hours plugging holes and cleaning their excrement. It finally cost $22,000 to have them exterminated.
At one point, Holcomb said, she tried to leave the church. It was so much work to maintain: sitting down buckets in the sanctuary, hauling water from the basement. For seven years, she joined a congregation of Episcopalians.
But after her father died, she couldn't resist the pull of her childhood church. She remembered counting diamond squares on the organ grill, running her eyes over the disciples on the stained-glass windows, trying to memorize the names of each.
"I know that building better than any building on the face of the planet," she said.
When the congregation began to discuss selling the church in September, one member argued that the building was only an object, empty as any other. "That's like saying the Bible is just paper and ink," Holcomb recalls her brother saying. "It's not just brick and mortar."
And yet, the brick and mortar needed repair. The tower was crumbling. Holcomb worried that the demands of being a member of such a church were too great for new members.
"Who wants to be a part of a sinking ship?" she asked. "Even if it's a beautiful ship."
On Sunday, 29 members remained after the service to cast their ballots. Coker announced the final count: 1 to stay, 28 to leave.
Boulden cried and hugged the other members of the congregation. They did not know when the building would sell or where they would go if it did, though they planned to continue as a congregation.
"I keep thinking of a song," Boulden said the morning after the decision. "A church is not a building. It is not a steeple. A church is not a resting place. It is the people."
Metro on 12/19/2017