Monks and a monastic brewery? Marblehead appears to have time traveled back to the Middle Ages with the St. Paul’s Foundation’s plans to open a Orthodox monastic brewery in town. Who knows what’s coming next? The Name of the Rose book store or maybe the Friar Tuck Lounge will make their debut. All jesting aside, Foundation executive director Father Andrew Bushell has pledged to ensure the Foundation is a good neighbor and he commended town officials for welcoming Foundation plans to convert 124 Pleasant St. into a church and Orthodox monastic brewery.
The Foundation already has a presence in town with its small monastic house and the Marblehead Salt Company founded six years ago. Marblehead is actually the Foundation’s second choice for a place to pray and brew ale. A proposal last year to open a brewery on the former Marian Court College site fell flat with Swampscott officials who raised zoning concerns.
Bushell argued that the Foundation enjoyed a religious exemption from zoning restrictions but that appeal apparently fell by the wayside in favor of expanding the Foundation’s presence in Marblehead.
It remains to be seen if the St. Paul’s Foundation can prosper and be a good neighbor in Marblehead. But Bushell has an ally in faith in Lynn who shares the monk’s belief that churches can do economic good in downtowns.
Kurt Lange, pastor of East Coast International Church, points with modesty to East Coast’s role in bringing good social work and economic benefits to downtown Lynn. The church has a strong presence on Munroe Street and Lange, who has helped build East Coast’s congregation from modest beginnings on Collins Street, believes cities and towns can do more to welcome churches to downtowns and give them the tools they need to provide economic benefits to a community.
He makes a good point: The building occupied by East Coast and its tenants was underused before the church settled on Munroe Street. Several other smaller storefront churches bring worshippers downtown and the economic benefits of their presence, Lange argues, needs to be measured and encouraged.
Churches were once literal pillars of the community, rising like the big churches on Lynn Common in the city’s center and supported by big congregations. Worship participation, like all of society, has changed over the decades and big worship houses that were once filled with the faithful are now empty or on the verge of becoming unaffordable to congregations.
East Coast and St. Paul’s Foundation provide a template for faith leaders and city and town officials to find ways to preserve those buildings and also turn them into focal points for prosperity.
There is no one perfect plan for potentially making religious institutions economic contributors or ensuring the survival of gigantic structures like Central Congregational Church and Washington Street Baptist Church. But an acknowledgment that churches can provide economic benefits by supporting enterprises or leasing property out to an entrepreneur are ideas that deserve exploration simply because of the successes achieved to date by institutions such as East Coast and St. Paul’s.
Faith may be built on good works, but work and the opportunity to hire people to do it might be the future byproduct of the modern religious institution.