When Rev. Mary Templer was appointed interim moderator of Knox in Windsor, Ont., she was prepared to deal with a lot of disappointment.
The congregation had dwindled to a few devoted, elderly members. Over the years they had tried in different ways to reach out to the students living and studying across the street at the University of Windsor, but nothing seemed to work. The congregation shrank as members passed away.
Fred Plexman, who was the clerk of session, remembers it as a very stressful time. Some members wanted to keep the congregation going and others wanted to close the church. It wasn’t like the congregation was going bankrupt. There were hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank.
“We have all this money, and we have no people” Plexman recalled. “What’s that good for? To carry on and just… it bothered me.”
“They were very disillusioned, and there was lots of infighting about what they thought should happen,” Templer said. “We had a lot of depressing meetings.”
She remembers when, during one of those depressing meetings, Plexman stood up and suggested everyone go home and commit to spending 10 minutes every day asking God what the future should be for Knox.
“It seemed like a radical idea for everyone,” she said. “We met the following week. I had no expectation that anything would happen.”
But Fred stood up again. He believed the church should close—and the congregation should ask the presbytery to put the funds and building to use. Nothing they had tried had worked. Maybe someone else could do better.
“There was a lot of discussion, arguing, tears, but the majority—about 80 per cent—voted to do this,” Templer said. She thought the congregation went forward with the idea because it was Fred that suggested it. He was a well-respected elder, someone who knew and loved his church. And with the university just across the street, the building was in a perfect location to serve the student community.
But that didn’t make the process easy, especially for the congregation as it prepared to leave.
“There was a huge amount if sadness,” Templer said of those final days. “We talked a lot about how you had to have a death to have a resurrection, but I think they had a hard time imagining a resurrection. … They had tried to reach out to university students, but I think they had the impression that the next generation was just disinterested. There was a sense of self-sacrifice and sadness.”
The final service “was very sad,” remembered Anne Plexman, Fred’s wife. Those who disagreed with the decision to close the church didn’t come, and it ended with a note of bitterness.
It took a long while for the Presbytery of Essex-Kent to work out a plan. In the end they decided to try and plant a new church in the old Knox building. Templer was one of several ministers who applied to lead it.
Anne said Fred was instrumental pressing for Mary to become the founding minister of University Community Church. “She seemed to have the right ability at the time,” Anne said. “That was a bit of a battle but he won them over as I recall. And as Mary said she went into that with much trepidation and fear, but she did a wonderful job.”
“When I started there wasn’t a single person here,” Templer said. “I just got the keys to a building that had been empty for months and months.”
So she started putting together a team. She thought about leaders in Windsor’s Christian community—not just Presbyterians, but people of different denominational stripes—who might be interested in starting a new church geared toward university students. She pulled together about 10 people, mostly Baptists, Anglicans and Pentecostals.
They didn’t begin by launching something new. They began by loitering and listening. They asked students around campus what they would want to find if they came to a church. Most said they’d never be interested in coming to church—but hypothetically, if they did, they would only be interested in God, not in traditional trappings or religious institutions. So the leadership team decided they would talk a lot about how awesome God is. They held their first service in September of 2001.
Planting and growing a church geared toward university students proved to be quite different from serving a more traditional Presbyterian congregation.
The worship services were designed for people who had no idea what a worship service was. The music was all brand new, played a band made up of university students. The sermons were interactive, with back-and-forth discussions. And students were very involved as leaders.
“In 10 years I have never had a Sunday without at least one person there who openly says they’re not a Christian,” said Templer, who retired from ministry a few years ago, passing on the reins of a congregation made up mostly of unchurched twentysomethings. “In some ways it’s fun and challenging but also exhausting.
