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Considering empty buildings
By Stephen KrissPage:
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I worked in Scottdale, Pa., before the near collapse of the once venerable Mennonite Publishing House and the disintegrating of the community that surrounded it.
Stephen Kriss, of Philadelphia, is director of communication and leadership cultivation for Franconia Mennonite Conference of Mennonite Church USA.
I’d first visited the place as a high school student and remember the sense of pride in mission as we were guided through this modern marvel of Mennonite life, with its cubicles, printing presses and warehoused books.
These days the big brick building stands largely empty at the top of the hill in Scottdale. Where once there were three Mennonite congregations, now there’s only one. The warehouses are virtually empty, the offices staffed by a scant crew, the printing presses sold off. Much of the activity behind what is now Mennonite Publishing Network is scattered across Canada and the United States.
The publishing-house image lingers in my mind as the end of an era. My twentysomething colleagues and I who landed at MPH in the mid ’90s felt the changes lurching toward us as we adapted to e-mail, desktop publishing and the Internet.
I wouldn’t have guessed that my first Internet visit sometime in 1994, the year I entered the workforce, would signal the end of life as we knew it at the publishing house.
My dad told me our Apple II+ computer would change everything I knew and experienced in my world of the 1980s. But I didn’t have the forethought to imagine how it would reorder even our religious perspectives and interactions.
This recollection leads me to think we need to jar ourselves out of what a recent issue of Dwell magazine calls the “edifice complex.” It names a common tendency: When organizational or political confusion arises, we try to reassert our control by constructing buildings and monuments to carry on a legacy or communicate a message.
We already have a hulking, unmarketable shell in Scottdale, joining scores of postindustrial buildings scattered across western Pennsylvania.
In our Mennonite future, there may be more of these — some possibly yet to be constructed, even with green architecture — scattered across places where we’ve traditionally gathered ourselves in the swath of agrarian locales from eastern Pennsylvania to south central Kansas.
And in the meantime, we’ll find that our population centers continue to migrate toward the coasts, cities and the border with Mexico.
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