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The church and cows at St. Mary's (circa 1996)
While researching The Pivotal Pastor, I pondered the odds against a farming parish in the country taking on a seemingly impossible task as St. Mary’s did. The architect had never designed a church. The campus was landlocked. The parish lacked funds for expansion.
Many new families were moving into the area, creating a strain on the parish’s religious services and the elementary school. The campus was too small to accommodate the size of facilities they would need based on population projections.
The priest the Archdiocese sent, Ron Lewinski, had never been a pastor. People generally agreed that he was shy and introverted. He typically felt drained after attending social events. He readily admitted that he disliked asking for money. He was of an age that was “over-the-hill” by the time he arrived. He’d been told by an instructor in college that he’d never make a good priest.
Most of these are not things one would put on the plus side of the ledger, regardless of the situation.
However, the architect, Dirk Lohan, had studied under--and later worked with--his grandfather, Mies van der Rohe, a pioneer of modernistic architecture. They worked on the New National Gallery in Berlin, the IBM office building in Chicago, and The Toronto Dominion Centre. Later, Lohan designed expansions to Chicago’s lakefront Shedd Aquarium, the Adler Planetarium, and nearby Soldier Field. Exceptional accomplishments.
Lohan’s credits also included the McDonald’s Corporation in Oak Brook, Illinois, and several buildings across the country. Before the St. Mary project, he added the Sinai Temple in Chicago to his portfolio. He was familiar with Gothic cathedrals in Germany, where he grew up, but he had never designed a church. Some parish leaders, later seeking to qualify (or disqualify) an architect, weren’t keen on that fact. Plus, there was the matter of fees typically associated with a world-renowned architect.
When Lewinski arrived, the parish consisted of just a few hundred households. Though it was adding new families, it was still toward the small end of the parish spectrum. There was little indication it could assume any renovation, much less the $4-$5 million that it typically cost at that time to build a new church. In fact, the project would cost twice that much.
For Lewinski, there was one thing that promised hope. It was a phrase he often repeated, an expression derived from the scripture story after which the parish is named: “For nothing is impossible with God.” (Luke 1:37)
Send me your comments/questions.
This is one in a series of installments by the author about his journey of writing The Pivotal Pastor.
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