The first itinerant preacher to travel as far as Chilmark was the Rev. Joshua Hall, in 1797. A small Methodist “class” was formed and continued to meet in the home of Capt. Francis Tilton, until 1827 when the old Methodist meetinghouse in Edgartown was purchased and subsequently moved piece by piece to the intersection of Middle Road and Meetinghouse Road, which was then the center of town. Sometime in 1843 the sanctuary was replaced and the church moved across the road. Philip Crandon was the first assigned preacher to the new station; I was the 88th pastor appointed in July 1992. The congregation steadily increased and in 1910 the church was moved again to its present location on Menemsha Crossroad. In 1928 the Odd Fellows of Oak Bluffs gave a bell to the Chilmark Ladies Aid Society. The bell was hung in the new steeple after three years of continual fighting (half the congregation wanted a steeple and a bell, the other half of the congregation did not want the church to be changed). The disagreement caused many hard feelings and the eventual loss of the dissenting members. One of the first things I was told when I first arrived about the church was that the steeple leaked and never should have been. The painters recently replaced the louvers in the steeple and would try again to fix the leak that had been leaking since 1931.

The painters did a great job in bad November 1992 weather. The church had been scraped and three sides painted. We hoped to be finished by Thanksgiving. Every few hours one of the members of the board of trustees would drive by or call to make sure the work was continuing on schedule. I could watch all the work from the kitchen window in the newly remodeled and redecorated parsonage next door to the church.

What a big job the restoration of the parsonage had been. We spent all summer painting and papering, and cleaning out the cellar and the attic.

Each side of the church has three large windows each with 24 panes of glass. There are windows on either side of the sanctuary and one window in the front between the doors. The painters had contracted to replace some of the cracked window panes before painting the windows.

The trustee’s question took me by surprise: “What have you done with the old glass in the cellar?”

“What old glass?” I answered, not knowing what the trustee was talking about.

“The old glass that was against the back wall.” He was scowling at me. “We can’t just replace the panes with new glass, it will look horrible,” he said.

By the look on his face I could tell I had done something I should not have done. I remember thinking, what on earth are all those large broken panes of glass doing down here collecting dust? In my usual compulsive fashion I tossed them out with the old paint cans, moldy bags of clothes and mildewed Christmas decorations.

The painters were almost finished, just the windows were left to be painted. All work stopped while the trustees spread out through the town going from barn to loft to cellar to shed looking for old glass to replace the cracked panes; mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

As soon as the workmen left, and while the trustees were still on their treasure hunt, I went into the church to look anew out of the church windows. The trustees were right; I had not noticed how the old glass in the windows bent the light coming into the church. I had not noticed that the trees and woods beyond the parking area had all their forms softened by the ripples in the old glass. I had not noticed how the colors blended together when seen through old glass.

I came to Methodism in my middle years. The first Methodist church I joined had beautiful stained glass windows, as do the two largest Methodist churches on the Island. I could not help but compare the tiny plain Chilmark Church with those more ornate Methodist churches and the large Roman Catholic churches of my youth. To tell the truth, I longed for something to change the plainness of the church. I thought of having the Sunday school children make decorations for the windows at Christmas and Easter. The teachers didn’t like the idea. It would block the light. I talked to the United Methodist Women about altar visuals or altar cloths appropriate to each season. They smiled but did nothing.

Looking anew through the old glass I think that perhaps the visual experience of the congregation of the Chilmark Church is not so far removed from the experience of Abbot Suger, at the church of Saint Denis. Light, oneness and order were the symbols of the Divine Presence at St. Denis, with light being the primary metaphor for the divine. Since light was such a significant medium for the presence of God, the way in which it is manifested in the building was one of the guiding principles during reconstruction of St. Denis. Replacing the old glass with old glass was one of the guiding principles in repairing the Chilmark Church.

John Wesley is said to have preferred meeting houses to be unpretentious without steeple or portico but usually with balconies and an elevated pulpit and a communion table ringed with rails.

The Chilmark Church does have a rear balcony. The pulpit is central and raised up two steps. The communion table is also central, placed in front of the pulpit down the two steps. A less than 18-inch-high altar rail surrounds the sanctuary on three sides. The kneeler is so narrow and the rail so low that adults end up sitting back on their heels when they kneel at the rail.

Besides John Wesley, the Chilmark Church would have pleased Zwingli. The walls are whitewashed, (but with a light blue tint), there are no paintings, no decorations, “Scarcely a statue, a painting, a crucifix, a votive lamp, a reliquary, a shrine, or image or decoration,” of any sort to be seen. But the light is beautiful. Maybe with Calvin the Chilmark congregation thinks that any image would draw human eyes away from God.

In On Art and Architecture, John Dillenberger presents Tillich’s views on The Ideal of Holy Emptiness. The members of the Chilmark Church might not be able to articulate their love of sacred emptiness, but they, like Tillich, are most satisfied with the architecturally expressed emptiness.

That Christmas we had the pageant as part of the worship service the Sunday before Christmas rather than the evening of the Sunday before Christmas. The mothers of young children were pleased but the older members of the congregation complained that it just wasn’t the same. They missed the reflection of the candles in the darkened windows and the light shining in the eyes of the little shepherds and angels. The next year we would have our pageant at night. I looked forward to seeing for myself the light refracted and mirrored in the old glass.

The trustees were able to find enough old glass to replace the cracked panes. Thank God!

Arlene Bodge is pastor at the Chilmark Community Church. This piece was originally written in March 1993 and was edited for this edition.