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Date: 11/30/2023
HUNTINGTON — The First Congregational Church on Norwich Hill was packed for its final service on Nov. 26. After worshiping together as a congregation since 1778, the membership had voted to close the church, being unable to continue to maintain the 1841 building, and had been working for a year toward that ending.
It was gratifying to see the pews filled for the last time. Members and pastors from at least 10 area Congregational churches, as well as neighbors in the community joined in the service, which honored its loving fellowship over the years. One neighbor, Noel Keeney, brought badges he had earned for seven years of perfect attendance in Sunday school and youth group. His family had been part of the church for generations.
During the service, led by the Rev. Carol Smith, who has pastored the church for the past 10 years, parishioners were asked to say the names of some of the people who had been a big part of church life over recent decades. The names of those people, mostly gone, went on and on.
The first name mentioned was the Rev. Barbara Paulson, my mother, who was the minister there for 20 years, from her installation in 1988 at age 60, until her 80th birthday in 2008.
She had been called as a young woman to the ministry, but her family had opposed her desire to attend a seminary. Instead, she attended Connecticut College, where she met my father, Robert Cunningham, who was graduating from Williston. She left college to raise five children at our home in New Jersey, one of them adopted from India.
During that time, she had gone back to school and gotten her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and became an English teacher at Teaneck High School. Too early, in his 50s, my father died of a heart attack, leaving her with a choice. She chose to move to Huntington, to the home they had planned to retire in. She remarried Robert Paulson, a bookstore owner in a nearby town in New Jersey. Together, they established a bookstore behind their home on Allen Coit Road.
Learning that her new husband was terminally ill, my mother acted on her call to the ministry and applied with his full support to Harvard Divinity School, where she obtained her master’s degree. She ministered at the VA Medical Center in Leeds before being called to the church on the hill, which was only one mile from their home. Months later, Robert Paulson passed away.
I moved to Huntington with my family during that time. Although I was not an official member of the church — I felt our mother-daughter dynamic might become a problem — the church was a big part of my life. For many years, I typed the bulletin, which she corrected beforehand, English-teacher style, in red. We spoke about church happenings, trials and heartbreaks, especially from the loss of church members. She served at many weddings and funerals, baptisms and other milestones in people’s lives.
My extended family often joined in worship, with our collective children playing horns on special occasions. The Christmas Eve candlelight services, which always brought in many members of the community and ended in silence with the lighting of each other’s candles, are a sacred memory for me.
COVID-19 was hard for many people, and especially for the church. The Christmas bazaar and other fundraisers, which the members poured themselves into and were its lifeblood, could not take place. Worship services moved to Zoom, and once they started meeting together in person, they met for economy downstairs in the fellowship hall, in order not to have to heat the church building.
The membership will now sell the church, which holds so many loving memories for so many people. Smith, who will continue on in ministry, said on Sunday that in the Congregational church, the churches themselves are owned by the members. Norwich Hill members have voted to give any proceeds realized from the sale to four area Congregational churches.
Smith said the hope of the congregation is that the church building will remain something for the community. My hope is that every member of the church will find a new church home, one that will minister to them as they have so faithfully ministered to others.
Amy Porter is a staff writer for Reminder Publishing and a resident of Huntington.