In an evensong service of hymns and prayer, members and friends of St. Mark's Episcopal Church will gather in the sanctuary Friday to bid farewell to a congregation that has been an anchor in the Old West End for more than a century.

A final service will be held at St. Mark's on Sunday morning.

Changing demographics, a declining and aging membership, and economic pressures forced the congregation to make some tough decisions, and rather than close completely or move to the suburbs, it voted to merge with another historic Toledo church, Trinity Episcopal downtown.

Friday's service, being held on the Feast of the Epiphany, in some ways marks the completion of a circle for the two congregations.

"It's interesting that St. Mark's began as a mission Sunday school of Trinity Church, actually beginning in the rectory of Trinity Church in 1888," said Ohio Bishop Mark Hollingsworth, Jr., who will preside at the evensong service.

"I admire their courage in making this difficult decision, and I admire both congregations for together undertaking this new adventure. God hasn't let us down yet, and I'm confident that there are many blessings and worthy challenges in ministry ahead in this new configuration."

Bob Meeker, a member of St. Mark's vestry, or leadership team, said the congregation has been evaluating its viability for decades. And while it was pondering, it watched two neighboring congregations slip off to new sites -- Ashland Avenue Baptist to Oregon in 2006 and First Unitarian Universalist to South Toledo in 2008.

The signs were clear that St. Mark's faces a tenuous future. Sunday attendance had dropped from 220 in 1999 to less than 80 today, with many parishioners getting up in years. At the same time, the costs of maintaining the 24,000-square-foot neo-Gothic building kept rising.

In a good year, maintenance costs ran around $50,000, but when the roof leaked or pipes busted, costs could hit $60,000 or more, said Hugh Grefe, a St. Mark's member and part of the joint "design team" that helped facilitate the merger.

Members of St. Mark's wrestled with whether it was wise to spend so much of their limited resources on building upkeep, Mr. Grefe said.

The final push to make a move came when the economy crashed in 2008, devastating St. Mark's endowment fund.

Members knew it was time to not just talk about change, but to act.

"All the mainline churches have been facing sort of an arc of descent in terms of membership," Mr. Grefe said. "For many of them, it's because of these ancient edifices that they are supporting. They are in situations where the cost of occupancy is just so deadly."

St. Mark's chose to continue spending whatever endowment funds were available for outreach and ministry to the Old West End, a once-upscale neighborhood that over time has lost much of its wealth and luster.

"It was a matter of continuing to be a presence in the neighborhood, to continue to serve the people here," said the Rev. Kelly O'Connell, St. Mark's rector for 6 1/2 years. "The parish was really committed to the neighborhood and didn't want to move out to Sylvania or someplace else. That was a real driving force."

Myriad options

St. Mark's members looked at myriad options before approaching Trinity.

They discussed renting space elsewhere, sharing their Collingwood Boulevard facility in nontraditional ways -- including discussions with a Zen Buddhist group -- or continuing as is until their endowment funds were depleted.

One option they rejected immediately was calling it quits. "We explored everything, but nobody had a belly for that. It took not even 30 seconds of conversation," Mr. Meeker said.

Once they began exploring a merger with Trinity, everything seemed to click, members of both churches said.

"When we reached out to Trinity, we found we had a whole lot in common," Mr. Grefe said. "Then we were reminded that we were, of course, actually a mission church of Trinity in the 1880s. One hundred years later, we still had a lot of shared values."

Trinity was first

Trinity was the first Episcopal Church in Toledo, having been granted a charter in 1842. Its building at St. Clair and Adams streets was dedicated on April 5, 1866.

When it started St. Mark's as a mission church, the Old West End neighborhood was less than 2 miles away but in that era seemed a distant suburb.

St. Mark's was designed by Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson, the prestigious Boston architectural firm that also designed the chapel at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the Church of St. Thomas on Fifth Avenue in New York City.

St. Mark's members are hoping that their building, which is being listed for sale at $199,000, will be bought by another church.

The Rev. Liddy Hoster, Trinity's rector since December, 2007, said she was intrigued right away by the prospect of a merger.

"My initial reaction was, 'Wow, this sounds like it has great potential. Let's talk more,' " the Rev. Hoster said. "We certainly needed to look ahead and say what's the best thing to do for our mission 10, 20 years down the road."

The church has about 200 members on the rolls, with half of them actively involved, she said. The endowment is solid, and Trinity completed a $3 million, award-winning restoration and renovation in 2003.

Open congregations

But St. Mark's plight inspired Trinity's rector and congregation to look at the church's long-term vitality.

Their commonalities include having progressive and inclusive congregations that are open and affirming to gays and lesbians, with a commitment to social justice and community outreach.

The Rev. Ted Voorhees, who was rector of St. Mark's for 15 years before leaving in 2004, said from St. Augustine, Fla., that the congregation has long been in the vanguard of promoting diversity.

It was the first church in northwest Ohio to display the AIDS Memorial Quilt, he said, and the first Episcopal Church in the region to bless same-sex unions, he said.

"We ended up with a community that had lots of straight people, but also a lot of gay and lesbian and transgender people as a part of it," the Rev. Voorhees said. "We had some straight families who belonged because they wanted their children to be exposed to that kind of environment, which was open and nonjudgmental."

The two congregations began holding formal meetings in June, appointing a design team that focused on five areas: creating unity; worship music and liturgy; sacred artifacts; future ministry opportunities, and staffing and leadership.

'Unity in mission'

The Rev. Hoster will be the rector of the merged parish. The Rev. O'Connell said she will continue in ministry, but does not know where.

One priority for the merged congregation is to share a vision for its mission, the Rev. Hoster said.

"Creating unity in mission is by far the most important focus, because if you don't have a common mission, then what is the church there for, as far as the greater community," she said.

Regarding St. Mark's sacred artifacts, a side altar at the church that originally was St. Mark's main altar will be moved to Trinity's chapel, and the chapel will be renamed St. Mark's Chapel, the Rev. Hoster said.

In addition, both churches have columbaria, which are shelflike storage places for cremated remains. The entire columbarium at St. Mark's, which now contains 17 or 18 urns, will be moved to Trinity after prayers are recited, the Rev. O'Connell said.

The rector said some families have asked for the remains to be returned to them rather than be moved to Trinity, and "we'll abide by their requests."

Mr. Meeker said Friday's evensong service at 7 p.m. will be "kind of a public moment," while the final services at St. Mark's at 8 and 10:30 Sunday morning will be more of a "family time."

The first worship service at Trinity for the merged congregation will be Jan. 15.

While the closing of St. Mark's and the merger with Trinity are bittersweet, Mr. Meeker said the congregation is proud of its history.

"I think we lasted 20 years longer than anyone expected we would, and we did it with great community focus and great social justice ministries," he said.

Bishop Hollingsworth said that while mergers and closings are "not that uncommon" these days, few parishes handle the transition with the foresight of the two Toledo churches.

"We have six congregations in Toledo proper and another four in the greater Toledo area, and it's inevitable that the church will face change like this and need to reconfigure," he said. "We will either do that by default or by intention. I'm very admiring of communicants at St. Mark's and Trinity for being so intentional about this."

Contact David Yonke at: dyonke@theblade.com or 419-724-6154.

First Published January 6, 2012, 6:30 a.m.