Abandoned Church in Northern Illinois with a Sanctuary Still Standing and a Pipe Organ

This is one of my favorite abandoned churches in Northern Illinois. The inside is mostly empty, but the sanctuary is the reason to go, with the pipe organ, the stained glass and the green carpet all still in place.

The building also comes with a school section, which is where the video starts. The exact location stays off this page. In the offices I saw something about a 1987 historic district, State of Illinois, so this one has some history behind it.

What we found

We started in the school section. Somebody is trying to scrap the AC units, and a few of them had already been scrapped. It’s a colorful little building, with a purple painted block wall, and there’s mold and peeling paint on a lot of the walls.

Other explorers had been through. Two accounts had written their names on a board in the school kitchen, and I pointed them out, along with a note about setting up a table and cabinets where the snacks would go.

The chapel has stained glass up high, and I asked for some pink and yellow in the shot. There are falling ceiling tiles, water damage and peeling paint, and some chandeliers I loved. It was cold enough in there that I was shaking.

The upper staircase area has spiral staircases with a floral pattern on them, and they’ve started to get soft. I said it’s pretty unsafe up there because everything is falling apart. Some of the doors are padded, and a few of them had been chained together.

From up there you can see the church. It’s a very beautiful church, and it looks like it’s in pretty good shape, but as you can see there’s a lot of water damage. There’s dust on the chairs and paint peeling off from how long the place has sat.

Upstairs from the sanctuary the ceiling is falling in. I didn’t know how safe it was to walk across, and one spot was a little soft. It gets really dark in there, and a sunny day is the best day for it.

Some of what looked like skylights were really just places where the ceiling tiles had rotted away. One door said do not enter, and I didn’t see why, since it wasn’t that bad. In the hallway the paint is peeling off the walls and the floors are soft, and I could hear it underfoot.

The organ has a plaque on it, and the seats around it have a thick layer of dust. A Methodist hymnal was still sitting open, and I read a line from it out loud.

In the offices there’s a pastor’s office, a secretary desk, a wiring device I couldn’t identify and blueprint diagrams. I said this is one of my favorite churches, and that it’s surprising it’s still in pretty good shape.

The church school has a little school board and a handmade painting of the church, which I thought was really cool. There were some Christmas decorations left in there too.

I could smell the mold in the basement. I found a hard hat with earmuffs, a bunch of books and old pews that were falling apart. At one point it sounded like something was down there, and there was a creepy little room that was probably storage.

Why places like this end up empty

I don’t know this church’s history, so I can’t tell you why its congregation left. NPR Illinois reported in 2019 that church membership in the US fell about 20 percent over recent decades, citing a Gallup poll. The reasons it gave for congregations shrinking were aging members who aren’t replaced by younger ones, rising building maintenance costs and shifts in population.

What happens to the buildings after that varies. NPR Illinois described a downtown Methodist church in Springfield, vacant for about ten years, that was turned into apartments and the headquarters of the local chamber of commerce. It also described a Presbyterian church built in 1909 that had sat untouched for nearly five years before it became a restaurant and beer garden. The same story warned that without groups willing to take on projects like that, many of these buildings could be demolished.

Water is the other clock on a building like this one. The EPA says wet buildings need to be dried within 24 to 48 hours to avoid mold, and that mold can grow on wood, paper, carpet and insulation as long as there’s moisture. That’s the peeling paint and the soft floors we walked across.

I called it not too big but in pretty good shape, besides all the water damage and mold.