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The towering cross on the lawn has been taken down and “Asbury United Methodist Church” stripped from the brick sign in front of the Pinecroft Road sanctuary that couldn’t afford to pay the pastor or its utility bills.

“We ended with a covered dish dinner where more or less we said goodbyes to all of our church family and we put our church to rest,” said Joan Hipp, who helped coordinate the church food bank’s weekly hot meal for the needy. “It was very, very sad — it was like a funeral. It was like we mourned the death of a loved one, and that was exactly what we did.”

The church, with its roots in the Billy Graham crusades in Greensboro in the 1950s, held its last service June 7, after dwindling from more than 300 members to fewer than 40 people most Sundays.

The economy, the aging congregation, and an outreach that never quite connected with the increasingly diverse community all contributed to the congregation’s financial woes.

“It wasn’t that they didn’t try,” said Frank Ison, district superintendent for the United Methodist Church, which reassigned the Rev. Julie Peeler to a church in Asheville and is currently assessing the value of the building and whether it is going to be sold or given to another congregation. “They did some creative things to reach out to the community but it didn’t work.”

The massive brick building in the shadow of Four Seasons Town Centre became the meeting place for the Neighborhood Community Watch. An African American assistant pastor was brought in to help connect with the neighborhoods around them.

But pews remained empty. At most churches, a sign of growth is the number of children in the congregation — here, there was just one youth and a few children under age 5.

“We didn’t have anything that would draw young adults who would want to bring their families in,” Hipp said.

A preschool, started just a few years ago, couldn’t sustain itself. Members tried sharing the building with other fledging ministries, including the Korean Presbyterian Church, but expensive monthly utility bills signaled problems.

The average attendance was in the 30s at the end, with most of the members retired and living on fixed incomes.

 Others lost jobs because of the economy.

Eventually, there wasn’t enough money to pay into the pastor’s pension and keep up with the utility bills, something ministries are required to do, Ison said.

“From month to month to month there wasn’t enough coming in,” said Nancy Harper, one of the charter members at the living room prayer meeting that evolved into Asbury. “It just became too much.”

Last year, the congregation appointed a task force to study its future. The task force found that the membership could not afford the building, but the church voted 17-15 to give it another try. Eventually, reality set in when they couldn’t pay a $900 utility bill. Now, after so many years at Asbury, people like Steve Woodard, chairman of the trustee board, are visiting other churches.

“It’s very, very strange,” Woodard said. “But I think we’ll just know.”

The building and the property are now largely under the responsibility of conference trustees, who are having it appraised.

“They should not feel bad — they should feel good particularly in their love for each other and their love for how God was in that community,” Ison said. “But that doesn’t mean they should not grieve the loss. You build up sacred space when you’ve been there that long.”

Hipp and her husband, who himself had been at the church for more than three decades, decided on Groometown United Methodist Church, where the food pantry has been relocated.

“One of the things I’ll miss most about Asbury is the people — the love, the connection, the fellowship, the compassion that we showed toward one another,” Hipp said. “We were a family, an extended family. When one was hurting, we all hurt. But at the heart of it all, we were connected by God.”

Contact Nancy McLaughlin at 373-7049 or nancy.mclaughlin@news-record.com