Celebration Sunday won't be much of a celebration for the Hyndsville and Dorloo United Methodist Churches.
And in Mineral Springs, they aren't going to be celebrating at all.
"Nope. It's just going to be a very quiet final service," said Mary Jane Myers, a longtime member of the Mineral Springs congregation.
"We're hurting. We're an old, old, old congregation. None of us can make sense of this and frankly, I don't care any more. Most of us here are done with the Methodist Church."
The small Hyndsville, Dorloo, and Mineral Springs UMCs, along with the Warnerville UMC, were notified in June that they were being discontinued by the Upper New York United Methodist Church Conference as no longer viable.
Warnerville and Hyndsville were offered reprieves-the chance to earn the right to stay open by meeting a list of goals set by the Conference-but just Warnerville agreed to the deal; one of the conditions is that members don't talk to the press or write any more letters to the editor.
Hyndsville voted not to take the reprieve, convinced the church was only being set up to fail.
Hyndsville and Dorloo have both set final services for Sunday, September 27-9am in Hyndsville, followed by a coffee hour, and 7:30am in Dorloo, and both have begun what is likely to be a year of exploring options and alternatives.
"We're looking at a few things," said Sue Davis, a longtime member of the Dorloo congregation. "We've got some feelers out."
That could include working together with Hyndsville on some sort of shared space or meeting in members' homes-the latter something Mineral Springs has also talked about, Ms. Myers said.
Members of the Hyndsville and Dorloo congregations have met with the Sidney Family & Friends Church, closed in 2009 by the Conference after a devastating fire despite having an $800,000 insurance policy that would have let the now-independent congregation rebuild.
'The best advice they gave us was to plan this out over the course of a year," said Peggy Himes, a member of the Hyndsville UMC. "To see if we can survive and be strong for a full year and then see what we want to do."
Ms. Himes and Ms. Davis said their congregations have both been notified by the Conference that their membership is being transferred to the Richmondville UMC.
Ms. Myers said it's been suggested that her church join Barnerville's.
"Let us decide," she said angrily. "We knew we weren't going to be able to hang on much longer, but let us tell the Conference."
There will be plenty of tears in all three churches on the 27th, but right now, anger is keeping them all going.
Hyndsville and Dorloo are both working their way through a five-page dissolution checklist with steps that include: Collecting and delivering all available church title and corporate documents, an inventory of physical assets, from dishes to silverware; collecting and labeling all keys and combinations for locks, and photographing the inside and the outside of the church.
"This is what it all comes to," said Ms. Himes.