But the church has now hatched other survival plans.

They’re working to secure a new, more favorable tax status which would make it easier for the church to get grants.

And at the end of the month, they’ll find out about their biggest hope to secure funds. The Cambridge congregation is hoping to hammer out a lucrative agreement with the statewide Swedenborgian organization, which is looking to relocate a Swedenborgian bookstore currently in downtown Boston. The Cambridge congregation hopes to bring the bookstore onto their property, for which the statewide group would pay rent.

Above all, the approximately 30-person congregation is keeping the faith that they can keep worshipping in their century-old home.

Three Precarious Years

The Swedenborgian House of Studies—the national seminary of the denomination—was located in Cambridge until the 1960s, and still owns the property where the chapel remains.

They decided to sell the chapel more than 20 years ago, according to Jane Sibert, chair of the Board of Trustees of the Swedenborgian House of Studies, which now resides in Berkeley.

“It just didn’t make sense for the seminary to own a chapel that they were no longer using,” Sibert says. In 1999, the seminary attempted to sell its final holding in Cambridge—the chapel’s plot—to a developer, who wanted to construct an 11-story condominium with the chapel as a lobby.

A public outcry ensued, and Cambridge residents—opposed to the idea of a large-scale development in their backyards—helped the congregation fight for a designation as a historic landmark, as well as new zoning which cut the allowed height for development on the site to three stories.

Stymied in their efforts to sell the site, the seminary hammered out a mortgage contract with the Cambridge congregation.

According to Sibert, two separate appraisals of the property three years ago estimated its value at over $4 million—but the seminary knew that the congregation couldn’t afford that much money.

“We sat down in a negotiation with the representatives of the chapel, and we worked out this compromise to sell it to them at $2 million [plus interest],” she says.

According to the terms of the contract, the congregation would have had until March 30, 2003—the end of this month—to raise the over $2 million sum to purchase the chapel from the seminary.

Earlier this year, as the deadline neared and the money failed to materialize, raising $2 million seemed an impossible goal.

Sibert says that the House of Studies decided to extend the deadline to allow the congregation time to explore its numerous plans.