From the Parish website at www.newoldchurch.org

OUR STORY

St. Raphael the Archangel Catholic Church, is named for the travelers’ patron—a fitting name for a traveling church ready to settle down at last in Old Mill Creek, Illinois. But our new church represents more than just a change of location.

It represents renewal.

St. Raphael’s shows a way to preserve the vision of dreamers and builders who have come before us. This project is charged by faith, but we hope it also inspires beyond its religious scope. We believe St. Raphael’s can be a model of architectural preservation. There is wonder all around us, and there are ways to save it.

It represents optimism.

When a church closes its doors, you know a community’s at a crossroads. Once upon a time, the story of a closed building had only one possible ending: Destruction. Now it can be something else: A larger community using the inheritance left by another generation as a foundation for the future.

And it represents innovation.

This is an undertaking that could change the way we think about architectural preservation. We may be accustomed to visionary thinking coming from the world of business or the creative community, but sometimes it just comes from people whose hearts are in the right place. A familiar story—old meets new—but there’s nothing familiar about the ending. St. Raphael’s will be unlike anything that has come before it. What’s new is the idea.