MCC waves goodbye to Heffron Hall

MCC waves goodbye to Heffron Hall

After 30 years in the area, and 21 years in the building, the Metropolitan Community Church Sydney has finally waved goodbye to Darlinghurst’s Heffron Hall, vacating the building on Friday.
The MCC, established in Sydney in 1979, originally met in the Uniting Church’s Village Church in Paddington, and had a brief stint in the Surry Hills Quakers Meeting House before moving to the hall in 1988.
MCC Sydney was one of the international GLBT-affirming church’s first branches outside North America.
“It’s sad in a way, but I also think this is a time when we can look back and see what an amazing amount of work, what an amazing amount of community service, came out of that building,” said MCC Sydney’s the Reverend Gavin Ward.
MCC Sydney has been holding services in its Petersham church since 2000 after buying that building in 1999, and now attracts around 70 worshippers most weekends. Ward said all that might not have been possible without the hall.
“The hall was very important to the life of MCC Sydney and we wouldn’t have been able to grow and purchase our own building without the City of Sydney giving us the gift of that building. It’s been a gift to the community as well because we’ve always made that hall available for the community as custodians of it,” Ward said.
“Many funerals were held in the hall as well as our Sunday lunch programs. It’s served a lot of roles — AA meetings, theatre groups, you name it. If you asked different people in the church and the community what they remember about that space, some would have a memory of a funeral, others of a holy union, and others as a place to eat. It’s been a lot of different things.”
The MCC continued to make the building available to community groups over the last nine years, but now it’s time to move on.
City of Sydney will now put the building up for tender, with the MCC hoping it will go to another group with the community at its heart.

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