Inside Cresskill Congregational Church, a monthly sale opens the door to something much older: a Bergen County building layered with stained glass, donated treasures, community work and the people who have kept returning to it.
There are certain places in Bergen County that are easy to pass without wondering what is inside. They become part of the visual shorthand of a town: the school you drive by, the municipal building, the steeple above a line of houses. You know where they are. You may have lived nearby for twenty years. You have never opened the door.
Cresskill Congregational Church, on Union Avenue, rewards the person who does.
I arrived because of a White Elephant Sale.
This is perhaps the appropriate way to discover a place whose history seems to reveal itself sideways. You go looking for an old serving dish and discover stained glass. You inspect a shelf of donated objects and learn that the shelf has its own provenance. You meet a woman named Karen Minkler, who has been working the sale for seventeen years, and within minutes she is telling you about the church, her late husband, her son, and a cross standing outside that you might otherwise have walked straight past.
The White Elephant has been around, in various forms, for more than sixty years, according to Karen. Today, it occupies the sort of space that invites rummaging. Household goods sit beside jewelry, books, toys, glassware and objects whose usefulness may reveal itself only after you have picked them up. The church says the shop opens monthly for much of the year and is staffed by volunteers. Its own constitution describes the White Elephant as a ministry that helps support the church while providing inexpensive goods and a social gathering place for the surrounding community.
Karen understands the social part instinctively.
“People come in and they will find something,” she told me. “Whether they know they need it or not, they will find something.”
This is an excellent philosophy for a thrift shop and, possibly, for wandering around Bergen County.
Inside Cresskill Congregational Church: Dana Corriel visits the White Elephant Sale, then gets an unexpected tour of the church from the people who know it best.
The sale itself contains pieces of other local places. Karen pointed out glass shelving that came from the Clinton Inn after its gift shop closed. Objects arrive by donation, are sorted and, when necessary, researched online before being priced below what volunteers believe they might command elsewhere.
The effect is less retail than accumulation. Bergen County is constantly renovating itself. Kitchens are gutted, houses are sold, businesses close, families downsize. Objects detach from one life and occasionally land in another. At the White Elephant, some of them pause in between.
Upstairs, the same idea takes architectural form.
The history of the congregation reaches much further back than the sale. According to the church, its beginnings can be traced to May of 1856, when Alexander McKelvey led a small Sunday school gathering in the Coley house on County Road in Tenafly. A formal church was organized in Cresskill in 1907 with fifty-nine founding members. The congregation joined the Congregational Church several years later. A Cresskill historical account identifies it as the borough’s first church.
The building grew along with it.
Rob Michelson, a church trustee whose family history has become entwined with the place, walked me through those layers. His daughters were baptized here. His granddaughters were baptized here. He has been connected to the church for nearly half a century.
The sanctuary is where the building begins to feel less like an institution and more like an artifact.
Light comes through old stained-glass windows depicting biblical scenes. Rob pointed out details that are easily missed, including areas of layered glass that alter the appearance of the colors depending on whether they are seen from inside or outside. He attributed the older sanctuary windows to J. & R. Lamb Studios, a name with its own extraordinary Bergen County history.
Lamb Studios was founded in New York City in 1857 and later moved its operations to Tenafly, where it remained from 1934 until 1970. The firm predates the studios of both John La Farge and Louis Comfort Tiffany, and its work survives in sacred and civic buildings around the country. The Library of Congress acquired a vast Lamb archive and has digitized nearly 2,500 design sketches spanning more than a century. Tenafly Public Library itself still has Lamb panels created by Katharine Lamb Tait in 1963.
Here, that grand history becomes local again: colored glass in a small church in Cresskill, pointed out by a trustee who knows which details to look for.
“The building grew by additions. The community seems to have grown the same way: one family, one volunteer, one donated object at a time.”
The tour continued through the social hall and kitchen, past the rooms and closets that reveal what the building does during the rest of the week. Cresskill Cares operates its food pantry from the church; the church says it also provides space for Fitz by Horan, community twelve-step programs and other outreach activities. Cresskill Cares has described its work publicly as addressing food insecurity and food waste, assisting seniors and families, and providing scholarships.
The church formally identifies itself as Open and Affirming, a designation it adopted in 2008, and as a Just Peace congregation since 2013. Its current website describes a congregation drawing members from across northern New Jersey and the lower Hudson Valley, with Sunday school, community programs and outreach occupying the building alongside worship.
Yet the most revealing part of the visit came outside.
Karen had one more thing she wanted to show me.
Near the front of the church stands a cross. Her son, Eddie, made it in the family driveway in Cresskill after Karen’s husband, Ed Minkler Sr., died. He had done a great deal of work for the church, she explained, and had always wanted a cross out front.
So his son made one.
Suddenly the cross was no longer part of the landscaping. It was a husband remembered by a wife, a father remembered by a son, and a family’s private history made visible in a public place.
This happens repeatedly at Cresskill Congregational Church. Things that appear ordinary from a distance acquire stories when someone walks over and explains them.
The shelves came from somewhere. The windows came from somewhere. The basement was once much rougher than it is now, Karen says, before generations of church members worked on it. Families have baptized children here and returned years later with grandchildren. Donated dishes and figurines arrive carrying histories nobody may ever know. A cross in the yard carries one that Karen makes sure people do.
Perhaps a community landmark is simply a place where enough people have left a little of themselves behind.
That may be what makes the White Elephant such a fitting entrance to this church.
The sale asks you to look twice at things that have already belonged to someone else. The church asks much the same of the building around it.
Come for the old glassware.
Then look up at the glass.
