Our bishop has not assimilated us exactly, but I couldn't resist the Star Trek- Borg reference. We had a thriving, financially viable parish with about 100 people on the list, and 40 as average attendance. There was another parish which ran into trouble with their building where upkeep was breaking them. Now we are one parish. One of the buildings will become condos or as one of my family suggests, an Organic Sandwich Restaurant. Yes, we were consulted, We also "workshopped" our common values and ideas and all the things that made us "us". -- Have you ever participated in something where you know where it is going, and the open discussion seems more like a progressive eroding of objection? A legitimizing via a process? Oh and to correct it. it is called "amalgamation". Maybe it will be okay. But I find myself repeating the Collect for Purity (same text more or less in all our national Anglican prayer books whether trad or mod language) multiple times each day. It's the cleansing of the thoughts part, but they seem to reside in my gut versus my heart.
No disrespect intended, but an average attendance of 40 is hardly what I think of as a thriving, financially viable parish. Two small parishes in close proximity can often do so much more together than either can do separately. Unfortunately, people sometimes want to cling to the familiar, e.g. the building where I was confirmed, the church where I got married, etc. Letting go is hard. My clergy-dad once had the charge to merge two bodies with buildings four blocks from each other. It was ugly and need not have been. Today they are one, but there were casualties along the way. I hope you can open your heart and mind to what might be rather than clinging to what was.
The church can hold almost 100. It is a small one. The financial viability was due to the desire to keep it going. The budget had been in surplus all from ongoing donation, and parish tithed to community development out of it all. We did have a full time priest. I had thought we had the opportunity for renewal again. Went through that in the early 1990s when the numbers had gone down, the priest had dropped to 1/2 then 1/3 time, and we got things going again (I was rector's warden at the time). I had thought this might be the direction. I'm probably a little non-objective. Before this parish, we had attended the church we've been amalgamated with (1970s-80s) then a mission parish which had closed by 1989. Things are rather changeable in the Canadian west, with flow of population from rural to city, with booms when they do more mining or oil. The church we're amalgamated with is 3 times the distance for us, and will take 30-40 minutes to get to through some traffic bottlenecks. it will be more of a "destination church" (is this a concept for a parish?) than a local parish. Winter will be interesting as well.