The little village of Gouise (Allier) has no church. During the last twenty years, local people have developed compensation behaviours that reveal the role that churches (as buildings) play in French society, such as celebrating a mass for the two hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution or planning the transplantation of a romanesque priory into the village. This paper aims to show that if churches keep a religious meaning to some extent, they above all embody the being of a local community in a given place.