Tom Stafford: Grace United Methodist celebrates 150th
Oct. 30—There will be a Bean Soup Supper for the benefit of the Grace Chapel Sabbath School, at Grace Chapel at the terminus of the street railroad Thursday evening Dec. 2 (1874). The attractive feature of the evening will be a liberal supply of bean soup and hard tack.
Springfield Daily Republic
His name is lost to history.
But evidence of his faith endures in a two-page poem written on paper now browned with age in the Grace United Methodist Church file at the Clark County Heritage Center.
It isn't clear whether the husband and the wife he addresses joined the West End Mission Chapel when it was founded in 1872.
But when he addressed his words to her in 1914, their church home had been 1401 W. Main St., where Grace will celebrate its 150th anniversary next Sunday at 9:30 a.m. with services and a reception open to all.
Because rheumatism kept his wife away from services in winter, the poet looks forward to spring, when warmer temperatures will "raise your dear sweet voice again prayer and song" next to him.
And he faces their march together into older age with a sense of peace.
"I'm glad that we are anchored safe in the church we love, and there will work and labor till we are called above. Then may we both go hand-in-hand, as happy as can be, to join the heavenly company that comes from Grace M.E." (Methodist Episcopal)
Two thirds of the $3,000 needed to erect one-room Sunday School next to the Pennsylvania House came from a group headed by Phineas P. Mast and John Foos. Three years later, the two would become business partners and compile the wealth with which Mast would buy the materials and import the labor to build his Castle Knoll mansion, which still stands, and Foos to erect his East High Street mansion.
Mast arranged for those who attended afternoon Sunday school classes to ride streetcars free, drawing both students and teachers from other churches after morning services.
As a result, Grace Chapel membership mushroomed from 176 members to 700 in 10 years and average Sunday School attendance to 850.
From Oct. 4, 1904, comes this about the Grace's community outreach: "The board ordered that the pastor and deaconess to be paid weekly ... at a rate of $10 per week for the minister and $2 for the deaconess and voted to abide by the deaconess' own sense of duty in making calls where contagious disease exists."
A 1910 remodeling led to the purchase of a pipe organ in 1912 to mark the congregation's 40th anniversary. It caught fire the evening of Wednesday evening June 25, 1913, and the church was saved when George LaCrone called the fire department after spotting flame while riding a streetcar home.
A church history notes that "charred wood is still visible underneath the foundation today."
As in most churches, the Ladies Aid Society has been a true godsend. In 1918, President Mary Schaefer and the ladies raised the money to put folding doors between the Sunday School and church auditorium, carpet the Sunday School room and with other proceeds from their booth at the city market paid off $50 of the church debt.
Four years later (1922) a series of evangelistic services added 55 members and had the church bursting at the seams, which leads to the story of the shed.
"At the rear of the Church is a shed. In the summer this shed is an oven; in the winter it is a refrigerator. For three years from 150 to 200 scholars have met in this shed. This has been necessary because the church is so small it has been impossible to find room. Now the shed is too small for the overflow."
The text is from a publication that could safely be called a sales pitch, which continued with this appeal:
"Grace Church is located in the heart of a growing industrial section (where) thousands of American workingmen have their homes ... But there can be no growth without a new building; in fact, without more adequate facilities the work must inevitably go backward .... The responsibility is upon the Methodism of the entire city."
Feb. 25, 1923, a $46,000 school wing was dedicated. Of that, $20,000 came from the Board of Home Missions and Church Extension and the Methodist Union of Springfield.
In the '20s, congregation stalwart W. Glenn Bell served as first president of the Men's Brotherhood; Miss Mae Allen president of the girls' Junior Epworth League; and to celebrate the first anniversary of the Knights of King Arthur, the board granted Grace's boys its official permission to ring the church bell.
During the Depression, daily meals were given free to the unemployed of the city (1930-31); Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops were formed; and in 1940, the Ladies Aid Society and the Women's Home Missionary Society merged into the Women's Society of Christian Service.
The merger followed the Ladies Aid Society's publication of a fundraising cookbook with recipes for fish and oysters; tongue and smothered heart; scrapple and the gravy for it; prune butter and prune pineapple marmalade; eggless mayonnaise; Italian fish dressing; apple roly poly; and hominy muffins.
In the 1940s, Homer Evilsizor added brick veneer to the north and east walls of the sanctuary, to which a public address system was added, and a Hammond electric organ to replace the old pipe organ. There also was a mortgage burning ceremony for the Sunday school building and the purchase of a lot on the church's east side to provide parking.
At Grace's 100th anniversary in 1972, membership was 586, although average attendance lagged, and church historian Roger Ludlow suggested the that $286,000 facility "would be of little value unless the congregations of today and tomorrow are ever mindful of the purpose of the original dedication was to the worship of the Almighty God."
Mary LeMaster's summary of the next 25 years remarked on disorienting changes "not only to our church, but to the City of Springfield and our country."
Those included: — "The disappearance of many local businesses which have been replaced with supermarkets and malls." — People "moving out into the rural areas and farmland is being annexed and used for building at an alarming rate." — The legacy of "a very unpopular war in Vietnam in which many of our Grace families were touched."
She reported some sense of healing when Grace member and Vietnam era pilot Col. John Ahlborn and his wife joined a group from the church's West Ohio Conference on a return trip to Vietnam, where it sponsored a church in the area where he served.
There followed a potpourri of activities that included the addition of a ramp to make the church accessible; support of Interfaith Hospitality Network for the homeless; a puppet ministry, a handbell choir and a neighborhood block party just before summer Bible school to help reconnect with the neighborhood.
The most recent years of Grace history might be called the time the roof fell in. In a signal of changed times, the responsibility for fixing it fell to a congregation led by the church's first woman and current pastor, Vicki Downing, a mother of four called to the ministry in her 40s.
With the help of those in and out of the congregation — and through the struggles of COVID — the church raised the $170,000 for new steel trusses and $200,000 more to renovate the sanctuary that will be dedicated next Sunday.
"It did the congregation good, because we had to pull together to do something to save the church," Downing said. "And what was really cool: Up until COVID hit, we were increasing our service to the community."
It was as cool as the idea of its laundry soap-making ministry, designed to provide a needed product that those on public assistance cannot purchase with the benefits they're provided.
And as interesting as having wood carver Greg Henry transform the remains of an elm tree killed by the ash borer into the image of a shepherd.
The church also has reached out to new residents of its neighborhood, immigrants from Haiti.
But at its 150th anniversary its biggest challenge is carrying on in a time in the continuing slide of church attendance that has brought people to Grace from congregations that have closed their doors.
Downing sees no easy answers.
"I think that our culture is so different. There was a time when just about everybody attended a church or a synagogue or a mosque. Everybody went somewhere. It was part of being a respectable person. They had a church affiliation, and they cared for the community. I don't see that as an expectation today."
But she does see hope centered on the notion that God is love: "That people will band together to help each other to love each other, because there's a connection to God — that God is real and God is still working, still healing, still lifting people up."
Although admitting "I don't have a clue" as to the solution of declining church attendance, "I try not to fret. Because .... if God has brought the church for 2022 years without my knowing how, there's a really good chance after I'm long gone, God will still be in the business of carrying the church forward."
By then, she will have gone with her husband, "hand-in-hand, as happy as can be, to join the heavenly company that comes from Grace M.E."
