CUMBERLAND — For 160 years, they worshiped at the same corner on Washington Street, building churches there in 1855, 1866 and 1914.
The year 2020 finds St. John United Church of Christ at a different corner, with the next building taking shape.
Roof trusses were recently added to the structure going up next to the activity center building where the St. John congregation has gathered for worship since 2015. That’s the year the church vacated its 1914 building at East Washington Street and German Church Road — a road so named because the church’s pioneers were of German heritage.
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The church broke ground on the new building in March, and the concrete slab was poured in July. The church hopes to move into the new building in November.
That move-in will bring some closure to a saga that accompanied the church’s relocation.
Several years ago, with the Washington Street building needing repairs, and the price tag for those repairs being more than the congregation felt it could afford, members made the difficult decision to sell the building and continue ministry in a new location.
The church built its Muesing Activity Center on land it owned at Prospect Street and Carroll Road, a few yards west of the Marion-Hancock county line. The intention was to build a new church building at the site too, even using some of the stained-glass windows from the previous building.
But local outcry hampered a $2.4 million deal the church was making with a developer to demolish the 1914 building and build a pharmacy, said church member Rich Suiter. That deal, and a later $1.7 million agreement with a convenience store developer, never materialized as companies shied away amid the protest of community members — including the Town of Cumberland — who wanted to see the building remain.
With its assets tied up in a building that wasn’t selling, the church postponed a new building. It gathered for a last service in the old structure on Oct. 4, 2015, and then began meeting in the activity center it had just built at 11910 E. Prospect St., arranging the building’s largest room as a worship space.
In the years since, that space has held rows of chairs for worship on Sunday and rows of tables for a monthly community meal (before the coronavirus pandemic).
In recent weeks it’s held spaced-out seating so one group of congregants can gather for socially distant worship; another group gets its turn the next week.
It’s been the site of streaming online worship (which continues).
“I don’t think anyone anticipated all the things it would have to do,” said the Rev. Janna Meyers, who became pastor at St. John in September 2018.
Now the days of worshiping in the activity center are numbered. The church finally did sell its Washington Street property to a developer building senior apartments behind the church and renovating the building itself for a new use. This sale, completed in spring 2019, was for $1.5 million — preserving the 1914 structure but leaving the church with nearly $1 million less for its new building and its future than the pharmacy offer would have provided.
“The congregation is making up the difference, basically,” Suiter said.
The $1.6 million building going up at Prospect and Carroll is a one-story building of more than 8,000 square feet. It’s designed to be easily accessible and to offer room for more people to join the congregation for services.
Meyers said in congregational meetings and votes — some conducted over Zoom or by mail during quarantine — members have voiced strong support for having a space to be able to welcome others.
“I think it’s a real testament to the dedication of our congregation,” she said.
At some point, they’ll sort through the windows they had carefully removed from the previous building and choose some to be installed in the new structure.
“The church is in the process of selecting the most iconic and beautiful,” Suiter said.
“We want a lot of the flavor of who we’ve been throughout the centuries in this new space,” Meyers said.
The windows, the baptismal font fashioned from old pews — these are touches that tie this new setting to the congregation of the past. But in this setting, the church also seeks connection with the community of its present.
While Suiter hopes the new building will help the church grow membership, it can also help the church “to be able to do more for the community as well,” he said. “We want to be able to serve the community.”
Someday, members hope to be able to resume those monthly community dinners. They’re also pondering other purposes for the activity center building, such as a child or adult day care, that would bring in some revenue and also be of service to the community.
The new space taking shape “enables us to be more seamless in connecting our worship and our service … They can see that our sense of worship connects to our sense of service,” Meyers said.
“I think there’s a lot of neat things that can happen.”
