By Colleen Nelson
I’m very familiar with the basement of the Rogersville Methodist Church – I spent ten years attending monthly board meetings there, helping make the Pioneer Festival (1997 – 2007) at West Greene High School a happy reality. Reverend Bruce Judy was a large part of this jolly band of neighbors, county workers and anyone else who wanted to help make this end of the county a destination for visitors and a point of historic pride for those who live here. It was Rev. Judy’s flock of hard working farm families that put the muscle into setting up a two-day festival in rainy mid-June, year after year.
Now it’s Sunday, the year is 2020 and I’m back to finally take a peek at what’s going on upstairs, ready to reconnect with neighbors who have become more like family the longer I live here.
Rev. Judy is retired and Cynthia Grimes Deter is the pastor. There’s an electronic sign by the road with some very clever messages about letting faith break up the logjam of personal conundrums that life has to offer. Community dinners and seasonal celebrations are still happening, no longer in the basement, but in the new gathering hall next door.
The history of the church and the families who have stained glass windows dedicated in their honor in the sanctuary was gathered for the175th anniversary in 2015, along with the back-story of the faith that came from Great Britain to America in the 1700s. Methodism arrived in Rogersville in 1840 when a “great quarterly meeting was held” in Henry Church’s barn. Many neighboring ministers came, many people were baptized and a new church was launched. It took a generation of meeting in schoolhouses before the first wooden church was built in town in 1874. A fire that started in A. L. Barnart’s store in the wee hours of a July 1903 morning destroyed the store, the hotel next door and then the church. With no insurance, parishioners would worship in the Rogersville Grange until $10,000 was raised to build again, this time with brick. The church you see today opened its doors on May 21, 1905.
At Rogersville Methodist, past and present are just words to describe the good work that is always being done by those who believe “We are told that nothing is permanent except change. But God has endowed us with a capacity to face the new and untried because change is part of His creative plan and purpose. …This is the day which the Lord hath made, we will rejoice and be glad in it.”
Sunday service begins at 11 a.m.