By Colleen Nelson
Finding a church to go along with this month’s Waynesburg Community Center story was as easy as doing lunch with a friend. Carol Corwin is the kind of center regular who knows what she comes for – lunch every day with some Silver Sneakers and Yoga for dessert on Wednesdays and Fridays. Never learned to quilt, she tells me with a twinkle. “I grew up in Waynesburg and at night we would go to the park and meet each other and socialize.” Farm kids, she tells me, went home from school and learned to do useful things – like quilting. “I’m afraid I never learned how to do useful things like that!”
What church do you go to? I ask her over a glass of buttermilk and an apple as she finishes her lunch of a nice piece of fish. It’s Friday and soon she’ll be doing Silver Sneakers from the comfort of a chair and I’ll be taking photos and jotting down notes for the story I’m getting ready to write.
“First United Methodist Church of Waynesburg. I’ve gone there all my life,” Carol tells me.
Carol has a special place to sit, to the left of the altar and I join her there. The atmosphere is as comfortable as my front porch and I find myself surrounded by people I know. There’s my doctor, Nate Duer, wearing a Steeler jersey and doing September duties as head usher. He grins and waves from the altar.
Theresa Simms shows me where the bathroom is, husband Mike pokes me and says hey you, Ferd Dolfi is playing the organ and Janice Geottschalk gives me a church program then rustles up a copy of the church history that was done in 2003 for the 200th anniversary of this congregation.
Singing in harmony with so many strong voices is delightful. Reverend David Lake has a showman’s gift for storytelling as he ties the impossibility of starting gasoline fires with lit cigarettes to the love of God for a lost sheep. The laughter he evokes leaves room for a deeper understanding of what the words of the Bible offer to those who appreciate Truth told with a grin.
I meet more friends and neighbors when services end and – seems I picked the perfect Sunday! – we head to the annual church picnic at Lions Club Park. Oakview and Washington Street Methodist congregations are joining us there. It is an open-air covered dish celebration of song, prayer and good food like the old days, when camp meetings were held in green groves attended by hundreds, sometimes thousands, of first settlers, linked in faith by the circuit riding itinerate ministers of the Redstone Circuit. By 1796 there was a Washington Circuit that was “soon named Greenfield circuit because most of the preaching was done in Greene County.” Church history tells us that by 1803 there was a Methodist Society in Waynesburg and by 1806 land was deeded for a Methodist Episcopal church. A frame building was erected in 1809 on Liberty Street that would serve the congregation until a new brick church was built in 1843 on Washington Street, behind the courthouse. When it came time to remodel in 1874, festivals, lectures, bake sales and rummage sales helped pay the bill. By the turn of the twentieth century membership was up and plans were afoot to build a church on Richhill Street, with beautiful brown stone from Hummerstown, Pa. Children collected pennies and patrons gave what they could to purchase those great stained glass windows you see today. Andrew Carnegie matched the monies raised by the Wesleyan Society to buy a steam-powered pipe organ.
Back at the picnic I give Lena Galing a hug – she and husband Phil came in late for services – and we talk a little Sheep & Fiber Festival planning details for next year. Marilyn Kerr, one of my best historical allies at Cornerstone Genealogical Society when I write these stories about Greene County is there with her congregation from Washington Street and when I finally sit with Carol to eat old fashioned pot luck food I get to meet Mary Lemley, a spry nonagenarian who swaps old school stories with Carol about growing up in the 1930s and 1940s, raising families in the 1950s and what life was like back then.
Mary looks at me and says, “I like churches getting together like this. People need to get together more. We could solve more problems that way.”
Who can argue with that?
