Volunteers revive Christmas service in long-shuttered rural Minnesota church

PAYNESVILLE, Minn. – The red wooden doors at Salem Historical Church have been tightly sealed and locked for most of the last half-century.

But on Saturday night, the doors were a portal to the past: Inside were twinkling holiday lights and a pine tree that stretched to the ceiling, its boughs draped in silver tinsel. A sugary aroma hung above a table lined with dozens of homemade Christmas cookies. And, for just a moment, the nave echoed with voices singing "Silent Night" in German — reminiscent of how the entire service sounded when the church first opened in 1871.

"Can you feel the nostalgia? It's dripping from the ceiling," said the Rev. Richard "Ric" Koehn, a retired pastor who spoke at Saturday's annual Christmas service.

The church closed in July 1968 after the Evangelical United Brethren Church merged with the Methodist Church to form the United Methodist Church, which then consolidated scads of country churches because they were difficult to staff. Congregants were told to go to the Methodist church in Paynesville, about seven miles to the south. But folks scattered, and the once tight-knit church community was feared to be lost.

"It really tore the community apart. We thought we were doing OK on our own," said Carol Wegner, 94, who has lived in the same nearby farmhouse for 74 years.

A handful of former congregants hosted a summer picnic two years after the church closed. They gathered on the lawn with lemonade and platefuls of a potluck-style meal. It was successful, so they made it an annual event, according to Rick Miller, 75, a former president of the nonprofit that maintains the church and its cemetery. Miller's father spearheaded the picnics, which drummed up enough support to pay for minor repairs needed because of vandalism and age.

Miller said he got involved after returning from college in the early 1970s to find the church closed and his former country schoolhouse shuttered.

"I came back and everything was gone," he said. "But this was our life. This was our community."

And it was a unique community. Though dozens of churches speckled the Stearns County countryside in the early 1900s, they mostly were segregated by the ancestry of the first European settlers, with German Catholics to the north of Salem Church and Scandinavian Lutherans to the south.

"In the heart of it, we were the Methodists," said Vicki Jenniges, 73, who is Wegner's daughter.

Jenniges now lives south of Paynesville in "Lutheran country" as she calls it. But she joined the church's nonprofit, Salem Historical Church and Cemetery Association, as a way to stay connected. She also was part of a group that decided something drastic needed to be done to save the church three decades ago, along with her former neighbor Susan Lorenz, 72.

"It was just in a state of disrepair," Lorenz said of the church in the mid-1990s. Patches of mold grew on the walls. The stained glass windows, some cracked, sagged from the window frames. And a menagerie of critters — bats, raccoons and pigeons — found shelter in the sturdy brick building.

"A group of us got together and said, 'We'd better do something or it's going to be all over,'" Lorenz said. "'If we don't do it, who will?'"

The big idea to save the church was to host a Christmas service reminiscent of the ones they participated in as children: a Nativity pageant with a baby, Christmas songs so familiar they can be sung without referencing lyrics in a hymnal and a magnificently decorated tree felled from a nearby grove.

In 1997, the group raised enough money to install a furnace so the building could be used in the winter. They then hosted the first Christmas program after a three-decade absence — and have continued ever since, except during the pandemic.

But organizing a once-a-year service in a shuttered church is no small feat. It takes hours to dust, then sweep the hordes of dead Asian lady beetles from the pews. A team of tree haulers must drag the 20-foot-tree up the aisle, followed quickly by those who vacuum the needles and pinecones. And a village is assigned to bake enough Christmas cookies to serve at the program.

At the helm is Lorenz, who does everything from organizing programs to shoveling the front stoop. That's in addition to hunting down the pesky mice, who this year buried soybeans in a decorative poinsettia.

Thirty volunteers joined Lorenz to plan the event this year.

"That's the most we've ever had," she said." We need to get younger and different people involved because without it, your church dies."

Each year, Lorenz sends out a list of tasks — and assumes whoever participated the previous year will do so again. They don't dare disappoint Lorenz.

"Whatever job you do, you have to do it for the rest of your life. But we don't tell people that," she said with a laugh on Friday while unraveling a string of lights to go on the tree.

On Saturday, about 150 people sauntered in through the red doors. Most could point to where they grew up and where they still live. But some, including Florence Dunkel, traveled hundreds of miles to experience the magic.

Dunkel, a professor at Montana State University, grew up in Wisconsin but would visit Salem Church every summer as a kid. Her mother and grandfather were born in a farmhouse nearby. Her great-grandfather helped build the original wooden church that was struck by lightning and burned down in 1896. The brick church was erected the following year.

"This is the last real structure that was here when my parents and grandparents were," she said. "To be in the building where they were, there's nothing like it."

The volunteers hope that sense of place will be felt by the next generation.

"We're going to keep doing it as long as there are people to do it," said Gary Reeck, 72, current president of the nonprofit board and member since the 1980s.

When Reeck first joined, he was uncertain if people would donate to help keep the church standing. But they've raised more than $300,000 in the past three decades, which has helped the nonprofit refinish the pews, replace the stained glass windows in their original style, redo the roof, tuckpoint the bricks and install a ramp.

Most people on the nonprofit's mailing list are connected to the church through relatives, but the connections seem to get looser every year. And some people just yearn for a nostalgic Christmas service, Jenniges said: "Every year, we get people from the outside who say, 'Oh, my gosh — I can't believe you still do this. You can't let it be lost.' "

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