Those of you who don’t remember worshipping in the old white sanctuary, the third church building for Bethlehem, might not understand what a huge undertaking this current facility was. It all started with a quarterly business meeting in October of 1941, when Rev. G. C. Crutchfield mentioned that the church might be eligible to receive money from a Church Building and Church Improvement Fund created by Rev. Jeremiah Holt’s will. The will provided that any church which paid Rev. Holt’s salary in full during the time he served there, could request an amount from his estate equal to the amount they had raised when they made the request. The church received $3250 from Holt’s estate. The fund raising continued for thirteen years, until the mortgage burning service, held on March 9, 1958. The total cost of the building was $111,000, or 101 times the amount spent by the church in the year before they decided to start building. To put that number in perspective, 101 times our 2007 budget is 24 million dollars. Not that we need a 24 million dollar building now, but let’s remember our legacy of giving and fundraising. It is also interesting that less than 15% of this money was borrowed.
For a country church to build such a magnificent structure is admirable. When everyone works together, amazing things can be accomplished. However, when we review the church minutes from those years, the fact that we are surrounded by these walls might be more than anything else a testimony to God’s faithfulness, since we didn’t always work together:
- Fourteen months after laying the cornerstone there was a motion at the July business meeting to seek a new pastor at the annual conference meeting in November. There was a 43-43 tie on an attempt to table this motion, and no action was taken. This was particularly interesting since the minutes recorded only 66 members present at the meeting.
- Then, at a called meeting in September, sentiment had shifted so that the pastor won an 86-18 vote to table the dismissal motion for two years.
Even so, he resigned 21 days later, to be effective at the end of the year.
- Twenty-one days after that, on October 30th, the church voted 30-19 at a called business meeting to reject his resignation.
- On January 1st, the pastor resigned again, effective March 31st, and asked that the church not discuss the matter further with him.
- On March 26th the pastoral search committee recommended G. C. Crutchfield, the pastor’s brother, to succeed him. Their report was narrowly adopted, 46-41.
- The members then voted to replace four of the five pastoral search committee members and have them continue looking.
- Eventually, at the July quarterly meeting, Rev. G. C. Crutchfield was called for an indefinite period.
As if this were not enough turmoil for a building program, at the same September meeting where the dismissal motion was tabled for two years, the church voted 44-4 to dismiss the entire building committee, including the treasurer of the building fund, and to dismiss this treasurer as a church trustee also.
While these events might make it appear otherwise, there really was much cooperation on the actual construction work. Rather than hire an excavator for the foundation, some of the farmers in the congregation used their own machinery and donated their time to dig the basement. The work of sawing the logs was donated by church members, as was much of the framing labor. The adult Sunday School classes took the responsibility of finishing their own classrooms. In addition to giving their own money to the building fund, the church members organized numerous stews and suppers to raise additional cash. You can see around you the result of all this work. Hopefully in the future you can appreciate it a little more, now that you know some of the story of its construction.
As a further construction fund raising project, the church sold memorial plaques on the stained glass windows, the wainscoting, doors, and other items in the building. For example, my parents, Roy and Sallie Kernodle, gave the baptismal font in memory of my great aunt and uncle, Andy and Laura Gilliam. You should have received a handout, with your bulletin, listing all these special gifts in memory and honor of particular individuals. Please take a moment sometime today to share memories with the younger members of your family about both the people who gave these gifts and those who were remembered. |
