Church has date with wrecking ball

BUCYRUS – The sights along Ohio 4 between Bucyrus and the village of Chatfield in northern Crawford County have not changed much in the past 50 years — or 100 years — for that matter.

But soon, one of the longtime landmarks along that 13-mile stretch, in place for 118 years, will be no more.

The former Chatfield Evangelical Pietist Church already presents a jarring image to the eye, with its steeple now gone and the stained-glass windows removed. Once the county sheriff’s office and the state are able to coordinate matters, the rest of the brick building will be demolished, probably within a few days.

“We’re trying to be as respectful as we can. We have saved quite a bit. A lot of the stained glass has been saved. Some of it has gone to members of the congregation, some pieces have been restored and will be framed and mounted as interior decoration, so we’re bringing the past with us a little bit,” said Larry Bertsch, pastor of the Chatfield Evangelical Pietist Church.

“We saved the bell, a big bell, which came from a foundry down in Cincinnati. At some point, that should be in a memorial tower and functional. We’ll try to save parts of the steeple.”

The Pietist Church, like any church, of course, is more than just a building. It’s a congregation, and it remains intact, albeit a couple of miles up the road. It moved into its new building, on Chatfield Center Road right within the village of Chatfield, four years ago. Upon entering it, a person, not knowing any better, might assume it used to be a school. He would be right.

“This was actually Buckeye Central West, an elementary school. It was rebuilt after a fire burnt quite a bit of the original school in 1985. We acquired it when they consolidated their campus to one location, and their options were to sell or tear down their out buildings,” Bertsch said.

“Through a series of negotiations and an auction and so forth, we acquired it and we remodeled it into what it is today, which is a very useful facility.”

It is indeed. The new Chatfield Evangelical Pietist Church has not just several classrooms at its disposal for Sunday school but also a kitchen, a full-size gymnasium with a stage, as well as an office and a welcome center. Members of the church also improved the former school with new carpeting and paint.

The old church south of town, built in 1897, had none of those features and had fallen into disrepair as well.

“To renovate it would cost a lot of money, and we wouldn’t have any bigger or any more useful facility when we were done. This building would’ve been a better stewardship of that kind of money. And we can open up this building to the community,” Bertsch said.

The church, which sits on 11 acres of land at its new site, offers weekly activities to area youths, hosts an annual Fire Department event and can rent out the gym for wedding receptions and other events.

Although the old building is coming down, the church itself is something of a historical landmark, being the only Pietist congregation in the U.S., unofficially. If there is another one, it’s being very secretive about it.

“The Pietist Church came out of the German Lutheran Church and was a very mission-minded group of people. It was probably the colonies when they first got here. They tended to establish churches out on the frontier. When those areas became established, the Lutheran synods would establish most of those congregations,” Bertsch said.

“The legend is there was a Pietist church in upstate New York, but I never have heard of where, or if, really. This congregation did not meld back into the synod, so in effect, it became an independent church, but it wasn’t really founded that way.”

The pastor noted that pietism almost by definition has always been an evangelical expression.

“It is a desire to have a warm and close relationship with God. There’s a distinction between piety and piousness. We try not to be pious, which is religiously arrogant. Piety is more toward humility than that.”

The old church, at the northeastern corner of Ohio 4 and Carey Road, is being torn down by congregation members with commercial experience in demolition; the work has been ongoing for about a month.

Longstreth Memorials moved some of the markers in an adjoining cemetery, Lust Cemetery, which is not associated with the church, to protect them during the demolition. No actual graves are being moved.

When the rest of the building comes down, Ohio 4 will have to be closed, given the structure’s close proximity to the road.

The gravestones in the cemetery, those that can still be read, date back to the 1870s — a wooden Pietist Church building sat at the site before the brick church was built in 1897 — and feature names of the congregation’s founding families, such as Beal and Froese.

Bertsch said the church’s members took about four years deciding what to do with the brick building and ultimately voted almost unanimously to tear it down. He said they didn’t want to see it become a private residence.

The Pietist Church’s congregation is smaller today than it was 100 years ago, in keeping with the area’s steadily declining population.

“The farm communities have shrunk from what they used to be. Surprisingly, there’s still a very similar demographic to what it was 100 years ago, there just aren’t as many of them,” Bertsch said.

“We still have families that would represent the founding families of the church. We have a lot of new folks. I’m one.”

On the old church’s steeple, the pastor said, was the design of a pineapple, a longtime symbol of welcome and hospitality in the early days of America, when pineapples were hard to obtain in these parts and denoted a special occasion if one somehow found its way to a dinner table.

In the wide hallways of the new Chatfield Evangelical Pietist Church, where it’s not hard to imagine children running to class just a couple of generations ago, hangs a drawing of that very same pineapple.

thill3@nncogannett.com

419-563-9225

Twitter: @ToddHillMNJ