We knew that Zion was getting up there in years. The thought that maybe a birthday party was in store did cross our minds. Here’s how we got from there to the end of our Centennial Celebration on October 30, 2005.
Recognizing It Was Coming.
It was 2002. We had to ask basic questions. Would there be a reason to celebrate? When should we celebrate? When did the church really begin? What records were there to help us understand the past?
Collecting Records.
We knew the church was almost a hundred years old, but we didn't have any written history of the congregation. There were a few newspaper clippings from the early 1960s when the church last celebrated an anniversary--was the date right? It appeared that the church had started in 1906, but there was some suggestion that it had started in 1905. How do you find these things out when it is one hundred years later?
We went through the church hunting for bits and pieces of the history. We looked at the church bell and found an inscription on the bell. We looked into the attic and found financial records and canceled checks from the 1930s. We found the original notepad of volunteers and work assignments for building the church in 1914 and 1915, each job given a dollar value. We went into closets and desks and old drawers and pages of books. We went into multiple secretarial reports for a hundred years. We found bits and pieces and were able to interpolate missing years.
It turned out that church records were in Swedish until about 1930. Church records from late 1906 to 1915 were missing, but a tidbit or two were present for those missing years. We found the original Swedish incorporation written in a school blue book! Things started to fit together.
Collecting Pictures.
There was an archive of church pictures in the church, but there was much that was missing. Data from the 1960s suggested many more confirmation pictures than we had actual pictures of. The pictures were lost! We asked congregation members and the community to help us with pictures and a number of pictures came in.
Membership Lists.
The church archives yielded much data for members from about 1920 to about 1950 and limited data for subsequent years. No data was available for the years 1970 to 1995, but a careful reading of official church council meetings filled in some information. Those same official meeting minutes back to 1915, along with minutes from the “Ladies Aid” and “Luther League,” gave us more “missing” information.
A Formal History Emerges.
The bits and pieces were assembled into a summary of the congregational history with pictures to illustrate events. A cadre of “old time members” within the church was assembled to verify that history and rework it as needed to represent what was reality for Zion. The church really had meetings as early as 1897, not as a church, but as “Lutherans” meeting with a pastor from Thorsby who came to Silverhill every once and a while. The congregation was formally organized, however, in December of 1905. All documents were in Swedish. The English translation and official registration with the State of Alabama as a church didn't get completed until the middle of 1906. Do you see the dilemma? Did the church start in 1897, in 1905, or in 1906?
Setting a Centennial Celebration Date.
The Zion Church Council looked at the data and decided our Centennial Celebration would be in 2005, reflecting the formal incorporation in Swedish. We would celebrate with a Church History publication, a community celebration event, and a festival Sunday celebration event.
What to Celebrate.
The church was originally “Swedish Lutheran Zion Church” of the Swedish Augustana Lutheran Synod. Zion is a Swedish-history church! Unfortunately, not a whole lot of our membership are Swedes who relate back to those early days. Times do change and Swedes and non-Swedes have moved in and out of our community. We decided to bring a pioneer spirit to our celebration by bringing back elements of the Swedish liturgy used by our early church. Our founding Swedes continued to use the language of the Old Country for church until about 1920 and used Swedish for official records until 1930.
We obviously could not use Swedish today--no one in the whole congregation speaks Swedish and understanding of the Swedish language is really quite limited. The solution? We obtained a translation of the original Swedish liturgy of the Augustana Lutheran Church. We took that English version and came up with a modified Liturgy we used in worship as a congregation during our Centennial Celebration month, October 2005. We came up with a second modified Liturgy that we used in our Centennial Festival Worship on Reformation Day. Do you catch the significance for a Lutheran church? We celebrated our Centennial on the birthday of the Lutheran Reformation! Good planning, huh? “Ya, sure!”
Though we do not speak Swedish, we do speak Swedish cuisine. We had Swedish Sausage and various Scandinavian dainties at a Centennial Community Celebration on the Saturday preceding Reformation Sunday and at a Centennial Congregational Dinner on Reformation Sunday itself. This is no little fete in the Deep South! Have you ever tried to buy potato sausage twenty miles north of the Gulf of Mexico? It took a special order of 25 pounds and our recipe to do it!
So What Happened?
About a year before our celebration schedule, our Church Council decided we would have Community and Church Celebrations. Pastor Pierre Burns, a Presbyterian Pastor, has a drama ministry and portrays an excellent Luther. He was recruited for the Community Celebration. Association of Free Lutheran Congregations President Pastor Robert Lee was recruited as special guest speaker for Reformation Sunday worship. Invitation letters went out to bring our friends, acquaintances, and community to our Celebration. Baldwin County Commissioner Grunloh recognized and attended the Saturday event. Through his efforts the whole Commission issued a Proclamation for our Centennial.
Organist Michael Coleman composed original music for the event. A Trumpeter and Flutist were brought on board to accompany the organist and pianist. Bottom line? We ended up with an attendance of about 60 people for events each day. Our attendance on a typical Sunday is in the 30s.
A Focus on Jesus and Worship.
Both of our Centennial Celebrations focused on our history of worship and honoring the Lord. Here are the two liturgies we used for each event, respectively.
