This week’s newspaper carries the news of the closing of Siren United Methodist Church. I note that because that congregation is where I began my ministry in the United Methodist denomination. It also marks the astonishing and lamentable decline of a church that was vibrant not that many years ago.
I’d served four years as pastor of Interfaith Christian Center. We’d outgrown several locations, finally ending up at the Sheet Metal Workers’ Hall in Maplewood, Minnesota. My family and I had moved to rural Luck, Wisconsin during my fourth year at Interfaith. It was more than an hour’s commute to Maplewood on Sundays and an hour into White Bear Lake on Wednesday nights. I believe the Holy Spirit told me that it was time for me to leave Interfaith; they needed someone that was a local phone call and not at a distant commute. They disagreed, but I knew. So I resigned.
I had about two weeks to read the Sunday papers when I received a call from Dr. Ed Outlaw, pastor of the Siren United Methodist Church. Ed was a psychologist we’d seen to help deal with one of our children. He had a military reserve meeting on a Sunday and needed a fill-in. I filled in and things went well. The following Sunday Ed had a family emergency, so I was there again. The congregation then asked if I could be the “regular” substitute. And people began to talk: very quickly I had two to three invitations to fill in for each Sunday. Then Bruce Bartel, the District Superintendent, called me. He said, “I’m getting all these calls about you but I don’t know who you are. Can we meet?”
We did meet at Hardy’s in Amery and quickly I found myself appointed to serve Birchwood and Exeland United Methodist churches half-time. The same week I was appointed half-time as Community Education director for the Unity School District. Birchwood, the closer of the two congregations to my home, was an hour and twenty minutes at the fastest one could go (legally). At the introductory meeting of the two congregations, it was evident that they were not happy about my appointment. Marina and I went out to the van to pray. It seemed that the pitch to the two churches was, “Take this guy or you get no one.” I would not be validating them by living in the Exeland parsonage and, because of the distance, they figured they’d never see me. (A year later, Fred Vreeland stood up in the Annual Meeting and said they saw more of me than they’d seen of my predecessors.) God was good, however, and I served nine years–more than any previous pastor in the church’s history.
And it all began at Siren UMC. When I first stepped into the Siren pulpit, I could hear the wooden floors creak in the old sanctuary. Under pastor Steve Ward, the congregation built a new sanctuary 1 1/2 times the size of the old building and some people felt they should have built it double the size. Weekly services saw 100+ attendees and they had a large and vibrant youth group, attributed not just to the Lord but to Steve’s attractive kids that brought in their friends, but also to the youth advisors Gail Ward and Mary Yambrick. When the tornado ripped through Siren and its surrounds, Siren UMC generously headquartered clean-up volunteers and food distribution. Yet, somehow, over perhaps twenty years, things unraveled for Siren UMC. A once-vibrant witness to Jesus the Christ now will be silent.