Wisconsin community mourns church’s closing, celebrates decades of ministry and memories

[Episcopal News Service – Lugerville, Wisconsin] In the terminology of the sparsely populated rural communities that span Wisconsin’s northern half, Lugerville is known as unincorporated. The nearby city of Park Falls, population 2,400, could be considered a crossroads community, but Lugerville is more like a wide spot in the road – an identity the community clearly embraces.

“Welcome to Lugerville,” the road-side sign says heading into town. “Don’t blink!” Fewer than 500 people live in the town of Flambeau, which includes Lugerville. Next to the town’s community center, a steel barrel atop a modest structure is labeled playfully, “Lugerville Water Tower.” As Flambeau’s central neighborhood, Lugerville has a recycling center, a baseball field and not much else.

It also has a church – or it had one, until about 2 p.m. Sept. 10. At that hour, 20 people gathered here inside Church of Our Saviour, nearly filling the cozy nave for a final “celebration of ministry,” as it was called in the service bulletin. Our Saviour, where worshippers had gathered for eight decades, was closing.

“You all here have been, for 80 years, the presence of Jesus in the world around you,” Wisconsin Bishop Matthew Gunter said in his sermon for the Eucharist marking the church’s closing. “The fact that the church is closing does not negate the good news of those 80 years.”

Warm, sunny brilliance shone through the church’s south-facing windows and stained-glass. Joyous hymns reverberated throughout the former one-room schoolhouse, a worship space no larger than 30 feet by 20. The congregation’s handful of regular worshippers were pleasantly surprised that most of the church’s 10 pews were occupied, a normally unfamiliar sight. Some visitors had heard about the closing from a local news story and came to say goodbye. Their spirits were high for what one woman suggested was a kind of funeral.

This is what the death of a small, rural church looks like. It looks like a celebration.

Ann Quigley had brought the cake. At age 72, she was one of the congregation’s youngest members. She drove from Park Falls, arriving about an hour before the service and carrying her sheet cake into the church’s kitchen area. Then she found a vacuum to begin tidying up the nave for the afternoon’s festivities.

Ken Johnson, the senior warden, lives nearby in the small city of Phillips, population 1,500. He arrived at Our Saviour even earlier, to open up.

After 20 years living in the area, Johnson, 78, also knew the history. Lugerville, though never a metropolis, was once lively enough to justify a small church. A century ago, the community’s economy depended largely on a railroad line and a lumber mill, and in 1938, families there founded Our Saviour out of a desire to educate their children in the Bible, Johnson said.

Many of the first worship services were held in homes. Then in 1948, they purchased a schoolhouse five miles away, and moved it to donated land in Lugerville. They renovated the square building to become the church that now stands facing Rocky Carrie Road, just off Highway F.

On June 13, 1948, Eau Claire Bishop William Horstick came to consecrate Lugerville’s new church. About 100 people attended that first service, which included two baptisms, Johnson said.

Those numbers are hard to imagine today. In recent years, a typical Sunday attendance could be counted on one hand. A few fingers more got you the total number of members, who could be named in one breath: Johnson, Quigley, Eric Swanson and Carol Pritzl, both from Park Falls, Nancy Osgood, who lives about 45 minutes away in unincorporated Springstead, and Anna Mae Grant, a lifelong resident of Lugerville.

Our Saviour was tiny, even by the standards of a denomination that has hundreds of tiny churches.

Why close? Behind difficult decision, a variety of factors

Across The Episcopal Church, at least one in 20 congregations closed in the past decade. In 2022, the median Episcopal congregation was 69 members, according to the latest churchwide data collected from the church’s 6,249 congregations across the United States.  That year, Our Saviour was one of 544 congregations with 20 members or less.

A congregation’s size isn’t always the best measure of vitality or viability, and the reasons churches close defy broad generalizations. In Lugerville, Our Saviour faced its share of challenges.

A little over a decade ago, Our Saviour’s numbers grew slightly after the closure of another church, St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church in Park Falls.  In subsequent years, Our Saviour lost some of its dozen or so members to death or relocation. More recently, attendance had stabilized, Johnson said. The six remaining members kept coming back.

They also continued getting older. Osgood is 95 and suffers from eyesight problems but is still mobile. Despite living the farthest away, she would find rides to church on Sunday. Grant, 88, attended the closing service sitting not in a pew but in her wheelchair. She called herself one of “the originals” and is old enough to remember her father and other Lugerville residents laboring in 1948 to relocate and convert the schoolhouse for use as a church.

“It’s been a wonderful church. It’s been home to me,” she said.

The Rev. Bill Radant, a retired priest who lives an hour away in Boulder Junction,  population 1,000, had been celebrating Eucharist at Our Saviour twice a month as a supply priest. Then in 2023, Radant retired from his supply work, too. Our Saviour shifted its Sunday services almost entirely to lay-led Morning Prayer.

A decision last winter foreshadowed Our Saviour’s ultimate closure. The congregation halted services in Lugerville for the season and arranged instead to worship temporarily in a Roman Catholic chapel in Park Falls, avoiding the physical difficulty of removing snow and ice from Our Saviour’s steps and wheelchair ramp.

The church’s finances had been stable for a while, Johnson said, but over time, the congregation lost some of its more affluent members, who had helped cover the costs of upkeep on the small building. No sudden emergency forced the hand of the six remaining members, but the ongoing challenges were adding up.

This year, after returning to Lugerville in the spring to resume worship services there, they agreed to close the church.

“We just didn’t see that it could continue,” Johnson said. “It just seemed like it was time.”

Gunter, who lives three hours away in Neenah, population 27,000, was making his third visit to Our Saviour, his first since becoming bishop of Wisconsin. He previously served as bishop of Fond du Lac and bishop provisional of the Diocese of Eau Claire, which included Our Saviour. In June, with the 81st General Convention’s approval, those two dioceses reunited with the Diocese of Milwaukee to become the statewide Diocese of Wisconsin.

The mostly rural Diocese of Eau Claire in northwest Wisconsin had been one of the smallest dioceses in The Episcopal Church, with under 1,000 members and fewer than 20 congregations. Church closures, however, aren’t unique to that region of the state. In July, Gunter traveled to central Wisconsin for the closing of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Mosinee, population 4,450. Formerly part of the Diocese of Fond du Lac, St. John’s had been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic and its vicar moving to New Hampshire.

“The congregation never quite rebounded,” Gunter told Episcopal News Service in Lugerville before the final Eucharist there.

Population stagnation and decline “just makes it harder for a church to thrive,” Gunter said, and a kind of tenuousness defines many small congregations. At that size, just one internal conflict, one difficult leadership transition or one expensive repair could force a conversation about possible closure.

“But that’s not the only story. There’s certainly decline, but there are several churches in Wisconsin that are growing,” Gunter said. “There’s signs of life and vitality and engagement.”

Saying goodbye after one last service

Despite the occasion of the Sept. 10 service, there remained clear signs of life in Lugerville. Before the service, two women sat at the table near the front door reminiscing. Linda Hayes had brought family photos. Her father, Larry Rowe, was a priest at Our Saviour many years ago. She no longer attends church regularly but drove up from her home in Wausau, population 40,000, to say goodbye to the church where her children were baptized.

“It felt like the right thing to do,” Hayes said. She had heard about the closing service from a brother who still lives in the Lugerville area.

Karen Baumgartner, a Phillips resident, explained with a laugh that she was there as “one of the elders of Price County,” known to “show up for stuff” like the Our Saviour closing. She recalled being at the church two years ago for a wedding. The out-of-town bride was from originally the area and wanted to come back to be married in the church, Baumgartner said.

Photos on the wall behind them captured other memories of Our Saviour’s past. In one, about 30 people attended an outdoor service at the church. Another photo was labeled “Easter 2021.” A dozen people posed on the altar.

For the closing Eucharist, the altar party numbered three: Gunter, Johnson and Radant, who had journeyed from Boulder Junction one last time. The priest’s preferred closing hymn, 423: “Immortal, invisible, God only wise.”

Before the dismissal, Gunter led a brief deconsecration ceremony, returning this former schoolhouse and now former church to a secular use yet to be determined. The Diocese of Wisconsin Standing Committee will decide what to do with the building. No plan or timeline has been announced.

Whatever happens to the former Our Saviour, “the presence of God is not tied to any place or building,” Gunter said. After the service, though, God’s presence seemed to linger a big longer, in the form of a communal round of coffee and cake.

“I’m just sad about what’s going to happen here to it,” Pritzl said of the church she grew up attending. Like Grant, Pritzl was one of “the originals” of Our Saviour. Now 85, she said her father helped establish the church.

As Pritzl sat in a back pew poking at her piece of cake with a fork, she paused between bites and pointed toward the front of the nave. “That second pew,” she said, “that’s where my sister and mother and I sat every Sunday.” She recalled her mother giving her and her sister nickels to drop in the collection plate.

Without a church in Lugerville, its former members were devising alternate Sunday plans. Pritzl lives a couple of blocks from the Catholic church in Park Falls, a possible option for her, and convenient. Osgood said she might stay home and become a regular viewer of the livestream from Washington National Cathedral, which she said offers “a wonderful service.”

Johnson, on the other hand, is willing to drive. He might “shop around” for a new church. The closest Episcopal church is St. Matthias about an hour east in Minocqua, population 5,000. Or he might visit one of the Lutheran churches closer to home.

As for Grant, her heart was still firmly planted in Lugerville. As the conversation wound down, she said goodbye, and a man helped her wheel her way out the door. Before leaving Our Saviour, she flashed a wry smile at Johnson and asked him, “Are we having church here next Sunday?”

Everyone, including Grant, knew the answer was no, but it felt like the natural thing to say.

– David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.