Turner Chapel A.M.E. Church choir members join the congregation in singing “What a Wonderful Change in My Life.” The church is the second-oldest A.M.E. congregation in Indiana.
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Barely five years after Fort Wayne officially became a city, three couples bought a lot on the south side of Jefferson Street between Hanna and Francis streets.
Their mission, as becomes clear in deeds recorded later, was to build a church for what was then a relatively new denomination – the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
The church building never came to pass. But the congregation is still going strong as Turner Chapel A.M.E. Church at 836 E. Jefferson Blvd.
The church, which bills itself as “the oldest black church in Fort Wayne,” is celebrating its 160th anniversary with a series of revival meetings and special services this week and Sunday. And it’s one of five area congregations marking significant milestones at, or past, the 100-year mark in 2009.
Two of the five – Turner and St. John Lutheran Church (Flatrock), Monroeville – date to 1849. Two – St. Aloysius Catholic Church, Yoder, and St. John Catholic Church, New Haven – date to 1859. The fifth, Crescent United Methodist Church, Fort Wayne, a mere youngster, is celebrating 100 years.
All the churches can trace their roots to missionary zeal. And, at their age, they have outlasted about 90 percent of American churches, says David Roozen, director of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut.
Here are the congregations’ founding stories.
Turner Chapel A.M.E. Church
Hana Stith, 81, a lifelong member of Turner Chapel and the historian founder of Fort Wayne’s African/African-American Historical Museum, says the church is the second-oldest of its denomination in Indiana. The first began in 1832 near Richmond.
Stith says Fort Wayne’s A.M.E. congregation likely started before 1849 as an outgrowth of camp meetings by circuit-riding pastors. But it was not long after the lot purchase that the congregation made its presence known.
The Rev. George Nelson Black, a Fort Wayne blacksmith who identified himself as the church’s pastor, wrote a letter to the editor of a Fort Wayne newspaper denouncing the idea of resettling blacks in Africa.
The letter “said they were not in favor of colonization, and they were Americans, too – that it was our country, and we had been here for generations, and we fought in wars and we were not going back,” Stith says, adding the letter recalled the fiery founding of the A.M.E. church.
The denomination began in 1794 as a response to racial discrimination after blacks were forcibly removed – “from their knees,” Stith says – during a Methodist Episcopal worship service in Philadelphia.
By 1871, Turner had called a full-time pastor. Later, land was bought at Wayne and Francis streets, and an existing church building was moved there from across the street. The church took the name Turner Chapel to honor Henry McNeal Turner, a black Civil War chaplain who later became an A.M.E. bishop.
The church occupied 801 E. Wayne St. from 1917 to 1965 before moving to its current location at 836 E. Jefferson Blvd.
Stith says Fort Wayne’s first black dentist, an early black attorney, black doctors and the first black undertaker were members of Turner Chapel. The church, now pastored by the Rev. Archie Criglar, ministers to the community through a food pantry and was the first black church to join the Interfaith Hospitality Network.
The congregation will have a celebratory dinner at 3 p.m. and worship service at 5 p.m. Sunday. The sermon will be preached by the Rev. John Richard Bryant, senior presiding bishop of the A.M.E.’s 4th Episcopal District.
Crescent Avenue United Methodist Church
When Crescent Avenue United Methodist Church was founded, the frontier “was across the Maumee River,” says its pastor, the Rev. James Evans.
“This church was actually started by Mrs. Isabel Bisel, who decided back in 1909 there were too many children living across the river from the town of Fort Wayne that needed some religious exposure,” Evans says.
“Back then, there weren’t too many of us living here on this side. The paved road went across the river at Columbia Street and then stopped. This was sort of flood land and mud flats.”
Bisel began teaching Sunday school, and soon had 60 or 70 children as students, Evans says. By the next year, a church building had been erected – a fact that Evans says “astounds” him.
Started as a Presbyterian outreach, the congregation affiliated with the Evangelical denomination when its sponsoring congregation could not afford to support it, Evans says.
Crescent Avenue came under the United Methodist umbrella through later mergers of its parent groups, including the Evangelical United Brethren, or EUB, denomination.
At the corner of Crescent and Tennessee avenues, the church continues to focus on ministry to children. It dedicated an educational wing during its 50th anniversary in 1959, and it is still in use for long-standing and active weekday preschool and before- and after-school programs, Evans says.
Sunday School for children also continues; Evans says. One of his favorite church photos shows 16 church women in 1920s hats and dress standing in and around an early roadster with “Go to Sunday School at Crescent Avenue” painted on the side.
But the church’s membership is aging, according to Evans, who has served it since 2004. And its 120 members are fewer than in its peak years about 50 years ago, he says. About 200 members and former members came to its anniversary service and luncheon Oct. 11.
But the church will continue, he pledges.
“This church has been a presence here in the Lakeside/North Side neighborhood for 100 years, and I’m particularly proud that on three occasions, this church had to make a decision whether to stay in this neighborhood or move, and each time, it said, ‘No, this is where we started, and this is where we will keep on,’ ” he says.
“I think something would freeze over before this church left this neighborhood. It’s a great place to be.”
St. John Lutheran Church (Flatrock), Monroeville
When German immigrants began settling the fields outside Fort Wayne, they planted churches as well as crops.
St. John Lutheran Church (Flatrock) was one, says its pastor, the Rev. Douglas Christian.
The congregation originally was “a daughter congregation” from St. John Lutheran Church in Bingen, he says. St. John was first named Bielefeld, after the town in Germany from which its members came. Flatrock was chosen later because of a prominent geological feature in what then was swampland, he says.
“Part of the reason for the congregation being started here was that to travel from this area down to Bingen in swampy land was very difficult in 1849,” Christian says.
The church’s first pastor, the Rev. Fred Husman, was a colleague of the Rev. Friedrich Wyneken, a famed German-born, circuit-riding Lutheran missionary who established several frontier congregations in the Decatur area in the late 1830s and early 1840s.
From its beginning, Christian says, St. John included a school. Its major ministry today, he says, is cooperating with Emmanuel Lutheran Church-Soest in running a 150-student Lutheran school with classes from prekindergarten to eighth grade.
Christian, who celebrated his 25th anniversary of ordination Oct. 11 along with the church’s 160th anniversary, is in his 18th year at the church, part of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.
“I love the people here. God has really blessed them, and they’re a great part of God’s family,” he says.
St. Aloysius Catholic Church, Yoder
This sturdy brick church stands within view of Interstate 469 and within a short drive of new housing additions, but it remains at heart an old-fashioned country church, writes member Tim Johnson, editor of Today’s Catholic, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend.
The congregation traces its founding to the time of Bishop John Henry Luers, Fort Wayne’s first Catholic bishop, who sent a priest, the Rev. Jacob Meyer, from St. Mary’s parish in Decatur to minister to farm families in rural Pleasant Township.
Meyer celebrated the first Mass for 16 families in a home, and a small frame church was built the next year, in 1859, according to a history by the late Connor Loesch, a parishioner.
The parish grew to include a school by 1876, a rectory, a convent and school additions. A new altar, built by a parishioner, was dedicated during the anniversary celebration in June. The sanctuary interior also was refurbished with the help of parishioners and the parish’s priest, the Rev. Dominique Carboneau
St. John the Baptist Catholic Church, New Haven
Now a 1,200-family congregation, St. John the Baptist in New Haven traces its roots to Msgr. Julian Benoit, who ministered to the Miami Indians and workers on the Erie Canal in the 1840s. A missionary priest, the Rev. Alexis Botti, was sent from Fort Wayne to continue the ministry in New Haven.
“This church started out, first in a house, and then more or less, in a storefront, a dry goods store. And it finally grew and became a church,” says Jim Kelly, parish director of religious education.
The cornerstone to the congregation’s first church was laid in 1860 by Bishop Luers, and the building was used until 1876, when another church was erected on the site of the parish’s current gymnasium. The church burned in a fire on Palm Sunday 1954 and the current church building at 943 Powers St. was erected. The parish’s priest is the Rev. James Seculoff.
Today, the parish is known for its school, which has 339 students from pre-kindergarten to eighth grade, says Kelly, who says the September anniversary celebration included a children’s carnival, a golf outing, a euchre night and a Mass followed by “an old-fashioned dinner.” About 500 people attended, he says.
