When Mark and I were researching churches in the area we found that there are not many in this tip of the peninsula, but Sturgeon Bay has both an LDS church and a Friends church.  They both meet at 10:00 on Sunday morning, so since we’d been to Mark’s church last week, we went to the Friends Community Church this morning.

It’s not been often that I’ve been able to find a Friends church in our travels, and when I have, they’ve usually been an unprogrammed meeting — the traditional Friends meeting with no pastor and no hymns.  The thing that I was most curious about in our research online was that Friends Community Church called themselves the church of the Old Rugged Cross.  That was my first tip that this was a programmed meeting.

I didn’t take my camera this morning so let me paint a picture of words.  Mark and I had previously timed how long it took to get from our place to the church and it took us forty minutes.  However, this morning we were behind every Sunday driver on the road and we were ten minutes late getting to church after starting out fifty minutes early!  There doesn’t appear to be a parking lot, so we parked on the street.

The building is an old stone building.  There are several stone buildings in Sturgeon Bay and I was later told that the stone was quarried on the other side of Green Bay and ferried over.  The congregation was already singing from a hymn book with a piano playing. Perfect!  My readers know I’m a little old-fashioned and don’t go for the rock concerts many churches these days have every Sunday morning.

The pastor is a woman named Nancy Bontempo.  She has been doing a series on the times that Jesus appeared in the Old Testament.  This morning she read Genesis 16, the story of Sarai and Hagar.  God had promised Abram and Sarai a son, but since Sarai had been barren for many years, she didn’t think a son could actually come through her, so she gave Abram her Egyptian slave, Hagar.  (Hagar is a Hebrew word meaning “Stranger”.)  When Hagar found out that she was pregnant she began to kind of gloat over Sarai, so Sarai went to Abram and blamed him for the whole mess.  He told her to do whatever she thought best, so she began beating Hagar and giving her hard tasks to do, to the point that Hagar ran away.  She was headed back toward Egypt when the “angel of the Lord” found her, called her by name, and asked what she was doing.  She told Him she was running away from Sarai because she was abusing her so much, and He told her to go back and submit to Sarai.  He told her to go back and face the hardest thing she’d ever been through and that she would have a son and she should call him Ishmael, meaning “God hears”.  As soon as she realized with whom she was speaking, she said, “Thou art a God who sees” and was amazed that she had survived seeing Him.  Christ appeared to an abused slave woman torn from her homeland and named “Stranger” and assured her that he knew her situation and would bless her.  The pastor said that same Christ knows what our difficulties and struggles are and is here with us. What an assurance!

This Sunday happened to be their monthly potluck, so several people invited us to stay for lunch.  The way to the basement was down a narrow steep stairway behind the pulpit and as we were going down I told Mark this reminded me of churches I went to as a child.  We stepped into the basement and could smell the food.  It was heavenly!  We laid our things down at a table and went to get a plate of food.  As we were coming out of the kitchen the pastor asked me if I’d been raised Quaker and I said, “Well, that’s a long story!”  She came and sat with us so I could tell her about the many churches I’ve belonged to in my life.  When I came to the part about Mark being LDS and how we trade Sundays at each other’s churches, she said, “How’s that going for you?”  That got me into a long discussion about how I came to realize that Mark’s and my many differences are only on the surface and underneath we are quite compatible.

When she left, her husband sat down and visited with us for a while.  Then as we were getting ready to leave, another man came over to greet us.  I had previously told someone that I was curious about the church being called the church of the Old Rugged Cross and he’d told me there was a booklet we could get about it.  I had forgotten to ask about the booklet again till we were about ready to leave, so I asked this man if we could have one of the booklets.  It took him a while to find where they were, but he finally found a stack of them and gave me a copy.  I read it to Mark on the way home.

Here I need to insert a bit of personal history.  I went to Christian grade school when I was young and every Friday we’d have chapel.  My favorite hymn as a child was The Old Rugged Cross.  Come to find out, this Friends Church is the first place that got to hear the song.  Back then the church was called Sawyer Friends Church.  There was to be a two week revival meeting held at the Friends church for all Sturgeon Bay and the surrounding area to attend.  The revival meeting began on December 29, 1912 and ended on January 12, 1913.  The pastor, Estella McCann, asked Rev. George Bennard, a Methodist minister from Michigan, to speak at the revival.  He brought with him a song leader, Ed Mieras. They met at the train station in Chicago and as they took the train, Rev. Bennard started writing the words and picked up his guitar to work on the melody for The Old Rugged Cross.

Back in the day, revival meetings were “happenings” that drew large crowds and this was no exception.  During the two weeks that Rev. Bennard was preaching, he took every spare moment to work some more on his song.  Several people were waiting for dinner at the parsonage (in the basement of the church) on the last afternoon of the revival when Rev. Bennard said, “I’ve got something that I have been working on.  Let’s try it out and see how it is.”  They formed an impromptu quartet and sang The Old Rugged Cross from a hand-written manuscript.  That night at the revival meeting, Rev. Bennard and Ed Mieras sang it as a duet with an organist accompanying them.  On that final night of the revival, the service lasted till midnight and 140 people came to the altar!

For those of you who may not be familiar with this hymn, I’ll leave you with the words:

On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,
The emblem of suffering and shame;
And I love that old cross where the dearest and best 
For a world of lost sinners was slain.

Chorus:
So I'll cherish the old rugged cross,
Till my trophies at last I lay down;
I will cling to the old rugged cross,
And exchange it some day for a crown.

Oh, that old rugged cross, so despised by the world,
Has a wondrous attraction for me;
For the dear Lamb of God left His glory above 
To bear it to dark Calvary.

In the old rugged cross, stained with blood so divine,
A wondrous beauty I see;
For 'twas on that old cross Jesus suffered and died
To pardon and sanctify me.

To the old rugged cross I will ever be true,
Its shame and reproach gladly bear;
Then He'll call me some day to my home far away
Where His glory forever I'll share.