250 Years of Serving the Lord

On Sunday, September 13, St. Luke’s Lutheran Church in Lincolnton, North Carolina, marked a milestone few congregations ever reach: 250 years of continuous ministry. District President Rev. Dr. Bill Harmon traveled to the small rural congregation, about 30 miles northwest of Charlotte, to preach for the special anniversary service, joining a sanctuary full of members, former pastors, supply pastors, and guests from across Circuit 15 for an afternoon of worship, remembrance, and thanksgiving.

It’s a milestone worth celebrating well beyond Lincoln County. St. Luke’s story is, in many ways, the story of the Southeastern District itself: a small band of faithful people who kept gathering around Word and Sacrament through frontier hardship, seasons of decline, war, rebuilding, and renewal, generation after generation.

A Congregation Older Than the Nation It Was Born Into

St. Luke’s traces its roots to 1776, when Rev. Johann Gottfried Arends, a German-born teacher who rode through the Carolinas on horseback, helped gather scattered Lutheran families in eastern Lincoln County. The congregation went by several names before it was St. Luke’s: Lebanon, Liberty, and Ore Bank, the last a nod to the iron deposits once mined nearby. Arends went on to become the first ordained Lutheran pastor in North Carolina and the first president of the North Carolina Synod.

The congregation’s first home was a simple log church. A frame building followed in 1858, the same year the name St. Luke’s took hold. By the 1970s, with fewer than one hundred members but no shortage of faith, the congregation built the brick sanctuary that still stands today, carrying pieces of the old frame church forward in its wooden cross, altar, and railings, hand-crafted from timbers of the building that came before it.

Faces Through the Years

Inside the sanctuary for the 250th Anniversary service

Part of what made Sunday’s service so moving was who filled the room. Guests included former longtime pastor A. Curtis Paul, who served St. Luke’s for 32 years and, now 90 and living in Ohio, sent a heartfelt letter to be read in his place. In it, he recalled 29 weddings, 79 baptisms, and 46 funerals over his tenure, along with the rare joy of baptizing, confirming, and marrying the very same member.

The afternoon also brought together several of the supply pastors who have shepherded St. Luke’s in recent years, including Pastors Ron Weise, Allen Trapp, Richard Tucker, Tim Fangmeier, Paul Griebel, Tim Baldinger, Norman Johnson, and Burk Hill, along with former pastor Glenn Roseman and Circuit 15 Visitor Pastor Steve Newberg, who served as lector. A congregational history booklet, prepared for the occasion, was handed out to every family, and a time capsule sealed in the altar back in 2001 was recognized as part of the celebration.

We rejoice that the congregation continues 250 years later still gathering, still sending. The Gospel endures! Thanks be to God!

Join us in giving thanks for St. Luke’s Lutheran Church and for the faithful people, past and present, who have carried this ministry forward.