The New Holland Church

Like St. Mary's, right here in Alton, it's a magnificent house of worship that is far more than just that--not as if that isn't much. The place is a testimony to God all right, but also a testimony to the immense spiritual commitment of the people, most of whom were poor, the ordinary folks who built it so long ago. That they poured so much of what so-little they had into a house of worship is a testimony to the sincere faith they took with them from afar, a particular kind of Calvinist theology that grew exponentially through the wearying trials creating a community required in a neighborhood where no white men had lived before.

Here, in Alton, and there, in New Holland, South Dakota, people spent time and money and whatever wherewithal the task required to build a church, a beautiful church as bold and tall on the open plains as their own vision and hope for a new life. It's God's House, they would have said, even though theologically they were aware no such single place existed, because they reckoned that all of it, all of the world around them was God's world, even though the land could turn its back on them, send fires and floods, grasshoppers, and week-long winter storms, blazing heat, frightful cold, and altogether too much drought. The church made clear that God was there, even when He seemed not to be.

That was years ago. Sadly enough, the church itself, the building, is weary. For years its been the people's church; for generations it's maintained a place at the heart of a community that grew only through the hard work that stubborn perseverance required. 

That particular community is far smaller today. Rural areas of the whole Upper Midwest have shed populace because to make a living on the land requires hundreds more acres, more land than sweat and heavy labor. Big agriculture requires big farms. Big farms mean fewer families. Fewer families mean less business, smaller schools, smaller churches. 

Meanwhile, floor to ceiling, the old New Holland church is showing its age. You don't even have to look close. The nature of the community that built it isn't the same either, and it isn't prospering. People are still leaving. Kids don't choose to stay on the home place. This wonderful building isn't the kind of home to new residents as it was to the pioneers. Besides the new ones often come from wholly different religious fellowships and traditions.

The old place, no matter how beautiful, doesn't create or carry the regard it once did. While the congregation who worships there is still vital to the community, their choices aren't easy--to invest hundreds of thousands into a creaking old beauty, or to raze the old one completely and start afresh. 

Most certainly, a church is not a museum, but then a people without a history is not a community. To buttress or to build--that's the question people who worship there have to answer. Both demand significant donations. It's not at all easy.

I don't have a vote. My great-grandparents left, like so many others, when the great dome of sky brought no rain for too many years.  The land couldn't hold all those people back then, through the last decades of the 19th century. That was the beginning of the exodus. 

But if I did have a vote, I know where I'd come down. 

It's a beautiful old irreplaceable place.  There's only one like it. It's stood through endless trials, ten thousand baptisms and marriages, as many funerals, some of them unforgettable, I'm sure. 

I say, shore it up. As much as it ever was, it's still a House of the Lord.