The first Methodist Church building in Illinois, Bethel Chapel, was erected in 1805, in a virtual wilderness 20 miles east of St. Louis. It was a simple log construction that leaked badly and was such a sorry excuse for a building that it soon fell into disuse. Eventually it fell down. We have no idea what sound its falling made, as evidently there was no one around to hear it or even record the year of its demise.
The Methodists also held annual outdoor camp meetings in the same location: carnivals of preaching, singing, “slayings” by the Holy Spirit, folks born again, folks sanctified… Preachers from those days would write in their diaries that moral reprobates would hover around those events to heckle the preachers, harass the saved, and provoke fistfights with those Christians not entirely sanctified. Within a couple decades, however, all traces of Methodism in the location fizzled out.
The area didn’t get a name until the 1890s. That’s when the Madison Coal Company was formed to extract the coal from a 5-8-foot-thick vein that ran 100-400 feet below the surface. The businessmen built a company town for the workers: Glen Carbon.
Within two years there were 13 saloons in the new town, not the best influence on the labor force. The coal company thought that a substantial dose of religion might mitigate the influence of all the alcohol, and so they donated a plot of land on Sunset Avenue for a church, to the strictest group they could find: the Methodist Episcopal Church South. A highly judgmental lot, the Southern Methodists never got a foothold in Glen Carbon and went out of business within five years. Thus, the first two attempts by the Methodists in the Glen Carbon area did not have much of a run.
The northern Methodists moved into the vacated building in 1901 and made a go of it for a few decades. But then in the 1930s, Peabody Coal determined to drive the Madison Coal Company out of business. So they bought the Illinois Central Railroad, the only way to get coal out of Glen Carbon. The mines closed for good. And the Methodist Church closed its doors once again. In the Illinois journals of the Methodist Conference, “Glen Carbon” simply disappears from its lists of churches somewhere around 1934, with no explanation.
A small band did, however, continue to operate a Sunday School out of the building. And by the mid 40s, the Methodists decided to send them a preacher to get reorganized. He was a student at McKendree College, and the only thing anyone could later remember about him is that he rode his bicycle to Glen Carbon, some 25 miles. No one knows whether his preaching was any good, but someone must have been a good organizer, because the church got jump started and by the mid 40s the church reappeared in the conference journal in the list of churches.
For three decades it was not big enough to have its own pastor, and so it was the “runt” congregation added on to some other Methodist Church, served by a pastor who lived elsewhere. The congregation was made up of a couple dozen women and “one man.” There would have been more men, but the particular women who ran the church in those days scared them off, along with any other women and children in the village who might have wanted to participate. As long as Glen Carbon was a sleepy village and the church was an add-on to another pastoral charge, nobody tried to upset things.
But then the federal government built TWO interstate highways through Glen Carbon in the 50s and 60s, and the village began to grow exponentially. Along with every other denomination, the Methodists wanted to get in on the ground floor and plant a megachurch. But what to do with the pillars who controlled the church already there??? Those women were not interested in adapting to their new neighbors.
And so the Methodist conference decided to start a second congregation in the village, calling it New Bethel, in honor of the dilapidated chapel that fell apart prior to the Civil War. They poured thousands of dollars into the project, angering the existing Glen Carbon congregation.
A pastor was assigned to New Bethel who assured its members that they wouldn’t have to pay anything: the conference would foot all their bills. For a while, Glen Carbon had two Methodist Churches: one that didn’t want any new people and one that didn’t want to pay for anything.
But then one of those inexplicable shifts happened: something Christians often call a miracle. The old guard that controlled the old church started “going to heaven.” Anyway, that’s what the preacher said at their funerals. And new people started to get involved in the old church. And when they saw all the money and all the land that the conference was giving to New Bethel, they staged a coup and demanded to be included. And so, in 1984, a merger created the Glen Carbon New Bethel United Methodist Church, the longest name of any church I ever served.
A new building was erected in 1985, and the bishop sent me there in 1988, telling me that the church had to start paying its own way… and by the way… pay back 50% of the money the conference had been pouring into it. The congregation had about 50 people at the time, was broke, and being torn apart by two factions. The bishop called it a great opportunity for me, a place with “potential.”
When I refused to take sides between the two parties, a dozen people quit, from both factions. This is the point where God really likes to perform miracles. The people who remained were exactly the kind of people a church needs. They were all smarter or wiser than their pastor, all of one heart. They knew the difference between arguing (in order to get the best ideas) and quarreling (bad). They looked for new ways to love both God and their neighbor. Hospitality was at the heart of what they did. Okay, they weren’t perfect. But what church can tolerate those who are?
The Glen Carbon church not only survived my 13 years of ministry there, but they have also survived 4 pastors since. They have also survived members who remind us that the church needs to welcome all sinners.
I went there this morning to worship with them, my first time back in more than two decades. It was delightful to see old friends and to see the spirit thriving in a church that has changed much since my tenure. But the joy, the welcome, and the miracles are still present. I must say, the people I saw this morning all looked so old after 20 years. Plus, they have been through Covid and other hardships of life. But there was joy, still the spirit, and still the sense of love and commitment that taught me so much when I was their pastor.
Thanks be to God for Glen Carbon New Bethel, all its people, then and now, and those to come. Lord have mercy upon them.
Mike
