One of the oldest organizations in Yelm, the Emanuel Lutheran Church, will celebrate its biggest milestone yet, as on Sunday, Aug. 2, the local church will celebrate its 100th anniversary with a service and barbecue to follow.
Jeannie Davis, Emanuel Lutheran Church administrator, and Karen Vosse, Giving Thanks Dinner director, gave the Nisqually Valley News a tour of the church on Thursday, July 23, and spoke about how much the milestone means to the organization and community.
She also highlighted the celebration set for this Sunday — which will include members of the congregations from Christ the King Epispocal Church and New Testament Christian Church of Graham, as both groups call the Emanuel Lutheran Church their home.
“What we’re going to do on August the second, that Sunday, we’re going to have a combined service,” Davis said. “Our bishop is joining us. We’re part of the link churches and we’ve invited other churches to join us — anyone who’s available. So we’ll have the three churches to service and then we’re thinking about noon we’re going to have the barbecue and pot luck.”
Davis noted that the congregation size at the Emanuel Lutheran Church is relatively small, so the local religious entity has been of service to the community — who in return has helped the church cover various expenses.
“Besides the two other churches that meet here with us, we have all kinds of things,” Davis said, of the local groups who utilize the church grounds. “We have a judo class that meets three times a week. We have the Prairie Point Quilters Guild. We’ve got the Prairie Co-op School that meets here once a week. We also have YARG, which is the Yelm Amateur Radio Group, who meets here twice a month. The Yelm Community Choir also meets here every Tuesday, and the Yelm Community Choir and two piano teachers do their concerts there — usually twice a year. We usually get six concerts a year, two from each of them.”
Davis noted that Emanuel Lutheran Church hasn’t had a pastor in 10 years, but said lay people, or members of the church who aren’t ordained as clergy, have led the church in the meantime.
“This church started out in 1926, actually, it started before then but it just became chartered in 1926. They had a pastor who came through on a horse, hopefully, once a month. Sometimes, it was every two or three months. But they’d have service,” Davis said. “What we do is we have service on the first and third Sunday of every month. Our lay people take it upon themselves to do the entire worship and service. They lead it. They do the sermons. One of the lay people has just finished a program that the Lutheran Church offers, called, ‘PSALMS,’ and it’s for lay pastors. So he’s become an official minister.”
