Lincoln Methodist Church: Past and Present

LINCOLN--By the time this story is printed, the Aug. 1 Back to School Bonanza will be history, and the 2019 Arkansas Apple Festival will be history.

Central United Methodist Church in Lincoln is involved in both community events.

In coordination with Lincoln Bright Futures, Central has provided backpacks, socks, shoes, and other items to school-aged children for more than a decade through the Back to School Bonanza, according to several church members.

Central provides free water and restrooms to those who wander by during Lincoln's Apple Festival on the first weekend in October. The church's welcome is genuine and relaxed and a respite from the bustle of the square during the annual festival.

Although Central has been around 117 years, church members talk enthusiastically about services and activities that address current needs and interests.

Quilters' Group

One weekly activity is the Quilters' Group, which meets at 10 a.m. every Tuesday in what most churches would call Fellowship Hall but which Central members call simply "the basement."

Barbara Griscom, 78, a lifetime Central member, said she remembers the basement when it still had a dirt floor, now poured, smooth and polished concrete. Because the room is partially underground and because Central is made of stone, the basement remains cooler even on hot summer days. Windows on all sides of the basement provide pleasant light for quilters to work by, augmented by ceiling fluorescent lights.

Mary Alice Pitts, 80, church organist, and Lee Munson lead the Quilter's Group, and Pitts said anyone is welcome to join, even non-quilters. Griscom, who is Pitts' sister, said she brings her needlework or whatever project she's got going so she can be part of the chit-chat and fun. At noon, the quilting stops and the group has a potluck lunch.

Marty Lunsford, whose deceased husband, the Rev. Gary Lunsford, served as Central's pastor from 2012 to 2017, said she is one of the actual quilters in Crazy Quilters, as she calls the group, and she loves it. The current group project will be the prize quilt at Central's Thanksgiving feast in 2020.

Thanksgiving Feast

Central's Thanksgiving feast happens "a couple of Thursdays before Thanksgiving," said Griscom and Pitts. Pitts' daughter Sarah Simmons coordinates and makes sure all the moving parts come together at the right time.

Judy Cohea, chair of Central's Administrative Council, said the feast is one of Central's longest running service activities, begun, she thinks, in 1962 or '63. She said members bring and donate roasted turkeys, usually about 10 to 12.

Griscom said 100 pounds of donated potatoes are peeled and mashed, and members prepare and donate all the other foods associated with a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. Some of the food is prepared in the church kitchen, using the old stove that has stood there as long as anyone can remember.

Lunsford said people line up around the building for the meal. Anyone may eat, but those who are able to pay (the suggested donation is $5) receive a ticket and are entered into a drawing for the Quilters' Group quilt.

Cohea said the proceeds from the dinner were originally used to pay off a loan for property across Bean Street from the church that served as Central's parsonage, but once the loan was paid off, Central decided to continue the event and began using the proceeds to fund a scholarship to a Lincoln senior headed for college.

Cohea said the parsonage property was sold this year because the need for it had gone by the wayside. Central is one of many churches with a shared pastor.

Pastor Rachel

Pastor Rachel Krest said she completed in 2015 the "rigorous and thorough process" to become a licensed "local pastor," which is an alternate track from seminary and ordination. She said the U.S. is experiencing a pastor shortage, and local pastors are one way the need is being filled.

She was placed with Central in Lincoln and with the Methodist church in Morrow by the Arkansas Conference of the United Methodist Church a little more than a year ago. The Krests live in Winslow.

Prior to this placement, Krest served at the Methodist church in Alpena, where she became its first female pastor. Central has had two female pastors before Krest, according to Pitts and Griscom. One served in the 1980s and Sarah Bainbridge in the 1990s.

Krest, whose flock call her Pastor Rachel, and her husband and ministry partner Kevin Krest, serve the Morrow church at 9:30 a.m. each Sunday, and then they drive to Lincoln so Pastor Rachel may deliver the sermon to Central's congregation at 11 a.m. She said she keeps office hours at each church on Mondays from 5:30-7:30 p.m., with the first and third Mondays at Morrow and the second and fourth at Lincoln.

Pastor Rachel wears several other hats. She works full time as Director of Development for University of Arkansas Libraries, and she has three children. Kevin brought five children to the marriage eight years ago, so between them, they have eight children between the ages of 18 to 29, with three of them being 18, including a set of twins.

Pastor Rachel said she and her husband work as a team, and she couldn't do it without him. Krest, who has worked in human resources and sales and management, is a self-proclaimed sportswriter and has self-published several books that Pastor Rachel said are about "sports, romance and mystery." Krest said he comes from a family heavily involved in the Presbyterian faith, and he saw his father, a lay leader, "doing what few do, minister to the minister." Krest said he has been drawn to that kind of service over the years and puts it to good use now with his wife.

Pastor Rachel said Central is "beautiful," and she said she has found "amazing followers of Christ" who are "loving, accepting, forgiving people" and who have "embraced me and Kevin." She said Central members are known for participating in Meals on Wheels and for their other community service.

Church membership totals around 90, according to Rachel Krest. About 35 attend church service on any given Sunday. She said the median age of members is around 70, but the age range extends from small children to those in their 90s.

Church History

Rachel Krest said she was not given a history of the church when she was placed with Central, and a mystery surrounds the location of what Griscom and Pitts call Central's "record book." The sisters speculated that perhaps it was mistakenly packed up and moved by a former pastor and has simply not been noticed. No one knows when it went missing.

This means some information about the church comes from members' best guesses. For instance, the richly colored, fine, stained glass windows that line the north and south walls of the sanctuary were maybe created and installed in the 1950s.

However, some records are still available. Griscom did some detective work and found in the Church's membership book that the church was established in 1902, with a building committee comprised of H. A. Douthitt, I. N. Whittenberg and W. A. Rinehart.

The church began its life in a wooden building, which served its congregation up to 1924. In that year, or maybe 1923, the wooden building was moved to 206 W. Park Street, roughly one block away, where it began a new life for some time as the Lincoln arm of Luginbuel Funeral Home. No one around knows what the old church building is used for now.

In 1924, a cornerstone with the Rev. William Alfred Downum's name on it marked Central's new stone building in the original location, on the corner of Starr and Bean. At some point, Griscom said, the stone was plastered over, and this is the look of the church today.

A modern innovation on the inside of Central happened during the Rev. Lunsford's time when he designed and built an inside stairway from the sanctuary to the basement, or Fellowship Hall.

One memory of Barbara Griscom's was when the men dressed in biblical clothing and posed in a tableaux of The Last Supper on the front porch of the church. Griscom said people would drive by or walk by the church to gaze at the men as they held their poses for certain lengths of time. A tableaux is a silent, still re-creation by people of a famous painting or historical scene, similiar to a living picture.

Pitts and Griscom said every important thing in their lives has happened there, christenings, weddings, funerals. Their mother, Mary Mileur, was also the church organist. They saw their mother's parents' funerals in it as well as their own parents and other beloved family members and friends. It seems they and all of Central's church family, as much as stone and wood, are the fabric that built and builds Central.

General News on 10/23/2019