12. The Methodist Church

If the American Republic was going to survive, a new vision would need to replace the lethal mixture of competing visions that led to civil war. After the Civil War, the rail road town would become the center for this new vision. In Old Sherwood Town, this building on Third and Main would play a highly symbolic role in the creation of the new vision. When this building was erected in 1893, it was owned by the United Brethren. In 1920 it became the property of the Methodists. (An ethnic issue that had separated the U.B. and Methodists was resolved in a worldwide merger in 1968 when the two churches became the United Methodists.) Finally, in 1977, the building burned and was raized. Only the twin cedar trees that guarded the church door remain.

Photo taken as congregation exitsthe building for the final timeMarch 20, 1976

Between the time that the building was owned by the U.B. and the Methodists, it was owned by the Congregationalists. During this time, the church became a kind of community center. The whole town was invited to bring their children to visit with Santa Claus under the community Christmas Tree. On the eve of Prohibition, the community came to the Congregational Church to hear lectures on the evils of booze. When the Friends lost their building to fire in 1904, they met at this church until 1912, when the Friends Church on Pine and Second was finally ready for use.

It would be hard to picture some of these activities occurring prior to the Civil War. In Colonial times, the Congregationalists banned Christmas as a pagan festival! Friends and Congregationalists lived in separate colonies and rarely mixed. Even in the Oregon Territory, the two bodies required separate towns! Forest Grove started out as Congregationalist theocracy. Newberg has always been a province of the Society of Friends (as anyone dealing in real estate there soon learns). Methodism does not have the strong regional orientation of these two bodies, but in the early days (circa 1730) "the true center of Methodism did indeed lie in the South." (Mead's Handbook of Denominations).

Here is the new America vision. Not only did these three denominations, virtually at war with each other during the Civil War (indeed, the American Methodist Church was split in half by the War), coexist in America's railroad towns, in Old Sherwood Town they shared the same building! It may have been a sense of brotherhood that brought them together, but in the earliest days it was certainly a problem of demographics. As a neighbor to the Hall family expressed it in 1853:

The religious features of the community are rather diversified though I believe that the majority of the settlers are nothingarians. There are some Methodists, some Episcopalians, some Baptists, and some United Brethren though not enough of either class to establish a regular church. Consequently they have to take turns in the pulpit and our preaching is consequently a mixture of Immersion, foreordination, Antislavery, Special Providence, etc.

—W.V.J.Johnson

Johnson's frustrations notwithstanding, there is plenty of evidence that a new small town vision was emerging here at the Methodist Church. In 1939, Sherwood Valley News reported on a sermon by a Sherwood Methodist minister entitled, "Home Town." Reverand MacArthur compared the Home Town of Jesus to Old Sherwood Town ("the Home Town of Jesus, that of Nazereth, in Galilee, with the Willamette Valley, harboring the little town of Sherwood."). According to MacArthur, the essence of the term "Home Town" is service, "Service to all, and any, no matter what the creed, ideals or social setting."

A FOOTNOTE:   Until the late 19th Century, the Methodists were deeply involved with the Great Awakening, a tradition they borrowed from the Presbyterians (which sect, incidentally, has even stronger ties to the South). This movement featured large outdoor meetings that fostered an emotional response to the Gospel. Here in Sherwood, something like the Great Awakening may be experienced in the summer tent meetings at the New Life Assembly of God Church (driven indoors by the Sherwood zoning official, alas), as well as the outdoor Missionsfest at Saint Paul Lutheran Church.