Donna Koenig remembers checking the Episcopalian designation on a Seward newcomers’ form when she and her family moved to Seward in the mid-1970s.
Soon after Jane Jones called her to invite Koenig, her husband Richard, and children Christopher and Carrie to St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church services and to join her family for their first 4th of July in Seward. The friendship and the tie to the stone church on the corner of 6th Street and Hillcrest Avenue were sealed.
Koenig is among the congregation members celebrating the 75th anniversary of the start of construction on the building on that corner this year.
Jones, who died in 2010, and her family were long a part of the small church, with her parents, Dr. Harry and Lucetta Cummins, giving the land for the church. In the 1940s and 1950s, the corner was a sometimes muddy intersection before through traffic and eventually Highway 15 was moved from 8th Street.
Koenig said the welcome her family received was common for the close knit congregation. Christopher and Carrie (now Carrie Koenig Graves) grew up in the church and served as acolytes.
Though her late husband, a plant geneticist, was transferred out of state for a time, they came right back to St. Andrews when they had the chance to return to Seward.
Kathleen Rutledge said that welcome is still present.
She said her husband, Ted Kooser, was first drawn to the church by its architecture. But Rutledge remembers “the warmth that engulfed us as soon as we walked through those red doors” in 2008.
The St. Andrew’s congregation has been through cycles of small and growing congregation numbers. They have had full-time clergy, part-time clergy and shared clergy.
When there were just six or eight people coming and they were without an ordained priest or clergy, Koenig remembers sitting together in the choir pews and reading the liturgy aloud each Sunday.
Today, Father David Stock comes to Seward for a 12:30 p.m. Sunday service after leading St. David’s Episcopal Church’s morning services in Lincoln. The Seward church has about 25 members and is as committed as ever to gathering to share their faith.
At a recent church gathering Stock asked members why they first came to St. Andrew’s and why they still come. Koenig said the answers were sometimes surprising.
Many mentioned the love they felt among the congregation. For Koenig it is because when she is in the church she “feels the real presence of Christ here.”
She recalls when Mother Helen Gortl served their church. She said each of Gortl’s sermons was filled with love.
Rutledge, a retired newspaper editor, and Kooser, a poet, now use some of their affection for words on the church’s exterior sign, recently posting “a late-riser’s dream, 12:30 p.m. Sunday services.”
She said humor is common in the congregation, which takes its faith seriously, yet finds comfort in the tradition of its services and enjoys gathering together with some frivolity.
Though the church’s pillars are scripture, tradition and reason, that variation from Sunday morning worship times may be in the St. Andrew’s congregation’s history.
In 1946 a small group of Episcopalians began meeting for evening prayers at 3 p.m. on Sundays in the Chain Wood funeral home’s chapel, then located in a Seward Street store now occupied by the Udder Store. They were led by the Rev. Harold Gosnell, who led worship at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Lincoln on Sunday mornings.
In 1948 the congregation dug and finished a basement for the 25-by-75 foot church that would eventually seat 120 people. They began gathering in the basement for worship, meetings and monthly parish dinners.
On Sept. 26, 1950, they laid the cornerstone for the church, which began to take shape with its concrete block faced with buff Silverdale, Kansas, stone.
Hughes Brothers fashioned 40-foot redwood logs brought by rail into arching roof supports. Local carpenter John Mueller and mason John Peters worked on the building. The steeple was designed by Les Pieper.
The Seward Independent reported in April 1952 that about 250 people gathered to consecrate the church building just a few days after it was completed.
At that 5 p.m. service on Tuesday, April 16, Nebraska Diocese Bishop Rt. Rev. Howard Brinker “rapped three times on the door of the new St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church at Sixth and Hillcrest,” which was part of a centuries-old ritual to consecrate the church and signify it was debt free, the Independent reported.
He was then presented the keys to the church and Warden Howard Colman “wished peace to be in this house.” They led a group of clergy from around the state into the church, followed by local lay leaders and a choir comprised of St. Andrew’s and Holy Trinity singers.
Congregational and worship leaders for the cornerstone dedication and consecration included Langdon D. Green, Walter Cattle, John O. Jones, Ivan Blevens, Willard Engler, Carlisle Boyes, Charles Barth, Howard Coman, Carl McGrew, Mrs. Arthur Anderson, Mrs. Percy, Peterson and Ivan O. Maurer, and acolytes Robert Blevens and Thomas Engler.
Over the years the church has continued to enhance the gathering spaces for the congregation, installing a pipe organ, adding a parish hall in 2010, and more recently developing its courtyard.
