Story originally printed in the Onalaska Life or online at www.onalaskalife.com
Published - Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Holmen Lutheran marks milestone — 100 years
When it came time to decide how the congregation should celebrate its 100th anniversary, members of Holmen Lutheran Church opted to pass on a big centennial bash and instead take the time to let it all sink in.
Beginning in January of this year, the congregation held a monthly service to recognize its past. Longtime church members were recognized, and many shared videotaped memories that were burned on DVD and shown during church service. Former pastors at Holmen Lutheran were invited back to give sermons, as were former church members who became ordained and left to lead other congregations.
 The Holmen Lutheran Church 1927 confirmation class is pictured at left. Such photos are rare as fire destroyed the church and many documents in 1953. |
The 10 months of celebrations each corresponded to a decade in the church’s history, and the festivities will come to a close this weekend when the Rev. Greg Van Dunk, a 1976 Holmen High School graduate who leads a church near Milwaukee, will preach at three services. The congregation will seal a time capsule with messages for the future and a luncheon will celebrate the present after looking at the past.
“It’s allowed us to savor each returning guest and their message and to reflect over the various decades of our history,” Rev. Dan Henderson said of the 10-month celebration at the church. “It’s been nice to slow down and take it a decade at a time.”
Holmen Lutheran’s 100th anniversary planning committee spent nearly two years organizing the centennial celebration and researching the church’s history.
Elaine Nelson, a 56-year church member and a retired English teacher from Gale-Ettrick-Trempealeau High School, took the assignment of authoring the church’s history. Her 40-page-plus book reaches back to the 1850s, when Holmen residents had to travel to Halfway Creek Lutheran Church for services. Holmen was a tiny village then, and as Nelson would learn as she did her research, times were different.
“There were a lot of interesting things. For instance, all of the services were conducted in Norwegian, and all of the early records were written in Norwegian,” said Nelson, who is 100 percent Norwegian and studied enough of the language to translate some documents.
A copy of the history of the Holmen Lutheran Church will be included in the time capsule, which will be sealed until 2057. It also will contain a current church directory, the filmed interviews of longtime members and two scrolls with messages members wrote for the future.
Ed Eisermann, chairman of the 100th anniversary committee, said the member interviews were each about 10 minutes long and were played in church during the passing of the communion plate.
“There was one fellow (who) talked about how women sat on one side of the church, and men sat on the other side of the church, and only the men voted,” Eisermann said. In other interviews, members described the 1953 fire that destroyed the church, and a former paperboy recalled his Sunday-morning duty of making sure the pastor was awake in time for the sermon.
“It was really an interesting history of people who are in their 60s and 70s and 80s who weren’t going to be able to tell that story in another 10 or 20 years,” Eisermann said.
Many recalled leaving school to watch the January 1953 fire that engulfed the church and destroyed it in 90 minutes. The cause of the blaze has never been determined, and much of the church’s historic record was lost.
“We haven’t necessarily had that much connection all the time with our past,” Henderson said. “So this has been healthy. It has reminded us that we have a past that we can be proud of and therefore a future we need to claim and make the most of.”
CENTENNIAL SERVICE
Rev. Greg Van Dunk will preach at Holmen Lutheran Church’s three centennial services, to be held at 5 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 27 and 8 and 10:30 a.m. on Sunday, Oct. 28.
A concluding luncheon will follow the 10:30 a.m. service and feature the sealing of a time capsule.
During the coffee hour between Sunday services, Van Dunk will share an original song written when he moved from Holmen and give a presentation on the future of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).
Van Dunk, whose parents are Gordon and Pauline Van Dunk, graduated from Holmen High School in 1976. He received a Holmen Viking Alumni Award in 2000 for his ministry in inner-city Milwaukee. Van Dunk currently serves Atonement Lutheran in Muskego, Wis., as a part time pastor and also serves as ELCA mission director for the Greater Milwaukee Synod.
All stories copyright 2006 Onalaska Life and other attributed sources.