LUGERVILLE—The only church in Lugerville is closed because fewer people are going to it.
The house that is now Our Savior Episcopal Church used to be a school. In the 1940s, they changed their minds.
“It was never a big group of people, but it was important to the families who went there for almost 80 years,” said Kenneth Johnson, senior warden of the church council. The choice to close was made because only three or four regulars show up most of the time.
It’s getting hard for those people to keep up the house and do other things like that, so we have to close, he said.
The last service will be led by Bishop Matthew Gunter of the Episcopal Diocese of Wisconsin on September 10. The former Episcopal priest Rev.
William Radant will help the bishop. He worked as a supply priest at Our Saviour until late 2023 and is now retired.
Johnson said that the church closing service is a deconsecration process that the Episcopal church needs to do to make the building neutral.
For religious use by a congregation, the service takes away sacramental things and the blessing.
He said that the closing is a chance for people who have been in touch with the church in the past to get back in touch with the building and the people who go there.
There may be older people who used to go to the church when they were kids. There may have been people who weren’t members but went to the summer bible school or events put on by the church and the neighborhood.
Jones said, “We don’t know who all of those people might be.”
Johnson said that the diocese owns the house and will sell it. People in the church and the diocese would rather have another church group use the building than have it be used for something else.
It’s not necessary, he said. “That might be the best way to use the building.” “The building is in pretty good shape.” It has had some repairs and changes made to it over the years.
Johnson said that until 2023, Wisconsin had three Episcopal districts. After that, they all merged into one. Lugerville used to be in the Eau Claire diocese, and the change had nothing to do with the closing of Our Saviour. It was something that people in the church thought about for a long time.
Johnson said, “It was our choice because we no longer had enough members to keep the building up.”
He said that the choice to close was a practical one, like planning a funeral for a faith community instead of a person. However, it needs to be done, and the process helps to make the pain as useful as possible.
“Yes, there is still a sense of loss,” Johnson said. “It’s like real life.” There are times in life when you know you don’t have much time left. You try to enjoy the last time because it’s going to be over.
And that’s kind of what took place here. It’s now so bad that it will kill this congregation and neighborhood. But the choice had to be made, even though it was hard.
He said that the sensible side helps people get over their strong feelings. Sometimes you just need to “buckle down and do it.”
UNIQUE BEGINNS
Johnson said that the Church of England gave rise to the Anglican Church and that the American church changed because of the Revolutionary War.
Since the only thing that brought the Episcopalians of Lugerville together was their religion, their effort to form a community was different from that of the Lutherans and Catholics in the area.
In 1989, on the church’s 50th anniversary, the Phillips Bee wrote that the church’s roots can be traced back to the 1930s, when an Episcopal priest went to Lugerville to hold services at the homes of faithful people. The church kept growing, and Rev.
Thomas Moehle in Medford decided to make Lugerville a mission. People could go to the Lugerville School, the community center near Popple Hill Road and County Road F, or the Popple School on Saturday nights to hear him preach.
In the 1940s, Thora Rishel moved from Chicago to become the postmaster in Lugerville. She was also a deacon in the Episcopal church and helped build the congregation by starting “Church School” for religious education. She also started the Women’s Guild, a group that donated and gave away clothes and a sewing group.
He told Rishel, “She came to this area as the postmaster and saw that it needed a church.”
The church bought the old South Fork School in 1949 and moved it to Lugerville. Johnson said it was important that Thora Rishel and the Grant family were strong.
In the Bee story, it is said that Bishop William Horstick bought the church at sale and turned it into a church. He said that the main classroom was turned into a church and the altar.
The entrance and coat room for the kids were turned into the fellowship room and kitchen. The church was built on a base that had a full basement. In 1983, a bell tower was added when an old church bell became available.
The first altar was made by Rev. Moehle out of boards and was used until 1956. The Phillips Bee story says that’s when the Episcopal Church gave away an old altar and rails from the Bundy Hall camp retreat.
In the beginning, the church used wood fires. Later, they switched to space heaters, which meant that the church had to close for the winter and hold services somewhere else. Central heating was put in at the start of the 2000s.
Jones said that the church had the most people in the early 1970s. At that time, there were about 25 regulars. They held a meal once a week, which turned into a brat fry benefit once a week in Phillips. Part of the goal of the mission was to let new and visiting Episcopalians know about the rural church.
Before Johnson, the son of an Episcopal priest, quit his job as a police officer in Fort Atkinson and came to Lugerville in 2003, there were about 12 regular members. The number of members, mostly older couples, has been slowly going down over the last 20 years.
Johnson said that the summer tourists came often and generously donated money. People who lived in the cabin, who were mostly from southern Wisconsin and Illinois, were considered members because they usually went to meetings.
He said that one of the traveling couples wanted to get married at Our Saviour and helped pay for the church’s costs for a whole year. This helped keep the building up as the number of people dropped.
One had a wife who was an Episcopal and a husband who wasn’t, but decided to go to services with her when they came to visit in the summer. The husband changed his mind and was baptized in the church before he died.
He said that around 2017, even the visiting faithful were getting old to the point where they stopped or slowed down their trips. Due to a lack of members, winter services were held in the church of St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church in Park Falls. Services would not have been held in Lugerville this winter.
Since it was founded, Our Saviour has gone in a few different directions. It is now at a point where the direction points to one choice. Around 2010, the people of St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church of Park Falls decided to close because it was too expensive to keep going.
Two people who went to St. Margaret’s started going to Lugerville, and other people who went to Park Falls switched to other groups. Johnson said that this could cause some members of Our Saviour to drive to Minocqua or farther for Episcopal services or choose to go to a different church.