Rensselaer Adventures

This blog reports events and interesting tidbits from Rensselaer, Indiana and the surrounding area.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Going to church the Bethany way

(I thought it would be interesting to use Sundays to focus on Rensselaer's churches and to see how many Sundays I can go before I run out of material. Indiana is richly endowed with religious denominations, with influences from North and South, East and West. This is part of that series of posts.)

Bethany Evangelical Free Church is located east of Rensselaer at 2100 E Grace Street. According to the "Church Services Directory" in the Rensselaer Republican, the pastor is Dan Earhart. Sunday Celebration Service is at 10:15 a.m, and Sunday evening service is at 5:30 p.m. There are other events and services.
I could not find a web site for this church, nor could I find any organization or fellowship of churches to which it belongs.

The building it occupies was once a school, and the north-south road on which it sits is called the Marion School Road, but I could not find information about it on the Internet. Although many of the old schools are in the Jasper County Interim Report, this one is not, possibly because it has been too extensively changed.

(A thought--wouldn't it be interesting to have an day or two in which Rensselaer had a tour of churches much like it has had a tour of homes in past years? I think it would be fun to see the insides of the various churches and to learn about their histories and practices, and the atmosphere of a tour of churches would be an informative and ecumenical way to do it.)

2 comments:

Dianna said...

This was Marion School. The outside looks the same as it did when it was a school. The playground equipment was moved to the opposite end of the building. If the slide with one ladder and two slides going down is still there it is the original slide.

I attended there in elementary school and have tried to locate some of the group pictures from that time period.

Anonymous said...

Founder and first Pastor was Rev. Harry McCorkel - one of the most Grace-filled people I have ever met. Rest his beautiful soul.