Going to church the Lutheran 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.)

The St Luke Evangelical Lutheran Church is located at 704 E Grace Street. Its pastor is Gary Wickert. Its worship service is at 8:00 am on Sunday, with Bible study and Sunday school at 9:15. It is affiliated with the Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod.
The local church does not have a web site. It is part of the Indiana District of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, which does have a website as does the Missouri Synod. The Missouri Synod is one of the largest of the Lutheran groups. St. John's Lutheran Church about ten miles north of Rensselaer is also a member of the Lutheran Synod.

The Lutheran Church takes its name from Martin Luther. The Missouri Synod website summarizes its beliefs as"

Being "Lutheran," our congregations accept and teach Bible-based teachings of Martin Luther that inspired the reformation of the Christian Church in the 16th century. The teaching of Luther and the reformers can be summarized in three short phrases: Grace alone, Faith alone, Scripture alone.
Grace alone
God loves the people of the world, even though they are sinful, rebel against Him and do not deserve His love. He sent Jesus, His Son, to love the unlovable and save the ungodly.
Faith alone
By His suffering and death as the substitute for all people of all time, Jesus purchased and won forgiveness and eternal life for them. Those who hear this Good News and believe it have the eternal life that it offers. God creates faith in Christ and gives people forgiveness through Him.
Scripture alone
The Bible is God's inerrant and infallible Word, in which He reveals His Law and His Gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ. It is the sole rule and norm for Christian doctrine.

The current church was built in 1954 and the hall attached to it was built in 1990. The hall often hosts the Red Cross blood drive.
Before the current church was built, the local congregation met for a number of years in a building on McKinley on the same city block as the Church of the Nazarene. This building now contains apartments and shows no external signs of ever having been used as a church.
The maps showing denominations from Valparaiso University (which is a Lutheran school) show that Lutheranism is strongest in the upper Midwest, from Wisconsin to Montana. In that area, the Missouri Synod is rarely the dominant Lutheran group, though it often is in the rest of the U.S. The Missouri Synod is important enough to have its own map. The Wikipedia entry on Lutheranism is here and its entry on the Missouri Synod is here.

I missed the chipper

It took the city of Rensselaer weeks to clean up all the debris from the ice storm of December. When the city trucks did pick it up, they took it to a city lot on Matheson Street, where they piled it into a very impressive pile.


Below is a city truck with a load of branches arriving. (Click on the picture for a larger view.)



It dumps its puny load next to the large existing pile. How many small loads like this one would it take to make the big pile. Thousands?Every so often a loader would pile the the branches and trunks so even more could be deposited. I was hoping that I would be able to get some pictures of the chipper that the city brings in to reduce all this debris into wood chips.
Alas, though I have seen the chipper in past years, I missed it this year. Tuesday after Easter I went by the lot and saw that the huge pile had been replaced by a much smaller pile of chips. City trucks were still bringing in branches, but it is unlikely the new pile will get to be nearly as big as the old pile was.


I recall that in the past the city has made these chips available for people who want them. I suspect there will be more than people will want to take this year. I wonder what they will do with them.

Weeping Willow

A few of the trees are showing signs of life. The large weeping willow at the end of Elza Street is turning pale green.
The leaves are growing as well as the flowers or catkins. The weeping willow is native to the Euphrates region of the middle east and has little or no value except as an ornamental.
This tree was also quite spectacular after the ice storm in December.

Snow bound

Fr. Charles J. Robbins, C.PP.S. wrote a chronology of Saint Joseph's College up to the year 1983. It is a major source of information about the history of the college. I thought this bit would make an appropriate post for today:

The week-end of April 16-17 saw a snow storm that created drifts eight feet high on Highway 231 east of the College. But the week-end was memorable not so much for the fact that a storm of that intensity should come so late in the year, but that it stranded 250 co-eds on an all-male campus for two days.

The females were on campus for a college choral festival. The residents of Halas and Gallagher halls gave their rooms to the stranded women and found sleeping space wherever they could. There were also stranded travelers to house.

By 9:00 o'clock on Tuesday morning the last of the snow-bound people were gone, but memories would long remain of a most unlikely week-end.

Update: I forgot to include the year. It was 1961.

Phantom ballfield

In the Board of Trustees room at Saint Joseph's College hangs an aerial photograph of the campus taken a few years ago. Examining it carefully one day, I noticed that there seemed to be the faint impression of a baseball diamond in front of the Science building. Today this field is sometimes used for band practice but little else. If you look carefully at the picture below, which is my photograph of the photograph, you might be able to make it out.
Here is a closer look. Can you see it now?
I played with the contrast, tint, black levels, etc. to try to make this phantom image stand out more. You should be able to clearly see it in the picture below.
And in the larger view below, you can see it has the same size as the current baseball diamond.
I took a close look at the field from ground level and could see nothing indicating that there was ever a baseball field there. The science building is close to the infield, so I thought that maybe this field had been abandoned shortly after the Science Building was built. However, I talked to someone whose connection to SJC is considerably longer than mine, and he told me that it was still the ball field in 1952 but no longer the ball field in 1960, when it had been replaced by the current field.

The current ball field is named after Gil Hodges, who played on this old field in the early 1940s. My source said that he was able to hit a ball over the trees into the reflecting pond. If he was able to do that, he certainly was able to hit the science building and maybe break a window or two.