In July 1983, I started a new Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) church in Somerset, Ohio. Our first service was held in a storefront building we rented for $100. A few months later, we rented the second floor of what was called the Landmark Building. Attendance growth was slow. By the summer of 1985, our average attendance was 50. To facilitate our expansion, we bought an abandoned United Methodist Church for $5,000. Built in 1831, the building was typical of Methodist churches built in the nineteenth century.
Over the next few years, Somerset Baptist grew to over 200 in attendance. Some of the members who attended the Methodist church when it was open were worried about our growth. Why? When we bought the Methodist building, it came with a cemetery, one that contained some of the early settlers of the area. The cemetery was a wreck, littered with toppled tombstones or stones that didn’t belong to any particular grave. We cleaned everything up, mowing the grass as needed. We were, in every way, good citizens.
Some of the people who formerly attended the Methodist church became worried that we were going to pull up the tombstones and turn the cemetery into a parking lot. They demanded we turn the cemetery over to the township, threatening us with a lawsuit if we didn’t submit. I remember being perplexed at the time. We hadn’t done anything with the cemetery other than maintain it (at our own cost).
Eventually, the township agreed to take over the cemetery. I told township commissioners that they would have to fence the cemetery and pay us for mowing the grass, which they agreed to do. And with that, the Methodists avoided the Baptists paving over the graves of former members and community residents. I never understood their paranoia over something we never would have done. Yes, we needed more parking, but turning the cemetery into a parking lot was never an option. Instead, we expanded the parking near the church building and encouraged healthy members to park along the road in front of the church and cemetery. Problem solved. 🙂
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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How “Christian” of the Methodists to threaten to sue you over their cemetery. Couldn’t they have just called you and met you at a coffee shop for a friendly chat? Was your hellfire and brimstone street preaching making them nervous about their forbears’ and loved ones’ graves being paved over by you and your rabid congregants? Interesting to speculate about.
I can’t believe the Methodists went straight to “they’re going to pave over the cemetery to create a parking lot”. That’s really telling on themselves. A meeting and conversation could have cleared that up pretty quickly.
The church I attended growing up had a small cemetery. The building we were in was built in 1961, so I’m not sure where exactly the original church building was or how big it was. It looked to me like the classrooms on the back of the church but connected to the auditorium predated the auditorium. While I was in college, the church built additional offices and classrooms and had plans to build a much larger auditorium (which was done sometime in the 90s after my family moved away). Additionally, they purchased a small grocery that was next door and converted that into more classrooms. Each time, they were careful to ensure that all construction did not interfere with the cemetery. I can’t imagine that anyone would have considered building over the cemetery.
Those lax Methodists probably didn’t want to meet in person because they had heard of the reputation of Bruce Almighty!
They would not have been able to withstand his hard-preaching against sin, back-sliding, dancing, television, FM radio, bright colors being worn to church, more sin, Cosmopolitan Magazine, instruments (other than an organ or piano) in church, men with mutton chop sideburns, women wearing pants, young men looking at girly magazines, leaving church before the two hours were up so they get home in time for the NFL, sneaking cigarette breaks, and all other manner of compromise those Methodists had made with the world!
That’s the real reason..there’s no preaching like Bruce Almighty preaching!
Preserving graves is yet another point where religions diverge. While looking for ancestral graves in the south Netherlands, I discovered the little Catholic church in our town had a tiny cemetery. The few graves had burial dates at most a few decades old. In the center of the cemetery was a large conical mound covered with gravestones. I learned that graves were recycled and whatever remains remained were added to the mound. When I asked a relative about this, the explanation was: “Well we can’t cover all of Holland with graves”. No graves were paved over but there was no sentimentality about digging them up to accommodate new burials. Just typical Dutch pragmatism.
That’s what they did in the cemetery at the basilica in my grandmother’s home town in Germany. I was told the when I visited there that there were only so graves, so they were recycled after so many years and the bones placed in a crypt. The church goes back centuries, so they must have been doing that for a very long time. No wonder cremations became standard in Europe (or at least they appear to be). Maybe having municipal cemeteries that are not attached to churches also helps.