It's lost to history what hymns might have been sung that morning, but more likely than not there was at least one Charles Wesley hymn, and perhaps something by Isaac Watts. The Methodists, a singing people, were drawn to the personal testimony and witness these great writers brought to their radical hymnody.
Ascending to that height, with the limbs of Church Park's trees winter bare, from atop the tallest structure in a bustling river burgh, the bellows boys look out through the the belfry's wooden slats. They see across the river and its bustling mills to to the pasture land that stretches to Munroe Falls. Looking west, they see a prosperous metropolis stretching well nigh to...Eight Street. After that, the Grant Farm and the Sackett farms roll to the horizon, and then just the wild ravines and mire of Northampton Township.
Lofty voices. A preacher's fervent drone. Warm heat billowing from a new pot bellied stove. A view that stretches to unknown wilds: all these things can cause a boy's mind to wander.
And so that morning young Richard Moore contemplates his future. He jots down some hopes and some dreams. He stuffs them in a money jug, and leaves them for future generations to find.
When, more than a century later, I saw for the first time the words young Richard left for us, I immediately thought: how different was his world.
But I could immediately relate, as can anyone who was nurtured in the embrace of this great church, for this has always been a church that calls its young people to serve.
We may not have pumped an organ bellow in a stuffy belfry, but how many of us sat on the old acolyte bench just below the Senior Pastor's pulpit, and had minds that perhaps wandered to futures unknown?
Perhaps we pulled open the accordian walls in the old 1920 sanctuary on a Sunday morning, so the gallery classrooms could accommodate burgeoning worshippers.
Perhaps we rode an old green bus to Frakes, Kentucky, donned a red robe, and sang in a in tiny mountain chapel. Afterward a very old woman wept: she had never seen so many Christians in one place before.
Young Richard could dream a great future, because he was held aloft by a congregation that laid a firm foundation.
On a rugged frontier, on this ragged corner of Stow Township where the river drops and bends, settlers conducted worship in homes. They pleaded for clergy to be sent from the East. Eventually they rented a storefront by the Big Spring, where Lambert Buick sits today.
Eventually that little Methodist Society got its visiting preachers, and grew beyond what the storefront could hold. Judge Josiah Stow offered them a corner of the public square, next to the more established Episcopalians, where Third Street crossed the old Indian trail.
The very first thing they did: they dug a sure foundation. They erected stone walls, most likely of our local conglomerate sandstone, quarried in these rough ravines carved by the river's fall.
In that basement they worshipped, with gratitude. Their dreams for a permanent base for their spiritual longings were finally fulfilled.
Eventually they were able to raise funds, and after a few years, built a proper church atop their sandstone foundation.
They raised a spire.
They bought an organ.
They sang their praise.
Eventually they needed more room for the Sunday School, so they dug the old foundation even deeper, and added more rooms.
And so it came to be, many decades later, young Richard Moore ascended that belfry, on a languid January morn.
"I am a boy homely of face," he wrote, "but kind of heart."
"I am the poor boy's friend."
He dreamed of a future, and hoped he might grow to be a strong Christian man, like the men whose voices wafted into the belfry from the church below.
He wondered about the future, and who would pump the organ bellows when he was a man.
How many of us have been able to dream a future, because those who came before us laid a firm foundation?
Two decades after Richard stashed his dreams in that belfry tower, with great trepidation and a giant leap of faith, our Methodist forbears dismantled their beloved wood frame church. They met in the Oddfellows lodge down by the river, while they audaciously built a big brick church.
Dismantling their proud wooden spire, they found the money jug, and young Richard's words.
Five decades after the new brick church, as a small boy, I walked down the wobbly slate sidewalk from the library parking lot with my mom, past the little carriage house next to Duckwall's printing, all the while practicing the big, long name of the big brick church with the giant clock tower: First. United. Methodist. Church.
As a new family in this community, we were able to find our way to this place because those who came before us laid a firm foundation. Those preschool classrooms my mom was taking me to existed because in the 1950s, as the town by the river boomed once more, those who came before us laid the foundation for an Education Building, despite the equally urgent need for a bigger sanctuary as well, just as decades before those before them dug the cellar deeper.
All around us are tangible reminders of the faith of our fathers and mothers:
- A table in the parlor, made of oak timbers from the beloved old wooden church, with the belfry tower that proudly bore the town's clock, a clock now installed at the new clock tower on Front Street.
- The letter that young Richard Moore wrote to future generations, now framed in gold and safely stored in the basement of our sunny yellow sanctuary.
- An old stone we walk over as we enter the breezeway, a piece of that old foundation.
- A hymnal I open randomly on a Sunday morning, presented on the proud occasion of the confirmation of a classmate who left us far too soon.
- Witness trees that dapple the sunlight pleasantly of a Sunday morning, trees that stood before our present edifices graced this town square.
They laid a sure foundation. Ours is not the time to build a lofty spire. Our time is to look with gratitude toward the the grace of our predessors, who imagined our future, who built us this place. Ours is the time, like those who came before us, to dig the foundation deeper. To shore up what is already here, to make it useful and strong, a place where young people can dream from lofty heights.
Young Richard asked that of us. He addressed his words to us, to the generations that would follow him. He wondered who would pump the bellows.
He called us to do what this church has always asked of us: Dig the foundation deeper. Go in faith past the point where we think we have nothing left to give. Reach down deep inside, and find a way to be true to the words of that great Isaac Watts hymn: when we see the sacrifice, and the faith, and the love so amazing, so divine , what more can our souls demand, but "My Life, My All"?
The organ swells. The music floats. Through the wooden doors. Through the canopy of the giant hackberry tree. Out into the old town by the river, and to all the places the people nurtured in this place find themselves taken.
