PERSON: Saying goodbye

You know, new churches are built to be multi-purpose buildings with worship centers rather than sanctuaries, food courts rather than fellowship halls. They are grand. They are spectacular.

But they just don’t have the patina, the character, the unbelievable workmanship that went into the Old First Methodist Church. When you entered the sanctuary, there was no doubt you were in the house of God. No big screens. No electric guitars. No block parties with a few hymns thrown in. You had gone to church – and you knew it. You felt it. You believed it. It was the closest to Home we would be until our final day.

We spent our formative years in that church building. Many of us were christened in that sanctuary. We learned that the carved oak pews slept quite nicely as we spent our early years trying to stay awake during “big church”.

When I called my mother and brothers early Friday morning to tell them the news, it was like calling to report a death in the family. My oldest brothers had reached the age of majority in the old church. To them, the building on Candler was the Winder First Methodist Church – not the building we moved into after they had gone off to college.

Mother wanted to go by the church to see the aftermath in the daylight. As the tears flowed, so did the memories.

“All of my babies were baptized in this church,” she said as she recalled the winter day in 1944 when my second brother Bob and cousin Bill received infant baptism at the curved mahogany altar. It was during WWII. My father and his older brother Sells were home on leave, so the family planned a double christening. The pew on which they sat graces my home today. Mother has the one that Daddy sat on in the back of the church whenever he ushered.

My grandparents had moved to Winder from Statham in 1922. They immediately joined the Winder First Methodist Church and so began our family’s relationship with the First Methodist family. My father became a member in 1929. When my parents married in 1942, Mother joined the church with my father.

“There were so many pretty services in that church,” Mother recalled last Friday. “But the service I remember most was your granddaddy’s funeral in 1945. The church was full. People all over town knew and loved Kemp Arnold. I can still smell the flowers.”

It had been a difficult decision for the congregation to move to North Broad Street in 1964. But times had changed. People no longer walked to church; they now drove 2.5 cars per family. Churches like those built between 1904 and 1914 for the Methodist, Baptist, and Christian congregations had been placed in residential neighborhoods so as to be a short walk from home. In the 1960s, parking lots had become a necessity. Urban churches were going out of vogue. So we moved to a field next to Clay Howard’s house. Plenty of parking.

But part of our hearts and souls remained with the vaulted tongue-and-groove ceilings, stained glass windows, heart pine floors, and carved pews in the building on the corner of Candler and Church Streets. Until I watched her burn, I never realized just how much of me was so grounded in that church building.

I’m so grateful to have been blessed with a family that ensured we grew up as part of the church family in the Old First Methodist Church. I’m grateful for the memories of Sunday School in the little rooms with tambour doors. I’m grateful for memories of lying on the oak pews looking up at those spectacular ceilings from which were suspended ecclesiastic cylindrical lights trimmed with brass crosses. I’m grateful for memories of my first communion taken between my parents at the mahogany stained altar rail.

I’m grateful my daddy, grandparents and Haase Jr. were not here to see the beloved old church ablaze in the eeriness of that night. Our memories become real to us when we can go by the building and say, “That’s where this happened.” When the buildings die, we are set adrift with only our memories. It’s as though we’ve lost our loved ones all over again.

So when I heard the church was on fire, I knew I had to go to say goodbye. I couldn’t imagine not being there when she breathed her last. She was there when I came into the world. It only seemed appropriate for me to be there to see her out. Goodbye, old friend. You will always live in our hearts.

Helen Person is a Winder resident and columnist for the Barrow Journal. You can reach her at helenperson@windstream.net.