First Posted: 3/30/2015
SHAWNEE TOWNSHIP — On an early July Sunday in 1955, the Rev. Robert Kimes, pastor of Shawnee Methodist Church, stood before his congregation and announced a building campaign to replace the one-room, white-frame structure on Zurmehly Road they’d used for 91 years.
Kimes, who current lead pastor the Rev. Bryan Bucher calls one of three pivotal leaders in the church’s history, set the price tag at about $150,000 to move the congregation into a building to fit the needs of a growing congregation in growing Shawnee Township.
Ninety-two summers earlier, the Rev. LeRoy A. Belt, a Methodist circuit rider and the first of Bucher’s important leaders, sat astride his horse before the congregation and called for money to build a church after a skunk (or skunks, depending on the telling) was turned loose in the schoolhouse they had been using for meetings. It was 1863, the United States was well into the second year of Civil War and Belt, Bucher said, had upset local southern sympathizers.
Thomas A. Maltbie, a Union veteran of the Civil War and son of Harrison Maltbie, the church’s third pastor, told the story in a Jan. 1, 1916, address to the Allen County Historical Society recounted in a 2009 edition of the Allen County Reporter. “These southern sympathizers, losing the battle, their next carnal weapons they drew from the armory of the woods …” The skunks forced the worshippers to retreat from the Shadyside school “to a room in Uncle Billy Breese’s home (which stood atop a hill on Fort Amanda Road, and later became known as Breesewood) and there the prayers went on encouraged by that giant in stature and loyalty, who proposed to the good people to build the Shawnee church, which was erected while I was with the 81st driving the johnnies to and fro, and capturing Atlanta …
“The Pastor Rev. L.A. Belt,” Maltbie continued, “in the opening prayer, kneeled and prayed thus: ‘Oh, Lord, we thank Thee for skunks. It was through the influence and scents of a little skunk that this people were persuaded to build this house to Thy name.”
Methodists had deep roots in Shawnee Township long before the church was dedicated. “The first religious society in Shawnee may be said to have been formed by Rev. James B. Finley, a Methodist itinerant, who preached in the homes of the people, particularly at George Coon’s house,” according to the 1885 “History of Allen County.” The “1976 History of Allen County, Ohio” dates the arrival of Methodists in Allen County at 1829.
In 1860, a Methodist society known as the Breese Class was formed. It was this small group that was the target of the skunk attack and that pledged $450 to begin construction of the church. The church, built at a cost of $991.95 by the Kemper Brothers from Cridersville, was dedicated in September 1865. That same year, church records show, the name of Breese Class was changed to Shawnee Chapel.
Early on, the church adopted the motto: “Never find fault. Never do wrong. Never go fishing on Sunday.” Fishing may have been out, but work was not. A church member writing in 1938 related the story of an early service cut short so wheat could be harvested before an approaching storm hit. Belt “sang a hymn, had prayer then dismissed them saying go home and gather in all the grain you can and I will help. So he with 22 young girls and boys … cut a nine-acre field of wheat on the Joe Dixon farm. It rained at sundown but they had finished the field.”
For more than nine decades the little white church would serve the needs of Shawnee Township. On March 14, 1906, The Lima News urged young and old to attend the Wednesday night prayer meetings to “strengthen their spiritual natures.” The church was where township residents wed and was the last stop before the adjacent Shawnee Cemetery when they died. Many early residents, like “old pioneer” Michael Shaffer who, according to the Feb. 12, 1890, edition of the Lima Daily Times, came “to this part of the country when it was a wilderness,” had funeral services in the Shawnee chapel.
The church also served the township’s temporal needs. In May 1916, the Lima Times-Democrat reported, “The annual commencement of Shawnee Township schools will be held Thursday evening, May 4, at Shawnee Methodist Chapel. Fifteen eighth-grade pupils from nine schools in the township will make up the class.” The chapel would be the site of graduations until a centralized school was completed in 1926.
The chapel also was the site of annual Memorial Day celebrations and an Eisteddfod, a singing competition named for a similar event in Wales. The 1923 Eisteddfod drew such a large crowd to watch the township’s school children compete that the neighboring Shawnee Township House “was thrown open to the crowd,” the Times-Democrat wrote May 26, 1923. “Participants repeated each number, singing one before the adjudicator at the chapel and again before the audience in the township house.”
On Nov. 19, 1915, the church invited “anybody and everybody” to join in Thanksgiving services “in their beautiful rural church,” which, the Times Democrat pointed out, had good connections to the Western Ohio Railway, an interurban line. After the services, “the Ladies Aid society will serve a turkey dinner in the township hall, just across from the church.” The dinner could be had for 25 cents and offered a chance to enjoy “the splendid fellowship of these country folks,” the Times-Democrat wrote.
By the mid-1950s, the “beautiful rural church” was in the middle the middle of an increasingly un-rural township. Church membership soared and the “country folk” were replaced by physicians and other professionals. Enter pastor Kimes.
“’The church with the cross reaching upward toward a building that is eternal in the heavens …’ Those words symbolize the brick structure and design of the new Shawnee Methodist Church, which this Sunday will open its doors to a grateful congregation,” The Lima News wrote Sept. 7, 1957. “For 90 years, members of the Shawnee Methodist Church have attended services in the one-room frame structure just west of the new building.”
An education wing was added on the north side of the church in 1966 at a cost of $225,000. In 1968, the Methodist Church and Evangelical United Brethren Church merged creating the United Methodist Church.
In 1991, Dr. Joseph Bishman, the third of Bucher’s pivotal pastors, arrived at Shawnee United Methodist, which had faced declining attendance since the late 1970s as other denominations opened churches in the area and industry left. Bishman reversed the trend by, among other things, revising or starting programs to reach out to the community, including Fall Fest, Harvest for the Hungry and Motorcycle Sunday.
Shawnee United Methodist Church merged with Blue Lick United Methodist Church in 2007 to form Community United Methodist Church.
