Iconic Oregon District church will close in Dec.
Dec. 31 will be the last day for the church, according to pastor.
Declining membership and resources are just too much for 158-year-old St. Paul Evangelical Lutheran Church to overcome.
It survived Dayton’s great flood of 1913 and more than one arsonist’s flame, but declining membership and resources are just too much for a 158-year-old church at the edge of Dayton’s Oregon District to handle.
St. Paul Evangelical Lutheran Church pastor Robert E. Miller confirmed rumors that the church located at 239 Wayne Ave. will close at the end of the year.
“It has survived a lot,” Miller said. “We’ve been an outreach ministry here ... for over 40 years with our feeding, hygiene, clothing and birth certificate program. And we know that ministry has a beginning and it has an end. Now it is time for St. Paul’s to pay it forward to someone else.”
Dec. 31 will be the last day for the church that dates back to 1859.
The steeple was built around 1869 and the parish hall in 1954.
The future of Project Blessings, a nonprofit that has fed needy families and individuals at the church since 1978, is undetermined, Miller said.
Jeremiah’s Letter, a program at the church that serves 18,000 people annually by providing direct services and educational opportunities, is also mulling its future
Miller said St. Paul once thrived, but its membership has fallen by half every 10 years since 1969.
“The kind of rebirth the city is having downtown is not going to fill the pews on Sunday,” St. Paul’s pastor of 17 years said. “It was a church of German immigrants (when it opened). Back in the ’50s and ’60s it had more members than it could shake a stick at.”
The growth of the suburbs and population change in downtown and the rest of downtown impacted the St. Paul’s congregation.
The church now has fewer than