Chapter Two
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A Mission Church
The summer of 1955 was a difficult time in the South. Racial problems had been brewing for years, and on December 1, a black woman in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her bus seat to a white man and was arrested. She went to trial, and the event led to a 381-day boycott of the public transportation system, before the U. S. Supreme Court ruled in November of 1956 that segregation on public transportation was unconstitutional.
The world was also in the midst of the Cold War, with the Korean Conflict not long ended, and President Dwight Eisenhower, the hero of World War II, still in his first term as president. School children were taught to “duck and cover” if a nuclear bomb fell nearby. Bestselling books that year included Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk, Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis, and Andersonville (which won the Pulitzer Prize) by MacKinlay Kantor. While popular culture gave us “Leave It to Beaver,” a new group of poets called the Beats took center stage, and Allen Ginsberg’s reading of his poem “Howl,” led to charges of obscenity.
“Gunsmoke” started its record-breaking run on television. Vladimir Nabokov’s sensational novel Lolita was the talk of the literary world. On the Waterfront had swept the Oscars earlier that year, and three days before the mission church that would become Holy Cross first met in Athens, movie star James Dean was killed in a car accident.
But in those days, when Athens had only three TV channels, long-distance calls were still a bit unusual, and there was, of course, no Internet, and the term “small town,” wasn’t just an idea. Though Athens and Atlanta had daily newspapers and had for more than a century, in many ways, the town was vastly different from what it is today.
That summer, in July, a mission developer from the United Lutheran Church in America, the Rev. Ernie Parrish, arrived in Athens. He was a young man, and he found a small but deeply interested group of potential congregants in Athens.
Parrish had been serving in the small town of Cox’s Creek, Ky., when he received that February an inquiry about coming to Athens to form a mission—the precursor of an actual church. Athens and Clarke County already had a Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, but with 60 or 70 Lutheran students at any one time at the University of Georgia, officials of the Georgia-Alabama Synod of the ULCA thought Athens might be ripe for a congregation. An official from the Synod went so far as to send Parrish a copy of “Shellhart’s book” about the forming of a mission so Parrish would know what he would face.
The whole idea of starting a ULCA mission in Athens was based less on a demonstrated need for it than a sense that there were a large number of “undecided Christians”—those who wanted to attend a church but did not quite fit with any other congregation in town. ULCA Lutherans were already meeting in the nearby town of Elberton (some 35 miles northeast), and Parrish was warned that somehow the Elberton congregation might be part of his responsibilities when he arrived.
Charles Fritz, then president of the Georgia-Alabama Synod, met Parrish in Dayton, Ky., where they talked of the challenges in Athens. Fritz was blunt: It would take several weeks of calling and making contacts before services could even begin. Parrish was interested, but, as it turned out, he was finishing his studies at Hamma Theological Seminary in Springfield, Ohio, as well as serving in Cox’s Creek, so Fritz made a decision. Subject to graduation and ordination, Parrish would become a mission developer for the Synod and start work in Athens on July 1, 1955.
To be fair, the idea did have some foundation in fact. In the summer of 1954, the Synod had conducted a survey and found, to their satisfaction, interest in starting a congregation of the ULCA. The major response was in what they called the “south-southwest part of the city”—the area known as Five Points, which included (then and now) numerous UGA professors and their families. Ultimately, the Synod agreed there were three reasons to come to Athens: the number of “unchurched,” the presence of the University of Georgia, and the existing congregation in Elberton.
Unfortunately, as Fritz had to admit to Parrish in a March 1955 letter, the survey was, in fact, more anecdotal than rigorous. In fact, Fritz said “Only a small portion of the city was surveyed,” and it was a “spot survey and very incomplete.” In fact, only 38 adults and 20 children were identified as possible members of a ULCA congregation. Some 338 people were listed in the survey as “not at home” (!) while there were in the area, an astonishing 22 vacant houses.
Half a century ago, Athens in almost no way resembled the town it was to become. The city’s population was 32,000, houses cost from $8,000 for a typical ranch home to $40,000 for an “estate.” The University of Georgia was home to only 8,000 students, and out of that number less than 75 could be identified as possible Lutheran members. In fact, Elberton was far more successful already, with 70 enrolled members. (Lutheranism in northeast Georgia and northwestern South Carolina had been around for more than a hundred years—many of the earliest founders of Oconee County, S. C., for example, were Lutheran.)
Unfortunately, as Fritz wrote to Parrish at the end of March, the pastor of the Elberton congregation had resigned. Despite the uncertainty of it all, Parrish liked Athens and decided to move here.
During the summer of 1955, Parrish began making calls and visiting potential congregants, using the Shellhart book as a guide on how to start a mission church. Because an actual congregation needed an enrolled membership of at least 50, there seemed little expectation in the short run that anything more than a mission might be developed.
Finally, on Thursday evening, Oct. 2, the small group Parrish had been able to gather met for the first time in the Franklin Room of the Davis Brothers Cafeteria in downtown Athens (currently the location of The Grill). The meeting “a la Shellhart, as Parrish reported to Rev. Fritz,” went well, and the room was fine, with a piano, indirect lighting, and a curtain covering one wall, which served as a suitable backdrop for an altar.
In a gesture of solidarity, Pastor Deffner of the Missouri Synod Church in Athens loaned the new group a portable “field altar” for the first service. With 19 at the initial meeting and 24 at the first service, things were going well, and Parrish told Fritz “We will soon start a church school.”
But what name would the new church have? Because the first service was on St. Michael’s Festival Day, several in the group suggested calling the church St. Michael’s. Others suggested Holy Cross, but the name with the strongest initial support was Christ the King. Fritz very much liked calling it St. Michael’s, since, as he noted, Holy Cross and Christ the King ring “RC in my mind.”
Berdia Brittain, the last surviving charter member still enrolled at Holy Cross, who passed away in 2003, taught the first Sunday school class at the still-unnamed mission with two pupils—the “Ridenhour boys,” as she remembered them. Eventually, as she wrote in her sketch of early church history, the class grew to six and often more and included Jimmy and Lois Bergeaux and Jimmy and Billy Jordan, sons of a noted professor of Romance languages at UGA.
“The Mission Board was interested in a Lutheran church in Athens,” said Mrs. Brittain, in an interview taped some years ago. “They felt as if it was time to see if one could be started. Ernie Parrish was a mission developer, and he came down to help us establish a congregation.”
The basement of the restaurant soon proved an uncomfortable venue, and the congregants moved to the Chamber of Commerce facilities in downtown Athens. It wasn’t until the group was settled here that they voted to name the mission organization Holy Cross, even though it was not yet a full church. The Chamber must have soon realized that allowing any group to use its space in off hours meant they would have to make it available to others who applied, so it asked Holy Cross to find another place for worship.
A new location didn’t come easily. Finally, however, the congregation wound up in an unlikely place: the basement of the Henrietta Apartments in Five Points—a building that still exists. While the group was pleased to have the spot for worship services, the roar of washers and dryers in an upstairs laundromat often meant shouted sermons and bellowed hymns. One large room in the basement served as sanctuary, while the Sunday school used a smaller one attached to it. The location did offer one huge advantage: No one else wanted it. Before, services meant, as Mrs. Brittain wrote, “assembling everything each Sunday, from the folding altar to setting up chairs, pulpit, and lectern. Now everything could be left in place and the doors locked.”
The women of the church set about making and donating sets of paraments for the services, with Mrs. Bessie Player and Mrs. Lessie Vogelsang creating green ones, and Miss Dora Mullendorf red. Mrs. Brittian added white and purple sets, while a Mrs. Player and Mrs. Karl Garrison made and donated two Fair Linens for the altar.
Some parishioners of Holy Cross were already pushing Rev. Fritz to consider approving a full-time minister for the mission church, but the number of congregants who consistently came never yet approached 50, so the point, for the time being, was moot. Throughout the spring and summer of 1956, much church correspondence concerned the Elberton congregation and sought ways it could be helped from the Athens group.
For a time during that year, Holy Cross looked at a piece of property at the corner of Milledge and Rutherford as a potential church site, but it was sold before the church could act. Parrish reported that year that the church might get a site “for a very good price” on Alps Road, which was then on the far western boundary of town. Little was in the vicinity yet, but soon Athens’s first shopping center—Beechwood—would radically alter the entire area.
Churches, in their early years, are tenuous things. Enthusiasm can ebb and flow unpredictably, and Holy Cross suffered the same kind of growing pains. While the church had many faithful members—some of whom stayed their whole lives—others came in for a time and then left, and the church could not sustain enough members to approach full membership in the ULCA. Worse, the location in the basement of an apartment complex meant the congregants had to put up with laundry noises and—according to Mrs. Brittain—a “giant roach population” that was “fast taking over.”
At the Georgia-Alabama Synod office, Dr. Fritz was concerned that he was not hearing from Parrish as much as he wanted, and he wrote Parrish saying, “Both the Board and Mission Committee of the Synod are deeply concerned.” Despite the gloomy basement and the uncertain mission membership, Parrish pressed onward, going so far as to write to pastors in Sharon, Penn., about possible Lutherans who might be moving to Athens with the opening of a new General Electric plant.
By early 1957, Dr. Fritz’s confidence in the Athens mission had improved to the point that he was hopeful that it could become an organized church by Easter. Still, Holy Cross could not approach the necessary minimum 50 members, and correspondence between the Athens mission and the Georgia-Alabama Synod trailed off during the rest of the year.
Sadly, Parrish’s wife was ill during much of the winter and spring of 1957-58, and complicating matters was that a Lutheran church in Anniston, Alabama, had called Parrish to become its minister. The decision was not an easy one, however, with Mrs. Parrish ill and the Athens congregation still struggling to survive. By this time, Parrish had invested three years of his life here, and leaving would be difficult. As a result, he took a long time deciding, and four weeks after the Anniston church had called Parrish, he still had not decided what to do.
In February 1958, Dr. Raymond Wood had taken over from Fritz as president of the Georgia-Alabama Synod, and he pressed Parrish for an answer. Finally, Parrish decided to stay in Athens, where, despite problems, he felt more needed and at home. “It was not so much a negative call to Anniston as a positive reply to the present call,” he said to Wood.
Despite his feelings for Athens, however, Parrish was less than sure the Georgia-Alabama Synod really wanted a church in Athens. He said the Synod had offered him “little support,” and wrote Wood that it was “true the church sent me here, but after that the attitude seems to have been to prove the necessity for our existence.” Considering the sketchy nature of the original needs survey, Parrish probably had a point.
After its initial successes, the mission was, at best, unsure of itself, according to letters in the church files. Parrish reported the departure of five families who felt Holy Cross was “not a growing concern,” understandable for a congregation meeting in a basement beneath a laundromat.
With the coming of warmer weather, however, things began to look up, both for Holy Cross and for Parrish. Wood wrote him a gentle, kind letter of thanks for all Parrish had done, and shared his sorrow at the illness of Parrish’s wife. By the end of May, the idea of a church site on Alps Road was once more moving to the forefront, and Parrish said it “was on a high spot diagonally behind the proposed shopping center.” (In fact, it was diagonally in front of what would become Beechwood.)
For more than three years, Holy Cross had been struggling to stay alive, but the new era of hope and good feeling that began in the spring of 1958 continued unabated through the summer and into the fall. Finally, in what can only be called a leap of faith, Dr. Wood, in a letter of September 5, 1958, told Parrish that the Synod would be moving ahead with plans to change the Athens mission to an organized ULCA church, possibly as early as February 1959.
“Our goal will be 50 charter members,” wrote Wood, “but”--in a policy change that would become important in the history of Holy Cross--“it can be done with less.”
The idea was that the conversion of the congregation from mission to full church should take place on February 15, 1959—the first Sunday in Lent. Wood drove to Athens and met with Parrish to discuss the plan—one of many trips Wood would make during a period of concentrated hard work, without which Holy Cross might never have been formed.
Mrs. Parrish’s health finally got much better, to the relief of all, but the whole issue of becoming a full church had somewhat unexpected complexities. As he was a mission developer, Parrish would not be available to be the first called minister of Holy Cross, though Wood hoped he would stay a few months to “smooth the transition.” Also, the Georgia-Alabama Synod had to apply for special permission for Holy Cross to form without 50 members to the national Board of American Missions.
Still, the time had come: Holy Cross would change from a mission to a church. It would usher in a time of growth—and challenges ahead.
Chapter 3
