The little church on the prairie

Our Savior's Lutheran Church, McGregor, Divide County, North Dakota
 

Our Savior’s Lutheran Church, McGregor, North Dakota. My paternal grandparents helped found this church in 1909. It was the centerpiece of many happy family events - baptisms, confirmations, and weddings – and those necessary sad ones. My grandparents, an aunt, two uncles, and many extended family members are buried in its adjacent cemetery. 

Prairie churches are a fixture of the rural landscape of North Dakota. Their simple, plain and quiet exteriors reflect the nature of those that worshiped there. 

My grandparents, Norwegian immigrants, and their neighbors and fellow immigrants built this church. In most rural communities, it was the first building that went up, and often remains as the last standing after the community has died out. In this case, the church was part of the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Churches of America) denomination, which was connected to the Church of Norway. In Norway, the church was not separated from the state, and all of a person’s milestones were registered with the state through the church. In order to marry in the church, one must have been baptized and confirmed, so those events were important to the community as well as the family.

The prairie church was more than just a religious building, though. It was often the center of communal life, where isolated families came together for social functions.

Our Savior's is now a shell of its former self and no longer functions as a church. But this is how I choose to remember it.