Winter solstice

view from the Broadway parking lot of Broadway United Methodist Church of Our Lady of Lourdes' steeple before noon on the winter solstice of 2010

The high point of the sun is the lowest of the year to-day. Behind and above early morning clouds there was a total lunar eclipse, that some people in North America were able to see.

The catholic church is a czech parish with spanish language masses. The protestant church had a czech congregation (at one time), its final services will be on the Feast of Stephen, the day that the carol has King Wenceslas look out on the snow in the moonlight.

This methodist church has a lone weekend service with less than two dozen participants. The congregation's endowment has been spent, a time ago; and by the rules of the polity of the Methodist Church, the threshold of congregants had not been made. It is one of three methodist churches in the county closing. The community programmes will continue from Broadway Methodist. Methodist ministries will operate in the North Broadway neighborhood from the offices attached to the sanctuary. Comparatively, the Catholic Church's threshold is one, and many closed parishes were flush with money. The leadership methods of the two churches' in town is different.

Their sanctuary has a life size painted reproduction of Da Vinci's 'Last Supper', and nine large stained glass windows by the Cleveland artist, R. Toland Wright. The windows were commissioned in 1918, and the painting in 1924. The present building's construction began in 1918 and services were held in late December 1919.

The congregation's founding was in 1872, and was part of the home missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Some czechs had left the church, and were anti-clerical and broadly agnostic, and called themselves 'freethinkers', some of these joined protestant congregations. The neighborhood was heavily czech (bohemian) with the catholic parishes of Old St. Wenceslaus (1867) and Our Lady of Lourdes (1883).

For more than two generations, both english and czech services were held. In 1968 the congregation joined the United Methodists. For a time beginning in the 1980s a korean presence was there under the name of Korean American United Methodist Church, and as St. Andrew Cooperative Parish.
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essay updated and expanded 22 December 2010.