Bethany Lutheran Church
Webster Groves, MO

Built in 1904

The year of the

"World's Fair"

Denmark.  Tiny land in a big world.  Land of lusty patriots in love with its green-garbed soil and zestful air.  Land of venturesome men who dared to sail the westward seas to know strange scenes and to brave new days.

What does all this have to do with Bethany? It pin-points the people who founded this church.  Stalwart, sunny Danes they were.

Their first attempts in the 1870's, to organize a congregation were abortive.  Danes, however, do not easily give up once in the grip of an idea.  So before the 20th century bowed in, their congregation was firmly established.

In 1904, World's Fair year in St. Louis, they built their modest Bethany.  Still in good use today, the structure has clean quiet lines, and homey chastity, and sharp roof slant of church and steeple, reminiscent of wayside chapels one may come upon in some hamlet outside Copenhagen.

Within, the simplicity prevails.  Restraint, neatness, order, are here.

The one concession to striking ornamentation is the Bethany scene behind the alter.  A gifted artist from Denmark had set up an exhibit at the World's Fair.  Just a glimpse at the paintings on display, and the pastor quickly commissioned him to do this colorful reredos piece for Bethany.  It covers the whole chancel wall.

Mary sits at the feet of Jesus quietly attentive to his words of wise grace.  In the background her sister Martha "distracted with much serving" frowns upon Mary's slowness to do her part in entertaining the Savior handsomely.

Bethany was long a culture within a culture, marked more by devotion than by action, a little spiritual island of Danes, loving America quietly, but loving old homeland hardly less.

In spite of this shy apartness, Bethany's relations with others has been cordial, astonishingly so.

Its pastors hobnobbed with "the Missourians" (as everybody knows, this is what most St. Louis Lutherans are to this day) and for advanced training sometimes enrolled at Missouri's Concordia seminary.  Concordia professors arranged Bethany's pulpit supplies in pastorless times and lent friendly aid in other ways.

Yet Bethany continued so Danish that as late as 1960 when its fast emerging evangelism enthusiasm was bringing new zest to it life, the neighborhood was still unaware that the little church was no longer totally Danish.

In that newer day, the parish worker, ringing unchurched door bells at Webster Groves homes, would tell a housewife that she was from Bethany Lutheran church--"you know, the little Danish church at the corner......" only to hear the puzzled astonishment of the woman's reply. "Oh, have the Lutherans taken over that church?"

So the months went by and the years and the decades, and Bethany was still a modest God's house by the side of the road, doing its work quietly, troubling nobody,, noticed by few.  Then came a wonderful day.  The little body of Danes to which Bethany belonged became a part, in 1960, of the great new American Lutheran Church.  Now life really began to hum at Bethany.

In 1961, Pastor Arland O. Friske, by decent a happy Norseman, came to St. Louis as Bethany's new shepherd.  Swiftly now, Bethany was on its was to becoming what the pastor calls 
a cosmopolitan church with bright visions of expanding opportunities and community concern and the wide world's needs.

DALO Glass Tinting

 

South County Historical Society
 

Lancer Remodeling