Steel beams can be seen from a wooden catwalk beneath the pitched roof of First Lutheran Church in Decorah. The beams were part of a sizeable project aimed at restoring the 148-year-old church’s structural integrity. (Photo by Seth Boyes)
By Zach Jensen,
An iconic Decorah church was on the verge of ruin in 2019, but thanks to a devoted congregation and an award-winning construction company, First Lutheran Church’s steeple still blesses the community’s skyline and will likely continue to do so for generations to come.
“We still have a beautiful building, and we’re going to keep on making it more useful,” said the Rev. Michael Wilker, First Lutheran’s senior pastor since January 2022. “I’m really pleased with the builders that put it together.”
First Lutheran member Dale Goodman said the project to save the more-than 140-year-old church came together perfectly.
“I worked in commercial construction for about 16 years,” Goodman said. “So, I’ve had lots of contact with contractors, architects and engineers. I have never run into a more perfect construction situation than the one we had in this part of the project. They were amazing problem solvers, and Ron Stroup was just amazing at looking at things and saying ‘This is the best way to do it,’ and he was exactly right. There’s an old saying that no construction project is ever built on time or within budget, and this was both.”
Wilker said church ushers likely recognized the problem in 2019, when they noticed some cracks in the structure’s walls were growing — after which an engineer was brought in to survey the issue and immediately determined the building was an unsafe place to hold worship services. The 148-year-old church was on the edge of falling in upon itself — leaving still-visible cracks and crevices where the plaster in the sanctuary was pulling away from the building’s framework.
“Sometimes, we call it Roofageddon,” the pastor said. “This started in 2019, and then in 2020, COVID hit. The congregation was dealing with so much.”
But Wilker said that, when the building’s structural issues were revealed, the congregation didn’t beat around the bush.
“They made an affirmative decision they wanted to keep the sanctuary, because another option was to tear it down,” the pastor said. “Comparing the costs, it’s very expensive to have kept this building for Decorah. It could have been more efficient and less costly to build a new building, rather than to preserve this beautiful, historic building, but that’s what we decided to do, because keeping the building and this beautiful steeple is important to us, and it’s important to the whole community.”
The First Lutheran congregation not only met the financial challenge but surpassed it — raising approximately $1 million for the structural repairs and setting aside the remainder for future improvements.
“The congregation is so generous that, by December of last year, we raised $3.8 million for the whole project — including stabilizing the sanctuary and future remodeling,” Wilker said. “We call it the ‘For Generations to Come Campaign,’ because we want this ministry, in this building, to be here for generations to come.”
Goodman said he’s never seen so much money raised by a church in so little time.
“I’ve spent half my life in work that required fundraising, and I’ve never seen anything like it,” Goodman said. “I suspect there are few churches in the country who could raise more than $3 million in four months. I was the director of Camp Ewalu down at Strawberry Point, and our first capital campaign was just under $1 million, and that took us seven years.”
First Lutheran’s congregation totals about 1,000 members with an average of 200 attendees every weekend, according to church officials.
“It’s really a strong congregation,” Wilker said. “We have a critical mass of people from every decade — from the 2-year-olds to the 90-year-olds, and they have a strong heart for caring for the whole community. Our mission statement says that we gather for worship and witness and ecumenical service — meaning it’s not just for the Lutherans. It’s for everybody in the household of God. We’re not a congregation that thinks we’re doing it for ourselves. We’re doing it for the glory of God and for our neighbors. They’re a fantastic congregation.”
The “Roofageddon” project required steel girders to be installed from the roof, through the sanctuary and into the bedrock beneath the church. New steel rafters were installed to hold up the church’s roof as well as the sanctuary’s ceiling. As this was being done, First Lutheran’s congregation worshipped at Luther College and in a neighbor’s carriage house for a number of weeks while Joseph Company installed steel pillars inside the church’s sanctuary to hold the ceiling and roof up while the contractor worked on them.
“The ceiling is really secure now,” Wilker said, adding that the sanctuary project was completed this past April. “It’s kind of like we have a new skeleton, and that skeleton is holding the building up. It’s a 21st century skeleton for a 148-year-old building.”
Finholdt Construction of Decorah and Joseph Company, Inc. of Austin, Minnesota, worked on the project, and the latter received an Eagle Award from the Associated Builders and Contractors for Excellence in Construction.
“All the credit goes to our supervisory and frontline staff who creatively designed structural modifications to the roof trusses and concrete foundations to prepare this iconic church for another 150 years and beyond,” said The Joseph Company’s President Carter Wagner.
And now First Lutheran’s congregation is taking the opportunity to consider how to remodel the other portions of the building, such as the church offices and educational spaces — those areas are inaccessible via the church’s lone elevator, which transports individuals from an exterior sidewalk to the sanctuary.
“We’re in the process,” Wilker said of the possible future renovations. “We haven’t made any decisions yet. We’re still working with our contractor and architect to figure out exactly what we want to do. We might start on that in 2025.”
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