Sunday, October 11, 2009

Bovina U.P. Church Bicentennial - Sunday

It's after 3 pm and I'm at Russell's catching up on the blog. Today was the 10 am Bicentennial service at the Bovina U.P. Church. There still is some debate on the crowd, but likely at least 200 came for the service.

I started thinking about the centennial celebration in 1909 and though I didn't have the program handy, I was pretty sure that the role of women then was minimal. A check later of the old program showed that for the actual service, all the main parts were by men, though there were women in the choir and the pastor's wife, Mrs. H. B. Speer did a solo.

Today's service saw as the main celebrants Lay Pastor Judi Gage, former pastor Rev. Karen Green, former elder Enid Carter, and the Rev. Cheryl Ann Elfond, who is the Interim Executive Presbyter of the Susquehanna Valley Synod. The soloists were all women too. But the service did not lack men - former Bovina pastors Grunstra and Hammer participated.

I'll be thinking about posting some pictures on my Flickr and Facebook pages to summarize the event, but everyone was highly pleased with how well the weekend went. It was fun catching up with folks. And I got a couple of great leads for pictures and some more information about the first Bovina pastor, Robert Laing, from a relation of his. Some interesting stuff I'll share on the blog at some point. But I'm ready to go home and take a nap!

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