In 1893, construction workers were hired to put in a foundation for a building on Lister Avenue in Worksburg, now known as Falconer. Brick layers were hired to lay the brick walls. Woodworkers were hired to make long wooden pews, an altar, pulpit, lectern and a Communion rail. This new building was not for a business or a store. Businesses and stores are needed to provide people with clothes and tools and furniture and bedding. But back then in 1891, when the average life expectancy was 50 years (no anesthesia, no penicillin, no anti-bacteria drugs and smallpox could be fatal), people faced a challenge that people today still face. That challenge is death and how to deal with it.

The people who hired all those construction workers were Swedish Lutherans. They had been a part of the Union Church In Falconer. It was built on Harrison Street (now Elmwood Avenue) before 1891, and its members were thirty Swedish Methodists, 35 Swedish Lutherans and 25 Swedish Mission Friends. The Lutherans got together for a meeting and voted to form their own church. The day they voted was Oct. 26, 1891. Those people were Andrew and Sophia Ross, Warner and Hilda Ross, Mrs. Susanne Jacobson, Carl and Louise Anderson, Miss Fredericka Olson, John and Olive Asker, Leonard Nyberg, Gust and Clara Anderson, K.H. Starner, John and Emma Balder, Carl Zakrison, Mrs. Maja Larson, N. P. and Sophia Johnson, Ephraim and Hilda Mary Carlson, Gust Peterson, Joseph and Christine Anderson, and Frank Grandin. They had their first church services in the schoolhouse on North Work Street, which in 1945 was called the old Village Hall (that building no longer exists). The congregation was incorporated on Dec. 12, 1891, under the name Svenska Evangeliska Lutherska Bethlehem Forsanlingen (Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Bethlehem Church).

The purpose of those 26 Lutherans was to comfort consciences, to offer Jesus’ mercy as a way of life instead of rewarding the good and punishing the bad, and to promise that people who trust Jesus will go through death to eternal life.

In a couple of years, those Lutherans voted to build a meeting hall, with the measurements to be 60 feet long, 40 feet wide, and walls 16 feet high. The roof was to be peaked and a bell tower on the left. That is when the construction workers, brick layers and woodworkers were hired. To pay those brick masons and woodworkers, the people of Bethlehem, now a lot more than 26 people, said that each of them would pay dues of 50 cents, a dollar per couple, per month. In 1893 the dues were reduced to 50 cents a month for each man, and 25 cents per month for each woman. When this group decided to call a pastor, they offered a salary of $15 a month.

One way that purpose of giving people Jesus’ mercy happened through Confirmation. Here is a picture from 1915 of a Confirmation Reunion held in the basement of that building on Lister Avenue.

When those Swedish Lutherans wanted to purchase a pipe organ in 1909, Rev. Bergren somehow was able to have half of the $4,600 for the cost of the organ paid for by the Andrew Carnegie, steel magnate in Pittsburgh.

After the organ was installed, a pump organ, it was discovered that the organist was not quite tall enough and so not strong enough to push the pump pedals. So those creative problem-solving Swedes drilled two holes in the floor underneath the two pump pedals, attached two ropes, one to each pedal, and had two men in the basement pull on the ropes to pull the pump pedals for the organist.

In 1918, Bethlehem and all churches in Falconer were closed for several weeks due to the Spanish flu epidemic.

After 38 years of comforting consciences with the mercy of Jesus, Lutherska Bethlehem Church caught on fire early on the morning of Jan. 30, 1925. The first man to see the fire alerted the neighborhood by running down the street firing his pistol. The church completely burned down.

The American Legion offered the Lutherans their rooms in the Community Building to use for their church services, which were held there until the new church was built on the corner of Phetteplace and Falconer Street. A few years earlier, a church group called The Gleaners had bought the four lots on Phetteplace between Main Street and Falconer Street. Those creative Swedish Lutherans, to raise a little more money during the Great Depression, grew potatoes on those plots and sold the potatoes. But they did not plant the next year because they were told that if they got any income off that property, they would have to pay taxes on the property. A little math and the Swedes saw that the taxes would take away all their profit.

The Lutherans built their church on the corner of Falconer Street, not the corner of Main Street, because of the noise of the trolley. Two weeks after the fire on Feb. 17, the Lutherans had a meeting in Grandin’s Shoe Store, owned by founding member Frank Grandin. (Grandin’s Shoe store later became Lydells’ Grocery). At that meeting the plans presented by the building committee were voted on and approved. So, once again the construction workers poured a foundation, brick layers put down brick, and the company that is now Fancher Chair made the pews (at a cost of $2,200). The estimated cost for the new church was $35,000, but the final cost was $60,000.

By Christmas of that same year, progress on the construction of the new church was enough that on Christmas morning at six o’clock Julotta was celebrated in the church sanctuary with piles of lumber, bags of cement, and workmen’s tool boxes taking up a lot of space. People sat on chairs and boxes and saw horses.

Two days later the goodness of Jesus was given in the first baptism in the new building, the baptism of a young lady named Ruthea Carlson, who became a faithful member of Bethlehem.

Thirty more years passed of giving Jesus’ forgiveness to people, and the Sunday School had over a hundred and ninety children when Fanchon Fuller was Sunday School Superintendent. There were so many kids that three classes were held in the balcony of the church, another in the choir loft, and another in the kitchen, plus all the classes in the fellowship hall. In the early 1960’s an education building was built off the side of the church.

The last story about Bethlehem and its purpose of giving the promises of Jesus to people is that, amidst the baptisms, weddings, and the many more funerals, a man who was a member of Bethlehem was in a bad car crash. He recovered, but did have some brain damage that made him unable to keep a job. He was let go from several jobs, so again and again he was judged as not good enough. The man took his own life. His parents, in their grief and in their trust in Jesus who does not judge, does not demand goodness but instead gives goodness, donated a processional brass cross to Bethlehem in memory of their son. That gift of a cross was them saying that their son was safe in Jesus, that Jesus would be merciful to him and give him new life.

For 125 years that promise of Jesus to comfort people has been proclaimed at Bethlehem to the people who were gathered to sit in those long wooden pews. Some of those people are grandchildren and great grandchildren of the early members and they sit in the same pew their great-grandmother sat in. For 125 years that demand to be a good person has been met with and overcome with the death and resurrection of Jesus, who promises, “I make you good.” For 125 years people sitting in Bethlehem have told each other that promise, “Jesus makes you good.” Of course, the people of Bethlehem also had to make repairs to the building – a new roof, fix leaks, clean, dust, polish, fix leaking toilets, and refinish the education building. All that work is done so that the comforting promise of Jesus is can be told. It is why construction workers and brick layers and woodworkers were hired to build what was first known as the Svenska Evangeliska Lutherska Bethlehem Forsanlingen on Lister Avenue in Falconer.