For 150 years, St. John’s Evangelical Protestant Church has been entwined with Cullman’s community and culture as thoroughly as any of the city’s first founding institutions. On Sunday, May 5, the church will commemorate its sesquicentennial with both a formal service and an informal celebration — each intended to embrace its close-knit membership while also extending an invitation to the wider public.
For the church’s current members as well as those who’ve moved away from the area, Sunday’s 150th anniversary celebration will mark a joyful local homecoming. Under the leadership of Senior Pastor John Richter, events will begin at 9 a.m. with a prayer service in the church sanctuary, followed by a 10 a.m. brunch in the adjoining Atrium before worship and the Sacrament of the Holy Communion inside Christ Hall at 11 a.m.
The celebration sheds some of its formality at noon, when members and guests are equally welcome at a church picnic. St. John’s has planned a festive afternoon outside on the church grounds, including an old-fashioned fish fry, a cake and pie eating contest, as well as a variety of games and entertainment for young and old alike.
Founded as the First Evangelical Protestant Church on May 1, 1874, St. John’s shares a history with Cullman that dates to the city’s very earliest days as a post-Civil War municipality. Though he isn’t noted for being devoutly religious himself, city founder Col. John G. Cullmann was among the church’s charter members, recognizing the need for his namesake city’s predominantly German residents to carry forward a spiritual tradition informed by their Lutheran roots.
“Because of our unique heritage, there really aren’t any churches exactly like ours in Alabama,” said Richter. “Ours was born out of a 19th-Century tradition; one that follows where German settlers went as they came to the United States and, specifically, to this area.”
The original church charter is filled with German surnames (Zeigler, Bauer, Dreher, Ruehl, Kessler, Schwan, Fricke and more), many of which still hold current significance in Cullman. That German heritage influenced much of the church’s growth — as well as its growing pains — through contentious periods that tested its early members’ historical connections to their Lutheran past, in the process leading to the splinter creation of other area churches (including St. Paul’s Lutheran Church and Christ English Lutheran Church — now known simply as Christ Lutheran) that themselves have since come to signify part of the city’s religious history.
Though its Protestant denominational affiliations have changed over the decades, St. John’s endeavors to extend its present-day membership the same opportunity as its founders: to seek Divine grace through liturgical Christian worship, and to approach their Creator with gratitude for the gift of a path to redemption.
“We seek to be a community of grace and truth,” said Richter. “We are all in need of grace. We recognize how broken we are and how broken the world is: We live in a broken world, and we have all contributed to that brokenness. We long to see a healing, and for people to live in hope and peace, with a joy in looking forward to the world to come.”
Learn more about St. John’s Evangelical Protestant Church online at sjepc.com and read more about the church’s history in the Holiday edition of Cullman Magazine in September.