Mennonite Weekly Review

NEWTON, Kan. — When Meadows Mennonite Church in central Illinois prepared to close its doors in August 2007 after 117 years, the remaining members wanted something of their congregation to live on in another.

From left, organ technician Duane Hanks and Shalom Mennonite Church members Merle Schlabaugh, Mark Schmidt Andres (on ladder) and Stan Smucker work to install the pipe organ given to the Shalom congregation in Newton, Kan., by Meadows Mennonite Church in Illinois after it disbanded. — Photo by Chuck Regier

So Paul Bertsche called his niece, Cindy Bertsche Regier, a member of Shalom Mennonite Church in Newton, to ask if Shalom might want the Meadows pipe organ.

Meadows was a daughter congregation of “Father” Joseph Stuckey, an Amish bishop in central Illinois who led the Stuckey Amish (now part of Central District Conference of Mennonite Church USA). For most of its history a thriving congregation, Meadows hosted the 1911 meeting that organized Congo Inland Mission (now Africa Inter-Mennonite Mission) and was a founder of what is now Meadows Mennonite Retirement Community.

Over the last 20 years, however, the congregation had dwindled. Finally, members decided to disband and give their church building to the retirement community.

It was the wish of the congregation, Bertsche told his niece, that the pipe organ be given to another Mennonite congregation.

Might Shalom be interested in a Zimmer & Sons eight-and-a-half-rank pipe organ, installed in 1982?

Shalom’s organists — Greta Hiebert and Martha Unruh Szambecki, in addition to Karen Bauman Schlabaugh, a professor of music and piano pedagogy at Bethel College in North Newton — began to get excited.

The existing Shalom organ, which came with the former Newton Bible Baptist Church building the congregation bought in the mid-’90s, was an electronic Allen organ “that was becoming less reliable,” Hiebert said. “The parts weren’t being made any more.”

Dream of a pipe organ

Ever since Shalom moved into its new sanctuary in 2002, the organists had begun to dream of having a pipe organ. When Cindy and Chuck Regier got the specs on the Meadows organ and shared it with the organists, “it seemed promising,” Cindy Regier said.