A nod to the past

- Hillsview Community Church in Damascus celebrates 100 years

In the late 1800s, a group of families with Swedish ancestry arrived in a heavily wooded area known as the Damascus community.

Led by pioneer men named Tillstrom, Schedeen and Gran, they founded and erected a house of worship that became not only the cornerstone of their faith but a comforting and unifying presence in their adopted homeland.

Today, 100 years later, Hillsview Community Church stands as a legacy to its original founders. It has maintained a ministry that feeds the souls of not only its members, but the surrounding community as well.

It has been said that We stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, said Pastor Michael Conrad. The privileges, structure and ministries that we enjoy today are because of those faithful church goers who listened to the call of the Lord. When you are a pastor of a 100-year-old church, you know that you have a responsibility to sustain as well as rejuvenate the ministry that was initiated by those who came before you.

Hillsview is a member of the Evangelical Mission Covenant Church of America, a Christian denomination born from a splinter within the Lutheran Church during the mid-1880s. Swedish immigrants felt the Lutherans were straying from basic teachings of the Bible and founded their own church, the Swedish Mission Friends, in the Midwest in 1885.

The group of Swedish immigrants who arrived in the Damascus area in the late 1880s came from communities where organized church work was common. The fertile lands here may have been favorable to farming, but not so much for travel to neighboring churches for worship services.

They found that the condition of the roads was such that in the winter, the mud sometimes reached the hubs of their buggies, church historical records say. And in the summer, they had to cope with dust. These conditions restricted their visiting other churches, hence they began meeting weekly in various homes in the community.

But the ever-present need for a sanctuary of their own led a group of 22 settlers to form the Mission Church of Damascus in 1914. Among those who penned their names in the churchs original ledger as charter members were pioneers Ernest Schedeen and Viola Tillstrom. Largely credited as the founding father of the church is Olaf Gran, whose descendants are still active participants of the church. Construction on the Mission Church of Damascus began in the summer of 1914. It was built entirely with volunteer labor and on land donated by church member Lewis Rodlun. Dedication services were held Aug. 8, 1915.

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A nod to the past