ST. LUKE Lutheran Church
Descendants of the German farm families who founded St. Luke Lutheran Church in Olney 125 years ago as well as new members and guests came together on Oct. 30 for a day of music, memories, and worship to celebrate one of the oldest surviving North Texas congregations in the church’s conservative Missouri Synod.
“St. Paul Wichita Falls chartered before us but … a missionary came to Olney from the Missouri Synod before they even went [to Wichita Falls] so that would make us the oldest in that sense,” St. Luke Pastor Rev. Sean Reeves said.
The Olney church conducted two worship services at 10:30 a.m. and 3 p.m. featuring traditional hymns accompanied by two guest organists, Kraig Kunkel and J.R. Smith, and violinist Dr. Leigh Furr Nordstrom, an internist in Dallas.
Pastor Dale Snyder of Our Redeemer Lutheran Church in Wichita Falls delivered the sermon at the second service, along with a history of the region’s Lutheran churches. After each worship service, the congregants, including several Olney natives who returned to town for the celebration, met in the Education Building for a meal and celebratory cakes made by Lynette Polster Lackey and custom-decorated cookies by Phil Jeske III.
The Kunkel and Bernhardt families founded the St. Luke congregation on Reformation Day, Oct. 31, 1897. The congregation has held services since that time in four different buildings in and around Olney. The St. Luke congregation first met at the Terrapin schoolhouse five miles north of Olney for services in German and English until 1914. The first St Luke Lutheran Church building was erected by the families about three miles northwest of Olney on land donated by Mrs. Otto Deitrich, and it served until the congregation outgrew it in 1926.
A larger brick church was erected in the same location and dedicated on Aug. 15, 1926. St. Luke moved to its present 13-acre location on West Oak Street in Olney on June 25, 1967, after the congregation determined that the old church building had become structurally unsound and outdated. Pastor Reuel C. Gauger was St. Luke’s pastor before and during the building of the current church. He was followed by Rev. Harold A. Heckman from 1968 to 1985, Rev. Delmer W. Brack from 1986 to 1994, and Rev. Gregory D. Hyatt from 1994 to 1999. Rev. Sean D. Reeves was installed on Dec. 29, 2002.
Pastor Reeves reflected that the congregation had grown to include more members who were not from the founding families and that his ministry shifted since the COVID-19 pandemic to use online technology to bring Sunday services to housebound members. “What has stayed the same is the important question to me,” he said. “It has always been the word of God in these twenty years and it has always been about His gifts and about gathering God’s people to receive his forgiveness.”