Coon Prairie Lutheran Church, Westby, WI

Coon Prairie Lutheran Church
in the country

where the ancestors are buried

 Coon Prairie Lutheran Church
in town

"Coon Prairie Lutheran Church was established on July 12, 1852, just four years after Norwegian settlers entered the Westby area. The congregation received its first pastor in 1855 and dedicated its first wooden building in 1857. Coon Prairie’s pastors served as many as 11 congregations throughout the region for many years. During the pastorate of Halvor Halvorsen (1872-1921), a fine stone building was erected which burned to the ground on Easter Sunday, 1909. Congregation members could not agree on a new building site and two identical edifices were built at $22,500 each: Country Coon Prairie on the original site and Westby Coon Prairie in the thriving new town. Coon Prairie was an important member of the Norwegian Lutheran Synod and experienced the theological divisions over predestination which rocked that church body in the 1880s. In 1917 it joined 92 percent of Norwegian Lutherans in the United States in forming the Norwegian Lutheran Church in America and is currently part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America." 

 - From Westby, Wisconsin Remembered blog, by Eric Leum, Mr. C.'s cousin. In memory. Today would have been his 70th birthday.

 

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"Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime." - Martin Luther
 

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Have a blessed Lord's Day,

InSPIREd Sunday

 Coon Prairie Lutheran Church
Westby, WI

Mark 16: 6-8

'Don't be astonished,' he said to them. 'You're looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has been raised! He isn't here! Look - this is the place where they laid him. But go and tell his disciples - including Peter - that he is going ahead of you to Galilee. You'll see him there, just like he told you.' They went out, and fled from the tomb. Trembling and panic had seized them. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.'

"People today are afraid of Easter for totally different reasons. Well, perhaps not totally different. The gatekeepers of 'modern' Western society have decreed that religion is dangerous nonsense; that if there is a 'god' he's a long way away and only interested in your private spiritual life; that Progress, Technology and 'Science' (by which they mean not real science, the delighted and humble exploration of the universe, but an ideology that uses the same name) are in charge, and taking us towards a golden future. And that dead people do not rise.

"They have to add that last bit, of course - not that it's a new idea. Homer knew that the dead don't rise. Pliny, the great Roman naturalist, was well aware of it too. That's hardly surprising, since it is the universal human experience. Dead people stay dead. The early Christians knew that too, and that was why what they discovered on that first Easter morning blew their minds and imaginations. They weren't ignorant folk who didn't know 'the laws of nature.' But those who try to shape today's Western world-view insist on 'no resurrection' for the same reason as all other totalizing systems insist on it. If Jesus was raised from the dead, a new power has been let loose in the world, a power which goes beyond all other power known to the human race. All other power, in the last analysis, ends up killing people. That's the bottom line. But if there is a God who raises the dead, all other powers are called to account. Resurrection challenges human empire where it hurts most..."

- N.T. Wright, Lent For Everyone

Jesus is Lord

Hope - because of the Resurrection.

Have a blessed Lord's Day, friends!

Linked to InSPIREd Sunday

Good Fences and Churches

Fall is coming to Wausau!

 This contribution from our daughter!

 

The grands with their newest mode of transportation

I couldn't resist...

Ash, Spruce, and a bit of fence

Westby, WI

Moen Cemetery

A fence around the cemetery.

Coon Prairie Lutheran Church (and cemetery fence)

where some of Mr. Cranberry's relatives are buried

 Neighborhood sumac

Neighborhood horse and foal

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InSPIREd Sunday