Swedish Free Mission Church

Duane's take

Here's the story as the official marker tells it, and I'm gonna do my best to do it justice. Out here in the western part of McCulloch County, something quiet and determined was taking root. The year was 1907, and Swedish families were settling into this stretch of Texas; not exactly the easiest land to call home, but they weren't the easiest people to discourage.

And right away, before they had a building, before they had an organization, before they had much of anything really, they started a Sunday school. That same year, 1907. They gathered in each other's homes for worship, because when you've traveled that far and planted yourself in new ground, you don't wait for the walls to go up before you start talking to God.

Three years later, in 1910, the congregation was formally organized: fifteen charter members standing up and saying, yes, this is real, this is ours. Fifteen souls making it official. Then in 1911, the Ladies Aid Society was formed, and if you know anything about how frontier communities actually hold together, you understand that right there was a load-bearing pillar of the whole enterprise.

By 1913, they had their church building; completed, standing, finished. From home gatherings to a house of their own in just six years. Now here's the detail I love most about this congregation: all through those early decades, the worship services were conducted in the Swedish language.

Not as a curiosity, not as a novelty; as the living tongue of the people in those pews. That continued right on into the 1940s, when the language of the services finally shifted. And in that same decade, the congregation's name changed too; to the Evangelical Free Church.

The name was new. The mission wasn't. From the very beginning, this congregation had supported missionary activities, and that thread ran unbroken straight through every decade, every change of name, every change of language.

Some things, it turns out, don't need translating.

What the marker says

Swedes began settling in the western part of McCulloch County in 1907. A Sunday school was begun that year, and the families met for worship in homes. A church congregation was formally organized in 1910 with fifteen charter members. A Ladies Aid Society was formed in 1911. By 1913 a church building had been completed. Worship services were conducted in the Swedish language until the 1940s. The congregation's name was changed to the Evangelical Free Church in the 1940s. From its beginnings the congregation has supported missionary activities. (1988)