As church grew, so did its home community of Arlington Heights

When Marilyn Hermann arranges a picture of cows grazing on the campus of St. Peter Lutheran Church with other mementos to celebrate the 150 years the congregation has been in Arlington Heights, they entwine with her own family history.

The 50-year-old church with stunning stained glass windows on three sides of the sanctuary, soaring wood ceiling and fieldstone walls stands on Olive Street not far west of Arlington Heights Road - at least the third location where the institution has worshipped.

St. Peter started with a simple frame church at Sigwalt Street and Evergreen Avenue. In 1882 a brick church very similar to St. Peter in Schaumburg's old church was built at Northwest Highway and Highland Avenue. That land was sold in the late 1950s to pay for the current church.

The anniversary of this member of the Missouri Synod will be celebrated with a special service at 10 a.m., Sunday, March 14, and other events throughout the year.

Hermann, the church's unofficial historian, traces her family's roots in the church back almost to its beginning because the family of her great grandfather, John Heinrich Meyer, moved to Arlington Heights soon after arriving in this country from Germany in 1852.

But for Hermann, like Craig Grandt, a third-generation St. Peter member, and Rev. Micah Greiner, one of two pastors at the church, the church's present and future are as important as its history.

"The people," said Hermann. "This is one big extended family."

And Greiner talks about what keeps that family relevant in the church's third century.

"One of our strongest, most enduring connections is the commitment to children as a significant part of our ministry," he said.

That was manifested four years after the church's founding when the congregation started a school. Today there are 463 students from preschool through eighth grade in the school, said Bruce Rudi, the principal.

The school population is more ethnically diverse than the church, which is still predominately northern European, said Greiner.

Grandt sent his children to the same school he attended so they could receive a Christian education, and he is now proud to see his daughter, Mandy, teaching in the preschool.

A special tie to the congregation's German roots came when Greiner, who studied in Germany and speaks the language, joined the staff a few years ago.

"On Christmas Day we do a bilingual German and English service. I deliver a short message in German and English," he said.

While the church has 2,400 members and averages about 800 attending four weekend services, like most mainline churches it has seen a decline in attendance from the 1960s and '70s when it was the premiere congregation in the synod.

But the congregation is pushing ahead with plans to add a multipurpose building that will include room for the preschool and a large auditorium.

Speakers throughout this year of celebration will include Mandla Khumalo, founder of St. Peter Confessional Lutheran Church of South Africa, which the Arlington Heights church has supported for 25 years.

"As much as my generation says they value individual voice and relevance they hunger for something true," said Greiner. "We are speaking absolute, timeless truth to people, engineered in new and dynamic ways."