Church’s closure marks the end of an era

But the tide began to turn in the 1970s. Membership gradually slid, and the forces of decline were too much for the 84-year-old congregation's remedial action.

At 3 p.m. Sunday, the sanctuary at 702 Cincinnati Ave. will swell once again, this time for a farewell service that will be attended by former pastors and members, musicians and officials with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

In the front reserved pews, about two dozen of the remaining members will take Communion, recite prayers and Scripture and recall the golden years when the sting of suburban sprawl and demographic shifts held no sway.

“This is going to be a bad day for me,” said a tearful Posey Steitle, 86, who sits in the same pew where she and her late husband were fixtures for decades. “I wonder when I'm going to see these friends again.”

The closing of Zion Lutheran repeats a common storyline for Mainline Protestant churches here and nationwide. They were established in bedrock Anglo neighborhoods that have slowly lost population and grown more Hispanic and foreign-born. The churches that choose to stick it out often struggle to appeal to the newcomers while sustaining traditional ways.

Steitle's three children grew up in the church, which started as a mission of St. John's Lutheran downtown in 1926. In the 1950s and '60s, it had two services on Sundays with scores of youths in Sunday-school classrooms and regular confirmation classes.

Youth basketball and volleyball teams, part of the now-defunct Protestant church sports leagues, once filled the church gym. The church's kitchen used to smell of sausage, spaghetti and tacos sold to raise money to send teenagers to retreats and conferences.

Those children grew up and, as adults, moved away from the neighborhood.

The congregation's council rallied from time to time with ideas to draw in people to refill the pews.