Lutherans gather for 'Preaching on Prairie'
By Phil Anderson
THE CAPITAL-JOURNAL
ALMA — Folks in Wabaunsee County are already calling this weekend's "Preaching
on the Prairie" event the biggest thing that has ever been done by Lutheran
churches in the area.
Now, they are just praying it doesn't rain.
The two-day event will be highlighted by worship services under an 800-seat tent
on Saturday and Sunday mornings in pastureland at the site of the former Zion
Lutheran Church, located in the Templin community 12 miles southwest of Alma on
old K-10 highway.
The featured speaker at both services will be Wallace Schulz, an evangelist who
was once the featured preacher on "The Lutheran Hour" radio broadcast heard
worldwide.
A burgers-and-brats lunch will follow Saturday's worship service, and what is
being billed as "the biggest potluck dinner in Flint Hills history" will follow
the Sunday service. Schulz will lead seminars after the dinners both days.
Music at 9:30 a.m. will preNews cede both services, and a bell choir will
perform both mornings.
A prayer breakfast at 8 a.m. Sunday at St. John's Lutheran Church in Alma will
be the kickoff event for the weekend's festivities. Tickets for the breakfast
are $5.
Preaching on the Prairie was the brainchild of Vicar John Fries, a student
pastor who is serving at St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Alta Vista and St. John
Lutheran Church in Alma.
When this year's Symphony in the Flint Hills — an annual affair featuring the
Kansas City Symphony performing outdoors on the Kansas prairie — selected a site
southwest of Alma near Volland in Wabaunsee County, Fries thought it would be a
perfect chance to hold a large-scale church function in connection with the
musical concert.
Some 5,000 people are expected to attend the Symphony in the Flint Hills.
Tickets at $75 each sold out in 32 minutes.
Fries said he had the support of several other Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod
congregations in the area, including St. Paul Lutheran in Alta Vista; St. John
Lutheran in Alma; Trinity Lutheran in McFarland; Redeemer Mission at Lake
Wabaunsee; and St. Paul Lutheran at Clark's Creek. Beyond appealing only to
Lutherans in the area, Fries and other organizers are hoping those who come for
tonight's Symphony in the Flint Hills concert will visit the Lutheran church
services.
Fries even seems amazed by the support the event has received, saying "God's
people just got excited."
He said people who attend the service and put an offering in their own church's
offering envelope will have their donation sent back to their home church.
"We don't want to take away from anyone's church," Fries said.
The vicar added that "even the Baptist church in Alta Vista has canceled
services on Sunday and will be joining us."
The location for Preaching on the Prairie is about four miles southwest of the
location for the Symphony in the Flint Hills.
This past week, Fries and the Rev. Bob Grimm, pastor of St. John Lutheran Church
in Alma, surveyed tall grass in adjacent fields where the cornerstone of the old
Zion Lutheran Church still stands. The Zion church burned to the ground in 1923.
The ministers said the big tent would be set up in one field, while parking
would be in the other. If it rains, attendees will have to park about a
quarter-mile farther southwest at a cemetery site and walk back to the tent,
which is why everyone hopes for a dry weekend.
Fries said the location of Preaching on the Prairie is of historical
significance to Lutherans, as well as to others in Wabaunsee County, as it is in
an area where a circuit-riding preacher named Frederick Lange established six
Lutheran churches about 150 years ago.
Lange's work helped to establish the Lutheran church in the area, as he reached
out to what Grimm called "German stragglers" who were of the Lutheran faith and
had migrated to this area of Kansas..
To this day, Grimm said, Wabaunsee County is only one of three counties in the
state — Saline and Marshall being the other two — where Lutherans comprise the
majority of the churchgoing population.
"Of course, we're excited about this," Grimm said. "This is just an incredible
type of an event. We're in the middle of God's green earth. There's a lot of
German heritage here, a lot of Lutheran heritage here.
"This was Vicar Fries' idea. It just kept getting grander and grander. He kept
making it happen."