Currentview Church of Christ celebrates centennial

CURRENTVIEW — The congregation of the Currentview Church of Christ will celebrate its centennial on Sunday.

Special activities will begin at 9:30 a.m. with coffee and pastries before Bible study and communion/worship starts at 10:15. There will be a potluck lunch at 12:30 p.m., with histories and memories of the church shared at 2 p.m., followed by singing, fellowship and churchyard fun at 3 p.m.

Although it is believed Currentview’s congregation dates back farther than a century, Oct. 23, 1920, is the date the church’s deed was signed, making the church building and property 100 years old.

“It is my understanding from a history of Currentview undertaken by Opal Petty that the Church of Christ at Currentview began meeting in 1917,” Gwen Brady said. “I don’t see anywhere where they talk about where they met those first three years, most likely in people’s homes or at the Currentview school house (which) is something that seemed to have been pretty common in those days.”

In the early 1900s, most people in the area were members of or at least attended the Presbyterian Church at Pope’s Chapel, according to a church history compiled from “remembered experiences of several people” by Brady’s late aunt, Faye Baughn Hawkins. “Little of it is based on any written records,” she wrote.

The Church of Christ, she said, later was established at Currentview after the “boom days” of the lumber industry ended.

Hawkins wrote there was no regular meeting place when her family moved from Stoddard County to a farm south of Currentview.

Members of the Currentview Church of Christ gather on the front steps for a photograph in 1967. Photo provided

Hawkins recalls an “old-time gospel preacher” holding a meeting in the school house sometime “during the record breaking cold winter of 1918. The deep snow didn’t keep us at home. (Her father) George (Baughn) hitched his team to a sleigh and took his family to church.”

According to Hawkins’ writings, Petty, who was her cousin, remembered a warehouse being purchased by the church, and it is the “main auditorium of the building to this day.”

The building that is now the church “is much the same” as it was then, “other than some cosmetic and functional renovation,” including the addition of classrooms and bathrooms, Brady said.

Before the land was bought for the church and building moved to its present location, Hawkins said, the church met in the house across the street from its present location on County Road E-4, off of Highway E.

The land, Hawkins wrote, consisted of four lots “at the top of the hill,” which were purchased by Baughn from Mary Posey for $75 in August 1919.

Hawkins said her parents sold those four lots to the church on Oct. 23, 1920, for $1. The trustees, “who were to see that the land was to be used for the purposes of a church,” she said, were J.G. Colley, Walter Miller, her father and Troy Ruff.

“The stipulations put into the church deed are very interesting,” Hawkins said.

It says, “the said trustees and their successors” may have and “hold this property for the use and benefit of the said Church of Christ upon the expressed conditions that no organ or other musical instrument be used or kept, and that no fair, festival or other practices unauthorized in the New Testament be held, had or conducted” upon the premises or in any building constructed.

And, the deed further says, if those conditions are not kept then “the property shall pass into the hands of the nearest congregation of the Church of Christ.”

Hawkins writes about how there was “little money” at that time, and “the members of this little group were poor in cash money. They decided to rent two or three acres of cotton land … and volunteer all the labor needed to raise this cotton.”

Brady said Mescal “Mack” Shelby West’s 100-year-old sister, Bonnie, recalls picking cotton “down in the bottoms” to pay for the church building.

Pictured in this 1936 photograph in front of the Currentview Church of Christ are Alma Lee; Ralph and Leona Merrell; Cecil, Meritt, Duane and Elaine Merrell; Landrum, Lorene, Jimmie, Carolyn and Marilyn Colley. Photo provided

West, Brady said, told her that her sister “still has a little, tiny cotton sack that her mom put together for her to pick with the rest of the family when she first started walking.”

The money from the cotton “was used to buy the building (and) to move it and make changes needed for it to be (a) church building,” Hawkins wrote.

The building, Hawkins said, was moved with horse power and logs as rollers.

West, Brady said, provided confirmation as it was her father, Frank Shelby, who provided the team of horses or mules that were used “to roll the building up the hill on logs and place it where it sits now.”

With Currentview straddling the Missouri/Arkansas line, Hawkins recalled how church members from Arkansas crossed Current River to attend services.

Teams, she said, were driven to the river, and the members crossed by boat before walking to the “meeting place.”

West, Brady said, reported her father and brother, Boyd, would drive the family’s car to pick up others for church.

Throughout the years, Hawkins said, there were many preachers who worked with the church, including students from Harding College, who “would fill the pulpit on Sundays.”

Exact membership numbers appear in Hawkins’ writing, but the church’s current directory contains about 30 members, including some who Brady described as home bound.

Services regularly are held on Sunday morning only, with Bible study/Sunday school (if there are guest children in attendance) at 10 a.m. and worship at 11 a.m.

“As with churches of Christ, weekly worship includes communion,” Brady said.