Time capsule holds potluck of memories

Nothing makes you feel old like watching a time capsule being opened – and remembering the day it was sealed.

I was 7 years old on that Sunday – Jan. 9, 1966 – and Southern Hills Methodist Church was dedicating its new sanctuary on Harrodsburg Road at what was then the edge of town.

We all gathered near the main door and watched as a copper box was cemented behind a cornerstone engraved ”1965.“ (Construction always takes longer than planned.) My parents told me the box was a ”time capsule“ that would be opened someday in the future, and people would look at the things inside and see who we were.

A few years earlier, as a wave of growth and development swept across the farmland south of Lexington, Methodist leaders decided they needed a church there. Southern Hills was started in 1959 by a few dozen families, including mine, and a dynamic young minister, Don Herren.

The congregation met in the old Picadome School until a church building was ready two years later. A little more than a year after the futuristic-looking sanctuary was completed, Southern Hills had more than 1,000 members.

Last Sunday, Southern Hills United Methodist Church began a yearlong celebration of its 50th anniversary. I don’t get back there very often. During the 22 years I was away from Lexington, I became active in another denomination.

When I arrived for the celebration service, I didn’t know the time capsule would be opened. All my parents had said was that the Tuttle family was barbecuing chicken for a dinner afterward. That’s all they needed to say.

Monthly potluck dinners were a staple at Southern Hills. But the serious food was reserved for one Sunday each summer when John Tuttle and the men of the church barbecued hundreds and hundreds of chickens and served them with baked beans and cole slaw. The sermon always seemed to go faster that day as the smoky aroma drifted in through the air-conditioning vents.

Tuttle was a poultry specialist at the University of Kentucky’s College of Agriculture, and he was always looking for ways to promote chicken. Like Colonel Sanders, he developed his own special blend of herbs and spices. He died years ago, but his children still have a company make up the sauce mix in bulk. Every few years, my father and I buy a five-pound bag.

Tuttle’s son and two daughters, dressed in special aprons embroidered for the occasion, were cooking away outside when I found a pew with my parents and read in the bulletin that the time capsule would be opened.

With help from Wiley Finney, a charter member well into his 90s, the Rev. Bill Moore carefully removed the box’s contents for everyone to see. There was a membership roster, other church documents and a photo of the sanctuary’s groundbreaking ceremony in 1964. Finney remarked that one man in the picture had died the previous week.

Herren, who served three terms as a Fayette County school board member and chairman, died in 2004. His wife, Pat, a music professor who always sang in the choir, was honored with a bouquet of roses.

The capsule held a complete copy of the Lexington Herald of Jan. 7, 1966, and several clippings of Herald and Leader stories and photos marking early milestones in the church’s life. I’ve always found it interesting that the simplest things we put in the newspaper will be clipped, saved and cherished.

It was fun seeing the time capsule opened. But as I looked around the sanctuary, the whole place seemed like a time capsule, reflecting both my life and the transformation of Lexington over the past half-century.

Seated in the pews were several of my old friends and their children, and many more of their parents – my old Sunday school teachers and Boy Scout leaders. So many familiar faces. In my mind’s eye, I still see many of them as the young UK professors, IBM engineers, lawyers, doctors, merchants, builders, teachers and salesmen whose labors and dreams would help make Lexington the city it has become.

It is moments like that when you realize a church is more than a building or a place to worship. It is a community built on faith, fellowship, dreams – and, if you’re lucky, great barbecued chicken.