Church Anniversary

I have had the pleasure of participating in some great events this weekend, and its not even over yet.
My Church, First Baptist of Salem, is Celebrating 150 Years of being "A Faithful Witness". On December 29, 1859 eight people joined together on the corner of Marion and Liberty streets and started the First Baptist Church. One Hundred Fifty Years Later, we are still alive and kickin' at the same place.

We celebrate this weekend the birthday of FBC Salem with many great events, some of which have already happened. On Friday night there was a service that had the opening of the Time Capsule that was created and placed in 1952. I had the opportunity on Thursday to help with some video creation for that Friday night service. I was at the church at around 1:15pm to help with the video capture of getting to the Time Capsule which was on the corner of the church building. I was stupidly expecting the job to be about an hour or less. NO WAY! This job was a multihour job. We were there from 1ish to about 7ish just doing the video taping. Then I came back on Friday morning to do the editing for the time capsule to shrink the Over-4-Hours-of-footage down to 4 Minutes. It took some doing. I had some use of speeding up the footage, and not using other parts, ect, but thats not the story.
On Friday night, they had a service with a History of the Church and surrounding area, some songs of the past, and of course, the Time Capsule opening. In the capsule was a bible, the church constitution, a letter from the pastor, the Statesmen newspaper from that year (1952), a list of the Church Directory, and a few other items.
Then, Today, there were many things going on. There were exibits in many rooms, Old Fashioned Craft making, a Butter Churning demo, Flax Spinning, a Barbershop Quartet, and Dance team, and lots of talks from members of the church from way back. There was one gentleman that is still at the church who was in the church in 1925. WOW. That is amazing.
Tomorrow, there will be a celebration service with the Churches first Youth Pastor. Throughout the weekend, they are ringing the Church Bell that used to be atop the steeple. Now it is in an enclosure. that can be moved around. The original bell. Amazing huh!?

I would hope to be a part of an Anniversary Celebration from my previous church. I don't know if anything is planned yet, but I did some digging, and the 100th Celebration for First Baptist Church of Redmond (now named Redmond Community Church) is coming up fairly soon. (1912). This was the church that I grew up in and I have some great memories of that church, as a boy.

Oh, BTW, if you would like to take a look at some pictures from this event today that I took, you can head on over to my Picasa site.
http://picasaweb.google.com/timothykirkman/SalemFBC150thAnny?feat=directlink