St. John Lutheran Church of Pleasant Green

Although it is commonly photographed, the Pleasant Green Lutheran Church or St. John Lutheran Church of Pleasant Green is hardly documented. From what little information I could find on the history of the congregation and church was this; St. John Lutheran Church of Pleasant Green was founded in 1900 by a group of Lutherans who felt that the Lutheran teachings needed to reach further north of the Smith and Phillips Counties.

An acre of land was given by Carl Rietzke and thus the first church was built here. This church building was destroyed when it was struck by lightning and caught fire on July 29, 1930. Construction of the building you see today on the same site began August 11, 1930 and was completed with dedication services in December.

The congregation was relatively small and its unfortunate location being in rural Kansas didn’t make that number increase throughout the decades. But the community held strong long enough to celebrate 50 years as a congregation in 1950 and 75 years in 1975. But they couldn’t hold on much longer than that. In August 1978, then Pastor Virgil Anderson gave the farewell sermon and the church disbanded with members mostly transferring to the St. John Lutheran Church within Kensington.

But like I said at the beginning of this article, this building has been deeply admired for decades and just because it’s abandoned now hasn’t changed that. In fact, if you wanted to experience the closest thing to this church being active again you’ll want to head on over to the Fort Bissell Museum. They loved the church so much so that they built a life-size replica of it to display all their church-related exhibit items and I must say it looks pretty close to accurate.

Gallery Below of Pleasant Green Lutheran Church