1859-Present
Judson Baptist Church
Kokomo, Indiana IN
By request of Brothers and Sisters in Ervin Township, Howard County, Indiana, in Ecclesiastical Council convened at the Stetler schoolhouse May 21, 1859 for the purpose of consulting the propriety of recognizing them as a Regular Baptist Church…. The Articles of Faith were read and adopted. After due deliberation, the Council resolved to recognize them as a Regular Baptist Church.[1]
Thus begins the story of the first 5 members of Judson Baptist Church which was blessed by 3 neighboring congregations and birthed in 1859. The present church building is located at the intersection of West Road and Judson Road northwest of Kokomo, Indiana, where the unincorporated neighborhood also bears the name of the Baptist missionary.
The first pastor was Price Odell who started on the path to become a veterinarian but eventually responded to a call to preach. Upon telling his mother about this calling, she went into the Indiana woods and dug out ginseng roots and took them to town to sell for cash. With $1.00 from that cash, she bought Rev. Odell his first Bible which he used the rest of his ministry.[2] “His services in the church for the first few years were paid for with articles of food such as a small sack of meal, maple syrup, or a piece of wild meat they happened to have and wanted to share with him.”[3]
The first building for the Judson Baptist Church was shared with the local school in 1869 after the Civil War. It was a walnut log structure approximately 16×24 feet, roofed with clap-boards, a door in one end, two windows on each side and furnished with puncheon seats and desks. By 1873 the congregation had a parking problem and had to install additional posts to tie horses and buggies to.
The pulpit was originally on the west end of the building but when a pump organ was acquired in the 1880’s the pulpit was shifted to the south. In the late 1890’s the pulpit was again in the west but in 1903 was moved to the north. The peripatetic pulpit was moved in 1908 again to the south side to allow for the construction of the North Annex.[4] A Sunday School was begun in 1893 while this pulpit was finding a permanent place in the worship center.
In 1934 at the height of the Great Depression, the Ann Judson Missionary Society was formed to work closely with Baptist women’s ministry in Indiana and nation-wide. The guest speaker at the centennial celebration of the church in 1959 was Dr. Dallas J. West, who was Executive Secretary of the Indiana Baptist Convention and would eventually become a founding trustee of Judson College (now University) in Elgin, Illinois. In 1968 the church called Rev. Chuck DeRolf and his wife, Judy, to serve as pastor. Graduates of Judson College, this missionary couple would eventually depart Judson Baptist Church to go to Tokyo, Japan, where they served as missionaries for over 40 years.[5]
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[1] Ethel M. Stetler, Judson Baptist Church: The First One Hundred and Fifty Years, 1859-2009. Printed by the church, 2009, p. 7.
[2] Ibid., p. 4.
[3] Ibid., p. 5.
[4] Ibid., p. 41.
[5] Ibid., p. 51.