By Gail Peckler-Dziki
Correspondent
The third annual Community Baptist Fall Fest on Oct. 24 brought church members and people from Silver Lake and surrounding communities together for food, fun and a little history.
One feature of Fall Fest was Pastor Cliff Hathcock’s historical tour of the church. The Community Baptist Church had its beginning in a train car.
“The country was growing during the late 1800s,” Pastor Cliff explained. “And towns sprang up and disappeared quickly. There were always taverns and sometimes the town would disappear before the church was built.”
The American Baptists had a solution. They outfitted train cars as chapels and would be pulled behind different types of trains to everywhere in the American west.
Railroad bosses saw the benefit to their workers to have chapel cars available and railroad companies would pull the chapel cars at no expense. The chapel car that impacted Silver Lake was called Glad Tidings. The missionaries were Reverend Charles and Bertha Rust.
When Glad Tidings began its journey, the Rusts were newly weds and they lived in a small apartment at the back of the chapel car. They lived there for four years. After four years and two children, the Rusts created a permanent home and Rust would travel back and forth while Mrs. Rust kept the home fires burning.
A chapel car would stay in an area for a while and when the car and missionary left, a small group who had trusted Christ would take up where the missionary left off.
When Reverend Rust returned to Silver Lake in May of 1897 for second visit, work on a church began. And that is the year that the Silver Lake Baptist Church received its charter.
The first church in Silver Lake was called Silver Lake Baptist and the original building sat on the site of the current parsonage, located on 4th Street not far from the current building. The name was later changed to Community Baptist and the new building was built in the 1950s.