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On Friday, Sept. 12, the doors of St. John’s Lutheran Preschool and Day Care closed its doors for the last time.  

In 1982, St. John’s started a Lutheran Elementary Grade School, teaching children from kindergarten to 8th Grade, the “4 R’s.”  Reading!  Writing!  Arithmetic!  And Religion!  We also created a preschool and a day care center to help families in our city prepare their children for school as well as having a safe place to leave their children until Mom and Dad got home from work.  Many families of St. John’s invested not just their money, and their time, but also their manual labor to build that school and to keep it going.       

In 2010, due to a lack of children in our congregation the congregation needed to close its Grade School.  However, they were able to keep the Preschool and the Day Care up and running.   We wanted to give parents not only a safe place where their children could learn, but also a place where they could learn about Jesus and the salvation He came to bring us.   

Over the past four years, many things began to change. With dwindling numbers of children who took part in the Preschool, and with dwindling numbers of parents who took advantage of a Christian minded Day Care, it became harder to keep the doors open.  But the congregation did keep the doors open, because as Dr. Charles Burling, President of St. John’s said, “we poured everything we could possibly pour into this school, to make sure we could provide a Christ-centered environment for the children and the families of our community.”   However, for the last three years the congregation lost around $30,000 a year because income from the Preschool did not keep up with the expenses.   

So, this year St. John’s Lutheran Church had to make a very difficult decision.  We cannot afford to keep it open, so we needed to close the doors of our Preschool/ Day Care.  As Dr. Burling states, “The sad thing is that this was purely a ‘financial decision,’ based only on the hard facts that we could no longer afford to run this ministry of ours.  As Christians, we hate to make any decision based only on money, because we are always assured that our God works miracles all the time, and can give us the money we need to do what we want to do.  And yet, we had to face the harsh realities of life, and realize that as far as we human beings can look into the future, we need to make this decision.”

However, one bright spot came out of this decision.  Even though St. John’s Lutheran Preschool and Day Care will close its doors for the last time on September 12, another group has asked for permission to use our facility to continue the work that we started.  Flowers Early Learning will open its doors toward the end of September or the beginning of October.  Even though Flowers Early Learning concentrates on the Preschool aspect, getting the children of our area prepared to go to school, they have a desire to get into the Day Care aspect as well, offering parents of our area a place where their children can be safe, while parents need to work.  They also promised to use as much of the present Staff who want to stay, and are willing to go through the training they may need to go through.  They also agreed to speak with all the parents who are presently using our facility to see if they can also qualify to use the new facilities.

“The solution is bitter-sweet,” Burling said.  “Although we need to close a part of St. John’s ministry that has been part of our life for 43 years, we did not have to close the doors completely.  There is another group who will take up reigns and will offer the people of our community what we have been offering all this time.  So, even though our eyes are filled with tears as we need to say ‘Goodbye’ to our Preschool and Day Care, we can rejoice that someone else will use our facility to offer the same services to the people of our community.”  

Pastor Adrian, St. John’s Lutheran Church