Walter Brandner was born in Kingsville in 1933, which means he has been part of First Lutheran Church for longer than the building itself has stood.

He remembers the before. Sunday mornings in the early 1940s meant walking through the old town hall — the building that now serves as the post office — past iron jail bars and into a borrowed courtroom to worship. "We used to go past the jail every Sunday," he recalls. "The bars were there. You walked past it when you went into the courtroom to have the service."

The congregation had been gathering like that for years — first in homes, then in halls — a tight-knit community of German immigrants and their families who had been making the trip to Windsor for Lutheran services until there were simply enough of them in the Kingsville area to build something of their own.

Not long after, the men got to work. There were no contractors, no bids, no project managers. Farmers built in the winters when the fields were resting. City workers came on weekends and evenings. Walter remembers the day the foundation was poured — a thunderstorm flooded everything. They cleaned it up and kept going.

That spirit — practical, generous, unshowy — defined the decades that followed. He remembers board meetings where a member would simply reach into his pocket and cover the shortfall when the treasury ran dry. He remembers Sunday school classes of 100 children packed into the basement.

What has stayed the same, he says, is harder to measure but easier to feel. The words posted in the narthex — You are welcome here — are not a slogan so much as a description of what the congregation has always, at its best, tried to be.

First Lutheran is still that. It has just been at it longer than most.