St. Paul’s Lutheran Church marks confirmation of baptism in Haysville

Three Becks and three other young people helped carry a long Haysville tradition forward at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, where the congregation marked its Confirmation of Baptism service on May 24. The photo that accompanied the service put local family names on record, identifying Chloee Beck, Blair Buse and Carlie Beck in the front row and Pastor Timothy Holt, Hudson Stemle, Trace Weisheit and Kole Kalb in the back.

At St. Paul’s, confirmation is more than a one-day milestone. It is a public step into the life of a church that says its first constitution was adopted in October 1848, that it has been led by 18 pastors, three interim pastors and six intern pastors, and that early services, including confirmations, baptisms and weddings, were conducted in German. The church says the last German-language confirmations there were held in 1941, a detail that shows how deeply the service is tied to family memory and congregation history.

That continuity matters in a county where church life often spans generations. St. Paul’s says it has served people from Dubois, Martin, Daviess, Pike and surrounding counties since its earliest years, and the congregation marked its 175th anniversary in 2023 with a theme from Ecclesiastes 3: “There is a time for everything.” For families connected to the church, a confirmation service is not just a photo opportunity. It is a reminder that the same sanctuary has seen baptisms, weddings, funerals and the passage of children into young adulthood for more than a century and a half.

The Haysville church has also survived repeated disruption. Its history includes a tornado in 1906, the destruction of a new brick church by fire on Christmas Day 1946, and the rededication of the rebuilt church on Easter 1949. In February 2006, the congregation dedicated an addition that added a Welcome Center, Fellowship Hall, kitchen, offices and classrooms, and in October 2024 it received a $135,000 Sacred Places Indiana grant for heating and cooling systems and boiler piping in the 1948 church.

St. Paul’s still stands four miles north of Jasper at the U.S. 231 caution light in Haysville, where it holds communion services at 9 a.m. Sundays and Sunday School from 9:45 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. The cemetery next to the church deepens that local record even further, with Find a Grave listing 1,346 memorial records for Saint Pauls Lutheran Church Cemetery in Haysville.