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For months, our Governor and other governors and political leaders have been attacking organized labor and specifically unionized public sector workers. If labor unions have made missteps in the course of their history, it is nevertheless undeniable that they have been a great force for good in our society, playing an indispensable part in insuring that the benefits of our nation’s prosperity were widely shared, bringing a large percentage of what might have been thought of as America’s proletariat into the middle class. In the nineteen sixties, one in four workers had the protection of a union. By the early eighties after President Reagan destroyed the air-traffic controllers’ union, the proportion had dropped to one in five. Today it is one in eight.

The building in which Emanuel Lutheran Church is located was built in 1878 and is a classic example of German-American church architecture of the period.  If you go across town to St. John the Baptist Church, you will find a Roman Catholic version of Emanuel, built by German Roman Catholics. 

The sanctuary of Emanuel is up a flight of stairs.  In its early days, the stairs were a tight spiral, and I have wondered how anyone managed to bring caskets up those stairs and into the nave of the church for funerals.  Today the stairs are straight and more accessible for all purposes.  And, of course, there is a lift for those who require it.  The pews in the sanctuary are fixed to the floor as church pews have mostly been.  They face forward in parallel rows.  There is a center aisle and side aisles, a chancel with altar (s) in the front and a balcony and choir loft in the rear with pipe organ and synthesizer.  Pretty standard fare and pretty unusable except as a place for formal worship.  And as such, vacant for most of the hours of the week.