Imagine traveling back in time, you walk into a Christian church service on a bright Sunday morning. Wearing your “Sunday best”, you walk in through a set of large double oak doors with the rest of your family. Your polished leather shoes click along the creaking wood floors as you walk up the center aisle and sit down in the large oak pews among your friends and neighbors. Idle chatter and small talk swirl around the room while everyone waits for the church service to begin. Suddenly, the choir floods into the sanctuary with their songbooks and hymnals in hand to raise a mighty song to the Lord. As they raise their voices in song and praise, your friends and neighbors join the choir. From the great ensemble of friends and neighbors, a gleeful sound of joyful praise dances around the church sanctuary for all to hear. But wait! You can’t quite understand the words being sung and then you notice the books under the pew in front of you have a strange looking font, from what you are used to. You continue to observe the service from your pew and after some time a mature bearded man, wearing a stiff black suit somberly walks to the front of the sanctuary with a black book in hand. You notice that the book he carries with him also has a foreign title like some of the books sitting in front of you. As the gentleman reaches the pulpit, he opens the black book and begins reading aloud from the text, however, what you hear does not register. The language this man is preaching in is certainly not English, so what is it?
If you walked into a church service in the Sugarcreek, Ohio area over 100 years ago, the scenario above may be what you would experience. Surprisingly, in the early 1900s Churches in and around the Sugarcreek area held all or some of their services in German. It is well known that the areas in and around Sugarcreek, Ohio were settled largely by Swiss and German immigrants. In addition to this and perhaps unsurprisingly, many families spoke both German and English. There are many pamphlets, schedules, and booklets from churches in the Sugarcreek area dating from the late 1800s to the early 1900s that are written in German. A schedule of the church services from The First Reformed Church in Shanesville, Ohio (present-day Sugarcreek) dating to the year 1908, indicates the largely bilingual culture of the area. Located near the top of the page, the church states prominently that all evening services are in English and it appears that the morning services switched between English and German.
Presently, this immersive bilingual culture may seem foreign to some; however, it was not long ago that speaking both English and German was widely practiced.