Mary Miller, her duet partner Susie Hatch – in her perfect patchwork button down – and Patsy Farmer all huddle around Janine Shipley at the church’s brand new keyboard. She’s taken to stacking four hymnals as a booster seat on the piano bench. This second visit to Highwater came on a perfectly rainy Tuesday afternoon, well in advance of the following Sunday’s performance.
The church is always warm. Carpeted aisles give way to dark wood flooring beneath the dozen or so pews, and emerald green upholstery gives a pop of color. A haphazard mix of warm and cool-toned fluorescents brightens the room. The stained glass windows boast a bright lime green and pink – an unexpected choice with an impressive result.
Highwater, a United Church of Christ congregation, sits in rural Licking County, Ohio. The building, no bigger than an upper-middle class home, is situated on Dutch Lane Road, and most parishioners show up for Sunday services in jeans. This year, the field behind the church is corn and the ones down the street are soybeans, but it’ll rotate next April. Keeps things interesting.
The pastor, Gladys Davis, is the only one in the building wearing a pantsuit, and she gives a bandmate’s nod of approval to Janine’s final piano riff. The congregation, 20 people at best, understands the rhythm of the service like the back of their hand. The Sunday school kids gather around the altar. One of the little boys says the word crap and his compatriots react in horror. They all run off to the gymnasium for their own version of church.
The service alternates between songs and sermons and readings, as they do. Patsy is the hairdresser in town and has been for decades, so she always comes prepared with a long list of prayer requests to share. For this week, Ann is having complications with her pancreatic cancer treatments, and Mary Joe is doing decently with only one more chemo session left.
To be known is to be loved, and it isn’t conditional. Most communities don’t operate with that framework. Even many communities built upon religion aren’t nearly as intentional as Highwater. With the growth of megachurches, and even just congregations exceeding 100 or so members, weekly updates on Ann and Mary Joe don’t make it into the program.
The rural space filling the middle of the United States is habitually perceived by more urban populations as being inferior in intelligence, wealth and relevance to modern society. Rural lives move much more slowly than those in big cities, and they’re inherently more tied to societal patterns associated with America in the 1800s: farming as a livelihood, tight communities based on location, and strong family structures. With the desire for rapid growth and change in the modern world, “outdated” ways of life are not given a second thought. Simultaneously, though, we are the loneliest we’ve ever been.
From a study on rural loneliness conducted by Dr. Carrie Henning-Smith of the University of Minnesota Rural Health Research Center, “On average, rural residents have more people in their lives, more friends, more family, and they’re more likely to say they can rely on their networks.”
Ohio Rt. 661 is the kind of road that makes asphalt look malleable. It rolls incessantly, with a few hills just sharp enough to make cars quickly lose footing. On either side, the land rolls much more quietly – off-season fields are gently landscaped by farmers and hungry cattle and partitioned by thick forests of hickory. Half of the houses are buried deep in soft hills, and the other half sit just a few feet from the shoulder. Chickens pace – more often in the shallower front yards – guarding ‘50s shiplapped ranches and subtle Victorians. There’s rarely anyone outside along the main drag, but down the endless sidestreets, every driveway is full of cars and every garden is watered.
Just 20 miles away, though, Intel is in the midst of constructing a $28 billion dollar semiconductor chip plant on at least 1,000 acres of former farmland. It’ll boost the economy, but not without moving people from their family land and bringing in thousands of workers to Licking County. This immense transformation will inevitably radiate for miles, and it’ll change this place forever.
Just a few streets from the church, Janine Shipley’s living room looks over rolling fields, the late November sunset, and her children’s homes. Her two horses roam the front yard just across the street from the Shipleys’ fourth-generation dairy farm. Roxie and Rex are too untrained to ride if you don’t know horses, but she promised me a horse-drawn wagon ride for each hymn I sing for the church.
She places a Tupperware of fresh cookies on the coffee table before settling into her easy chair, and Susie Hatch takes two cookies before doing the same. Susie grew up just down the road and sang in Janine’s wedding 40 years ago, so the practice isn’t unfamiliar. Janine’s late husband Tim and Susie were cousins, born into the church in the ‘50s. By the early ‘70s, the roster was down to a few dozen people, most everyone related.
“You have to be really careful when you come to our church with who you talk about, because you could be talking to a blood relative!” says Janine.
The Shipley brothers and the Hoar sisters grew up just five minutes down the road from each other and spent their days trekking around in the woods. They’d all sit through Sunday services salivating over their weekly post-church Snickers bar. Most mothers would throw a skillet in the oven to cook through the service and be ready for family lunch, but on the lucky days there wasn’t time for preparation before carting the family out of the house, a trip to Burger Chef would stand in.
Susie’s maiden name is Hoar, and she’s not above the joke. In high school, she’d introduce herself as Ima and just wait to be asked her last name.
The Hoars, Shipleys, and Rileys are three of the most consistent names throughout Highwater’s history, and all of the family trees connect. The Rileys date back to the mid-1800s, and the Hoars and Shipleys didn’t join the mix until around the 1920s. They haven’t wavered since, and the three families have almost single-handedly kept the church populated.
Susie and Janine were both in their early twenties and newly married in 1983 when the Highwater roster was not much above 15 or 20 parishioners – lower than it was a century earlier in 1872. According to the Washington Post, the United Church of Christ nationally lost 11% of its membership between 1970 and 1980.
But it’s not just the United Church of Christ seeing membership declines, according to a 2024 study from Gallup.
Two decades ago, nearly half of all U.S. adults attended religious services “nearly every week,” according to Gallup. But 10 years ago, that number fell to 38% and in 2024, it was just 30%.
The governing Columbus association office of the United Church of Christ found that a retired preacher by the name of Jim Legg lived a few miles down Dutch Lane road. Four grandmothers to Susie and Janine’s generation were the backbone of the church at that point, and in a last-ditch effort, the women marched up to his door, knocked on it, asked him to come out of retirement to lead Highwater, and he said yes.
“You know, I think I still know whose grandmothers it was!” Susie laughs. “It was Lucille Baughman, Dorothy Bruce, and a few others.”
Legg, with a rough hand, loved the church back into existence.
“I’ll tell you what he did,” says Susie. “[My husband] Virgil was on second shift when we were building our house. Legg came by in the middle of the day and went ‘Virgil, get off the roof, I want you to be the moderator. I want you to be there Sunday.’ [Virgil] said, ‘I kind of like that guy,’ and he went! Legg went from family to family.”
With a newly organized church and deep dedication, Legg brought the roster up to almost 100 people within just a few years. In the last two decades, the church has steadily kept its footing, continuing to make renovations, start youth groups, and connect with the community.
On Christmas Eve of 2019, Mary Miller had moved back to Licking County after years away from her home turf, and she wanted a real Christmas Eve.
Having gone to high school with Susie – and habitually calling friends from parties at Susie’s house just to tell them they were at the Hoar house – Mary landed at Highwater through some familiar faces. Her timing was tricky, however, as she only had a few months in the church before COVID-19 caused worldwide shutdowns. Highwater fought hard to stay connected, through parking lot services and livestreams.
“We needed each other!” says Mary. “I mean there was no time that we needed each other more than during that shutdown. Our church feeds people. If you’re sick, everyone is coming to drop off food. Everybody just takes care of each other.”
Mary, a professional musician, had very little work during the height of the pandemic, and the church knew it.
“The church allowed me to have a key to come in and do little Facebook live concerts. I can’t tell you how many times – pretty much every time – I came in to do my little show, there would be something on the table for me. Oh, I want to cry thinking about it”
She gets choked up.
“There would be gift cards, a little envelope of money, presents. Every time I would come in to do my thing, I’d walk in, turn on the lights, look over at the table, and immediately cry. I mean, people looked out for me.”
“Really, [Mary] gave more than we could ever. People love her,” explains Janine.
“Well, I love them. You want to know why I’m at Highwater? Love. I mean, it’s just love. The love of the people, for each other, for me.”
Four years later, Mary and Susie are still singing together every Sunday, and whenever the service has a skit written in for the kids, Mary is the first one cast. Last weekend, she was the gift of joy, with a yellow gift-wrapping bow balanced on her head as she told knock-knock jokes to the congregation. Jen Spellman has taken to signing with the crew after finding Highwater recently. She’s retiring in January from a career as a suicide prevention hotline worker, and she told me that Highwater is the first place she’s belonged in a while.
Sophie LeMay writes for TheReportingProject.org, the nonprofit news organization of Denison University’s Journalism program, which is supported by generous donations from readers. Sign up for The Reporting Project newsletter here.