Jim Fisher visits a church where the door is always open.
JIM FISHER: Northwest Missouri, bean fields swept clean, the stubble where the summer's corn and milo grew, a khaki world this time of year, the brief fall color gone, only the oaks holding their lives until another spring comes around. Amid the low hills of Gentry County is a creek, a bridge, and a community: Island City, a quite name, almost ethereal in the ease with which it can be said. Say it a couple of times. There is none of the dissonance of other place names, the Wichitas, the Buttes, Albuquerques and Bangors, Schenectadys and Milwaukees. Island City. Legend is that a century ago Little Turkey Creek flooded, marooning what then was a new fairly sizeable town, one with a dentist and a doctor, several thriving stores, even a blacksmith. The water soon receded. The name remains, but the hoped-for railroad never came, and over the years, Island City shrank to a combination store-odd fellows home, now gone to ruin, and a paved road that turns to gravel. (Choir singing) Then this, the Island City Christian Church. (Choir singing) Membership, 100. Average Sunday attendance, 40 plus. Founded in 1860, the present building dates from 1878. Gleaming white, set above the little tributary that occasionally floods, believe it or not, in this go-go age of emergency committees and task forces, it still has a ladies aid society.
REVEREND: We ask every person this morning that believes that Jesus Christ is our master and savior to break bread with us.
JIM FISHER: Still the sight of a congregation could be a postcard, not only of reality here, but as representative of a good part of that rarely mentioned America, one of peace, community, friends, caring, and this year's good crops, things all attributed to a higher power. Despite what's beamed here on television and in satellite signals, the cacophony of politics and mayhem, the outrages of the powerful, Island City is still the rule, rather than the exception. Just a church, just folks. The door is never loved, a fact almost impossible to believe in 1996. What's here sometimes seems hard even to imagine in a world increasingly bounded by a 21-inch screen, with its celebration of the dysfunctional and its worship of the celebrity. But it's real. A Missouri autumn, people visiting afterwards, in a small white building high on a hill. The thing is occasionally you have to look.
I'm Jim Fisher.
