Someone in the congregation once thought the bell ‘sounds’ at our 10 AM Call to Worship were recorded. That the Pastor just pressed a button near their seat and the ‘bell’ rang 10 times, just another part of our Sunday Order of Worship, a tech-trick done with electronic gizmos.
The truth is so much better…
Liberty United Methodist Church has a bell, a real bell, in the scalloped, mission bell tower and at 10 AM every Sunday a real person rings the bell 10 times marking the hour and calling the faithful to worship.
The original church bell was removed from the bell tower in 1955 when a new sound system was installed in honor of Hubert Theodore Kieffer.
The updated sound system was not a big hit with the close neighbors of the church at the time, there were complaints about the volume!
Some compromise was reached and the sound system remained in use for many years, however the original bell was lost to time.
Hubert Kieffer, married Irene A. Azlin in 1934 and raised their children, Hubert T. Jr., James, John, Catherine and Carol as part of the congregation of Liberty UMC. Photo: Buckeye Main St. Coalition, Jan. 2022.
In 2019, while shopping at the Brass Armadillo Antique Mall in Goodyear, Shirley Bomgaars, a member of the Liberty UMC congregation, found and purchased a bell of appropriate size and donated it to Liberty UMC in honor of her mother, Eleanor Bomgaars (nee Van Horsen, b. 1920 – d. 2013). Eleanor was a member of Beaver Ridge United Methodist Church in Karns, TN and loved fishing. Shirley shared the memory that her mother was still fishing until her 91st year!
After the bell tower was repaired, the new bell was raised and dedicated in 2021.