“God’s Acre”

Historic Forest Grove Church

Little Snowy Mountains

Written and Photography by Cathy Moser

Meadowlarks warble from their perches on the ornate and lustrous silver fence fronting the Forest Grove Church where worship will soon begin. The bell in the bell tower rings as congregants pass through the front doors that open to the sanctuary. Natural light illuminates the room where stained-glass windows cast their hues. Without electricity or plumbing, the small congregation has chosen to keep the building exactly as it was when several of their ancestors built it back in 1907. 

“I have an intense interest in people. I want to know what they think and if I can help them by giving them the gospel.” 

- Reverend David Iverson

Reverend David Iverson, 90, sits behind the pulpit. Dressed in in jeans, cowboy boots, a Western shirt, and a bolo tie, he looks more like a rancher than a pastor as he preaches to his flock. Since 1968, he has preached, prayed, and sung his way into the hearts of Forest Grove parishioners. His dedicated service there, and at two other parishes in east central Montana, is similar to the nineteenth century clergymen who traveled by horseback, wagon, or foot, delivering their sermons along circuits that ranged from 200 to 500 miles. 

Iverson grew up on the family ranch near Winnett and saw the need for churches in prairie communities. Drawn to ministry, he graduated with a degree in Biblical studies from Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, and later received his master’s degree in New Testament literature from Wheaton College in Illinois. He and his wife, Ella, married in 1956 and raised two children. 

After ordination as a Baptist minister in 1958, Reverend Iverson founded First Baptist Church in Winnett in 1959. When a family in Sand Springs asked him to start a church in that ranching community, the lukewarm response to the proposal included one curmudgeon who said he didn’t think any Christians lived in the area, so why build a church? But the Iversons’ faith prevailed. More families came to worship in the Sand Springs Community Church erected in 1964. “We started the Sand Springs and Winnett churches with very few members,” Reverend Iverson recalls. “If we didn’t have our faith, we would have been discouraged.” He and Ella drove 200 miles every Sunday to preach at the Forest Grove, Winnett, and Sand Springs churches. 

When the Forest Grove area was still largely unsettled, two circuit-riding clergymen practiced a similar testament of faith. Reverend Hugh Wakefield and Episcopalian Bishop Richmond Brewer had dreams of building a proper place to worship at Forest Grove. Bishop Brewer was convinced he could persuade homesteaders, cowhands, sheepherders, and others to make donations for a church. He was right. A list of donors and amounts, from 50 cents to $500, was sealed inside a tin box and placed in the cornerstone. The church’s clean, simple architecture reflected the no-nonsense, Spartan lifestyle by which homesteaders lived. One summer day in 1908, during a picnic, the community dedicated St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. 

“Sheep and people can easily be misled. They both have to have supervision. They both have to have care.” 

- Reverend David Iverson

A mere four years later, a representative for the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad came to town. He brought good and bad news: steel rails were coming to Forest Grove and would link it with Lewistown, 20 miles west, and Grass Range, 16 miles east, but the church and adjoining graveyard sat on the right-of-way. This was remedied in 1913 when railroad men moved the church and graveyard to a plot of land donated by the homesteading Frost family. Many of the pioneers who settled Forest Grove rest in the cemetery.

Although the church was founded on the Episcopalian faith, John Sellers, the churchwarden in 1928, expressed an overriding sentiment. When penning his historical account of the church, he wrote, “It is ‘God’s Acre.’ We don’t expect to be asked what denomination we belong to when we present ourselves above. Neither will there be anyone asked that question when they come here to lay away their dead.” 

In 1969, a new chapter in church history unfolded when the Episcopal Diocese in Helena announced that it no longer wanted the church. The plan was to demolish it. To save it from that fate, the four St. Paul’s Episcopal Church officers each donated $1 to purchase the building. The congregation renamed their house of worship Forest Grove Church, and it was officially nondenominational. “We have families who are Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist, and so on,” Reverend Iverson says. “Our hearts are open to everyone.

In recent years, Reverend Iverson and Ella, who is now eighty-six, had eased their schedule, availing Sand Springs and Forest Grove on alternating Sundays and handing over the Winnett parish to Reverend Joel Oldemann.

Forest Grove Church services are held Easter Sunday and every first and third Sunday at 11 a.m. through the end of September. This isolated ranching community in the Little Snowy Mountains foothills is accessed by dirt roads south of Highway 200, connecting Lewistown and Grass Range.

“Preaching takes a lot of emotion and energy,” Reverend Iverson said. “Doing it three times in one day and keeping up with the ranch work became too much.”

For thirty years he ran sheep at the family place, Silver Sage Ranch, before switching to cattle. Ranching provided fodder for sermons, and he found similarities in the animals he tended and the people he ministered.

“Sheep and people can easily be misled,” he said. “They both have to have supervision. They both have to have care.” 

With sixty-seven years of service as a pastor, Reverend Iverson still feels God nudging him to minister. “I have an intense interest in people,” he said. “I want to know what they think and if I can help them by giving them the gospel.”