An elder-led congregation on South Main Street
Chatham Christian Church meets at 9897 South Main Street in Chatham, Illinois, a small town just south of Springfield. The motto that runs across its pages - "Where God's Word is Taught… and Lived" - captures the personality of a congregation that has organized itself around plain Bible teaching, believer's baptism, and the steady work of a pastoral team led by Rick Wenneborg and youth minister Mark Huber. Services are held each Sunday morning, supplemented by Sunday school classes, evening studies, and a long-running midweek Bible study that has walked the congregation through books of the Old and New Testaments for years.
The 1976 sanctuary building sits on land the congregation bought four decades ago, and a brand-new 60-by-120 foot gymnasium has now been added behind the fellowship hall. Members built the gym with a sizable gift from the estate of Jack and Bonnie and dedicated it as a way to reach families through basketball, volleyball, and pickleball. On any given Sunday you will find a printed sermon manuscript on a table at the back, a YouTube livestream running for those staying home, and a calendar full of small groups, choirs, retreats, and basketball nights.
Sunday morning: worship, then Bible school
Worship begins at 9:15 am. The congregation is traditional in its musical diet, closing many services with hymns like "Joy to the World" and "All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name," and singing the doxology when the offering is brought forward. Rick Wenneborg's preaching is conversational, often working through a single book of the Bible or a tight series of sermons, and he prints full manuscripts of each message to place on the table at the back of the auditorium. Members pick them up before or after the service to follow along, fill in the blanks of the outline, or take them home for later reading. The manuscript and the recorded sermon video are also posted online through the church's sermon archive, so people who miss a Sunday can catch up the same week.
At 10:30 am the Sunday school hour begins for children, youth, and adults. Rick and Mark alternate in the pulpit, and youth classes meet with the youth minister down the hall. A separate adult class offers an open discussion of the morning's message in the auditorium, and another group meets across from the youth minister's office for a slower, expository walk through a book of the Bible. During the summer, college-aged students gather in the church library for their own study. Children's ministry runs alongside these classes, and the church runs a Vacation Bible School during the warmer months and a Children's Christmas Musical later in the year that brings kids, parents, and choir together for rehearsals on Sunday evenings.
Sunday evenings and Wednesday Bible study
From September through the spring, the adults of Chatham Christian Church gather again at 6:30 pm for an evening study series. Recent rounds have included an archaeological look at the Holy Land sites using the videos of Joel Kramer and Expedition Bible, a four-part Ray Vander Laan study (Israel's Mission, The Mission of Jesus, A Clash of Kingdoms, and Cultures in Conflict), a sweep through Christian history with Tim Challies' "Epic: An Around-the-World Journey through Christian History," and verse-by-verse work through the Psalms. Youth groups meet at the same hour, and a separate children's choir rehearsal sometimes fills the early evening.
On Wednesdays at 6:30 pm a smaller group meets around the ping-pong table in the fellowship area to walk through a book of the Bible together. The most recent cycle has been an extended study of the book of Job, and before that the group worked through Psalm 119 one stanza at a time, beginning on the first Wednesday of January and continuing through the year. Members describe the Wednesday study as the most participatory hour in the church's calendar - a chance to ask hard questions, swap insights, and pray for one another in a setting that feels closer to a Bible study around a kitchen table than to a classroom.
Preaching and the "Rappin' with Rick" column
Rick Wenneborg has been the preaching minister at Chatham Christian Church for more than fifty years, and his voice sets the tone of the bulletin and the website as well as the pulpit. He writes a monthly column called "Rappin' with Rick" that lands in the church paper and on the website, blending biblical reflection, family news, and gentle commentary on the world. Recent columns have walked through the armor of God with a grandchild fresh back from a CIY week, traced the idea of intelligent design through a months-long knee problem, retold Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe as a parable of contentment, and shared a tribute to the church's two local pro-life ministries.
The sermons themselves come from the same steady well. A recent series through Matthew peppered the church with parables - "Failure in the Valley," "Eyewitnesses of His Majesty," "A Rock and a Stumbling Block," "Strange Bedfellows," "Feeding the Dogs," "Conflict Over Traditions," "Retreat, Respond, or Rescue," "Tares and Treasures," "The Parable of the Sower," and "An Evil Generation" - and past series have ranged through Genesis, 1 and 2 Samuel, the Sermon on the Mount, the pastoral epistles, and books of the prophets. Members who travel can keep up through the online manuscript, the sermon.net audio and video archive, and the YouTube channel that carries both live worship and prerecorded messages back several years.
Youth ministry and the next generation
Mark Huber serves as the youth minister and coordinates the church's ministry to teenagers and college-aged students. Sunday school classes for youth meet during the 10:30 hour, and a youth group gathers at 6:30 pm on Sunday evenings for teaching, games, and small-group time. During the summer, Mark and other adults take students to conferences such as CIY (Christ In You), and a calendar of retreats, service projects, and fellowship events fills the rest of the year. High school graduates are encouraged to plug into a campus ministry when they leave for college, and several of them have gone on to lead Fellowship of Christian Athletes chapters and to serve internships with campus ministries at Illinois State University and Auburn.
Children's ministry runs alongside the youth program. Sunday school classes meet for every grade, and the church runs a Vacation Bible School each summer that uses the church grounds and the fellowship hall for games, music, Bible teaching, and crafts. A Children's Christmas Musical brings the children's choir together for Sunday-evening rehearsals in late September and October, leading up to a full performance in December. Parents are also encouraged to bring their children into the auditorium for the main worship service, and printed sermon manuscripts are designed to be picked up by anyone who wants to follow along at home.
The new gym and the sports outreach
The most visible change at Chatham Christian Church in recent years is the new gymnasium built behind the fellowship hall. The project is the legacy of Jack and Bonnie, longtime members who left the bulk of their estate to the church and asked the elders to use it for ministry to young people. After months of prayer, the elders chose a sports-based outreach - a 60-by-120 foot heated and air-conditioned steel building erected by Hersberger Construction of Tuscola, Illinois, attached to the fellowship hall with doors that open directly between them. Inside the gym are basketball and volleyball courts, lines for pickleball, a balcony that doubles as a set of bleachers and a hangout area, and storage rooms that can be opened for dinners and receptions.
The gym was dedicated in April, and it is now in regular use by the church for church programs, church-sponsored events, recreational play by members, and games hosted by members and their guests. Pickleball nights have become a standing item on the church calendar, and the facility is also reserved for wedding receptions, holiday meals, and family gatherings. Members of the congregation can book a time slot through a Google Calendar linked from the gym page, and Mark Huber, Casey, and Chris Luzio handle day-to-day questions about the building.
The elders have been clear that the gym is not a community rental facility and will not be open for drop-in reservations from the public at large. The hope, however, is that neighbors who come to play basketball or watch their kids in a volleyball game will get to know the people of Chatham Christian Church and, through them, the Savior it serves. Sunday school classes, youth events, and outreach nights are starting to use the new space, and the gym has quickly become the most active room on the property.
Missions and global giving
Chatham Christian Church has long made global missions a major line item in its budget, setting aside roughly a quarter of all tithes and offerings for work beyond Chatham. Missionaries and ministries supported by the congregation include Mark Fishel and Grace in Cambodia, where the church has helped fund retreats, baptisms, an English-language Bible study, and a Christmas outreach; Fernando and Janaine Basso in Madagascar, who work with Good News Productions International to show the JESUS film in hundreds of Bara villages and have helped start more than two hundred churches; and Ati and the Asian Christian Mission, which the church has underwritten with extra gifts for water treatment systems, evangelist training, and Sunday school curriculum in the Jerwang villages of Southeast Asia.
Closer to home, the church has partnered with Casas por Cristo to build homes for poor Christian families in Guatemala, sent relief funds after the Haiti earthquake to help with a school septic system, and stood behind two local pro-life ministries: First Step Women's Center and Beerlahai Roi. The church has also given to the Christian HolyLand Foundation to support Christians ministering in Israel, given to Ozark Christian College, and contributed in the past to Good News Productions International and to a church in Jamaica that needed a new roof after a hurricane. Members are encouraged to make missions a regular part of their prayer life, and the church's monthly newsletter carries updates and prayer letters from missionaries on the field.
What the church teaches
Chatham Christian Church understands itself as a simple congregation of Christians who work, pray, study, worship, and fellowship together under the oversight of local elders. It does not maintain an official church membership list; instead, the active participation of an immersed believer in the congregational life of the church is treated as adequate to constitute membership. New visitors who have not been baptized are encouraged to come forward on a Sunday to publicly acknowledge their commitment to Christ and, if they have not already done so, to be immersed into Him. The church will also notify any other congregation a new attender may already belong to, so that relationships with a previous church family are not unintentionally broken.
The road to that moment is laid out in four steps drawn straight from Scripture. A right relationship with God begins with faith, after the model of Hebrews 11:6; it leads to repentance, as in Acts 3:19; it is followed by an open confession of Christ before others, as in Matthew 10:32; and it culminates in baptism by immersion, as Paul describes in Romans 6:3-6, rising to walk in newness of life. The elders have written out their convictions in a series of documents - the founding Organizing Board Minutes of November 28, 1971; "On Church Membership" of February 19, 1981; "On Church Leadership" of November 5, 1981; and "On Evaluating Elders" - which the church keeps on file and makes freely available.
The Bible itself sits at the center of these convictions. Psalm 119 - all 176 verses of it - has been a focus of personal study and small-group study across recent years. The Wednesday night Bible study has moved stanza by stanza through the psalm, members are encouraged to memorize key verses and end their daily Bible reading with one from this psalm, and church leaders have recommended Matthew Henry's commentary, the Daily Reading Bible NASB reading plan (available on Kindle), and the illustrated overviews produced by BibleProject as a way to keep growing in the Word. Worship services, the preaching schedule, the adult studies, and the youth ministry all orbit the conviction that the Bible, taught in plain language and applied to daily life, is the means by which God's people are built up and sent out.
From a storefront to a steeple
Chatham Christian Church traces its beginnings to a small group of believers who organized themselves in late 1971. The "Chatham Christian Church Organizing Board Minutes" of November 28, 1971 record the formal establishment of the congregation, and within a few years the new church moved into a dedicated building. Members still tell the story of marching from a storefront on the square to the new sanctuary carrying flags and singing hymns. On the day of the move, the men rigged the steeple into place while the women carried furniture, arranged classrooms, and filled the minister's shelves. The dedicatory prayer offered by Jerry Aulich - "Praise God, Bless His People. Fill this Church, and Deliver the Steeple" - has become part of how the congregation remembers that moment. The decorative cornerstone set that day is engraved with the words "Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it," a verse from Psalm 127 that the church still treats as its motto.
Rick Wenneborg arrived as preaching minister a couple of years into the church's life, when he and his wife Marilyn came up from a small congregation in Kansas at the invitation of two couples who had heard him preach. Within a few years, the church was planting outreach projects and supporting missionaries from coast to coast, beginning an annual Thanksgiving dinner that became one of the church's most loved traditions. Over the next five decades Rick would preach nearly 2,500 sermons, write more than 2,000 columns for the church paper, baptize 317 people, marry 129 couples, and bury 175 of the church's members. The fiftieth anniversary of his ministry was marked by a celebration in 2023 and, around the same time, with the trip of a lifetime - Marilyn and Rick flew to Israel, sailed the Mediterranean, walked the Sea of Galilee, and toured the catacombs of Rome as a gift from the church family.
A calendar full of small things and large ones
Outside the Sunday and Wednesday rhythms, the church keeps a steady beat through the year. Vacation Bible School fills a week each summer. Pickleball and volleyball nights fill the gym year-round. An annual Thanksgiving dinner in the fellowship hall - and, after the gym opened, sometimes in the gym itself - brings the whole congregation together around a table. A missions month, a pro-life baby bottle campaign, and a Love Week tie the church's faith to the world beyond Chatham. Missionaries visit in person when they can, and the church's newsletters carry their letters in print and online.
Two of the church's long-running traditions are worth noting because they shape what newcomers experience. The first is the printed sermon manuscript, an unusual practice in which Rick and Mark put a full written copy of the sermon on the table before the service, alongside the outline, so that visitors who want to read along can pick one up as they walk in. The second is the open invitation to ask the minister hard questions, which Rick has issued in writing in the church paper. Members are encouraged to ask anything, and the minister is happy to come to their kitchen table to talk through the difficult passages. It is a remarkably conversational church for one that has been on the same corner of Chatham for half a century, and visitors tend to notice.
How to connect
Worship is at 9:15 am on Sunday morning at 9897 South Main Street, Chatham, Illinois, with Sunday school following at 10:30 am and youth groups and adult study at 6:30 pm. Wednesday Bible study meets at 6:30 pm. Services are livestreamed on YouTube, full manuscripts and audio sermons are archived online, and the church's calendar, newsletter archive, Bible study notes, gym reservation page, and the "Rappin' with Rick" columns are all available through chathamchristian.org. Visitors who want to talk with the pastor can reach Rick Wenneborg at rick@chathamchristian.org and the youth minister, Mark Huber, at mark@chathamchristian.org; questions about the livestream or the building can be sent to chris@chathamchristian.org.