The Community Club was initially designed as a women’s service organization. However, a parallel men’s club never got off the ground and in 1922 both men and women were welcome in a single volunteer and service group.

   The Community Club attracted many of the leaders of Deering and the new organization raised funds and oversaw the addition to the town hall, installing running water in the town hall, repairing the church, sponsoring Christmas parties for all the town’s children and holding dances and whist parties.

   The Community Club also raised the funds to purchase the town’s first tractor for plowing snow, sending the old snow rollers into permanent retirement.

   From its inception, the Women’s Guild served as the major gathering place for Deering women and it is still going strong. Margaret Colburn was at the founding of the Guild and has been an active Guild and Church member ever since.

   The Guild, infused with the Christian message of service, has been the strongest arm of the church. The Guild has raised money for the church, the town and for countless needy people at home and around the world.

   For Deering women who lived in families struggling for physical survival, the service function of the guild was a crucial factor in strengthening their dignity, self-reliance and their sense of the wider community. Asking poor people to give and to serve others is a high compliment indeed.

   The social dimension of the Guild was equally important. Farmwomen often find themselves isolated from their neighbors and caught in an endless round of work. With the Guild, once a month Deering women could take a bath, put on their best dresses and even hats and leave husband or children to prepare supper that day.

   They were off, usually by foot or horse and buggy, to the Guild where they entered another world of small cakes and coffee, served on real china that soon swept away the worries and pressures that they had temporarily left at home.

   They got to talk with neighbors they may have only seen at church, weddings or funerals. More importantly they could expand their minds and souls.

   Almost every Guild meeting had a program featuring talks by missionaries who had served in China, Japan or the Philippines. There were also book reviews and talks on how to make things like Christmas decorations, advice on cooking new dishes and innovative sewing techniques.

   The Guild was a major force in bringing Deering women and the summer people together in a single community. At first most meetings were held at summer residences and Mrs. Poling and Dr. Campbell planned most of the programs.

   However, Millie Johnson, a local woman, succeeded Mrs. Poling as president and thereafter meetings were rotated among all sorts of homes in town. Later, Deering women such as Almeda Holmes, Margaret Colburn and Clara Rich, all of whom were also active church members, served as president.

   In 1941, as World War II began, Rev. William Sipe, together with his wife and six children, came to Deering as its first settled minister since 1874. By this time the Congregational Church’s Board of Homeland Missions had taken over the Community Center and begun to appoint directors that also served as our pastors.

   In 1946 Rev. Charles Reidt, the second successive full-time minister and director of the Community Center, arrived in Deering. The Reidts, like the Sipes, settled easily into Deering society. With three children, one still in high school, the Deering kids were directly connected to the Reidts and the Church. Mr. Reidt also volunteered to conduct a Sunday School for the high school youngsters and even encouraged them to set up a basketball court in Elizabeth Hall.

   At least one of the teen-age boys who attended Mr. Reidt’s Sunday School reported that these classes were far more engaging than those offered at Hillsborough High School. Mr. Reidt was not shy about giving reading and writing assignments and believing that young people were capable of sophisticated Biblical analysis.

   When the Reidts retired in 1954, the church entered a twenty-five year period of attempted self-sufficiency. The Community Center no longer supplied pastors and the small congregation struggled to find part-time ministers and others who might volunteer to preach.

   In 1954 Deering welcomed Rev. Lydia Whipple Wood for a two-year assignment as the first woman pastor to our church. Rev. Wood came to Deering one day a week and conducted Sunday services. In these times the annual church budget was about $2,700.00 a year. Our church also relied on subsidies from the New Hampshire Council and the Board of Homeland Missions.

   In 1957 the Church opted to join the newly organized United Church of Christ, but it still had no full-time pastor and struggled to find visiting preachers, except during the summer months. However, in 1962, the church fortunes changed when Elmer Lushbough and his wife agreed to serve as lay ministers.

   Lushbough later wrote of his years here that he had no major problems “ with a conservative congregation pretty much Republican, I think…” Thanks to the Lusboughs’ Sunday School project, we have plaques on all our pews identifying the original supporters of our church building.

   With a generous $5,000.00 dollar gift and a $5,000.00 loan from the UCC Board, another donation from the erstwhile benefactor of Deering for $5,000.00, the small church membership still had $20,000.00 to raise. In two years the church raised $10,000.00, mostly given by members of the summer colony. Later the church membership voted to withdraw $14,000.00 from its endowment to finish the ambitious project that is now used for suppers, meetings and church offices.

   In 1965 William Sipe returned to Deering for a second stint as our minister. Although retired to his home town of Hollis, Rev. Sipe commuted to Deering to see our congregation through a difficult period, and Moderator George Wolfe ably led the membership.

   During the 1970s a series of retired part-time pastors came to serve our church. The first of these, Lloyd and Mildred Rising, asked the moderator if $100.00 per month would be possible and then drove to Deering to be the first to live in the new parsonage. The Risings knocked on Deering doors and attracted several new families to the Church.

   Rev. Jonas remembers the Deering Association suppers, Tom Rush concerts and the annual Guild Fair as the highlights of his time with us. He also recalls that the membership was “mostly liberal, both socially and politically.”

   Although the dream was delayed, it did not die. In the 1970s fifty-one new members joined the church, including 27 after 1977. The new membership, including the Shermans, Spraggs and Weedans, sparked a genuine revival in our church. The spiritual harvest of the 1980s was even more dramatic. From August 17, 1980, to March 20, 1988, seventy-one new members joined our church. This new influx of members, more than any other factor, facilitated the serious consideration of our church’s decision to call a part-time minister, for the first time since 1874, financed by our own members.

   In 1977, led by the moderator Howard Spragg, and made possible by the generous offer of Rev. Jonas to donate his time during the winter months as well, the church voted to maintain a year-round church ministry as an experiment. With the help of the New Hampshire Conference minister William McKinney, who conducted another survey of Deering’s potential to support a year-round Church, the membership affirmed the experiment as a permanent policy.

    Katherine Bliss remembers that at this meeting many members were scared to vote for a year-round church. She recalls that Edna Yeaple was the most adamant that the experiment should be continued. Mrs. Yeaple told the meeting, “Let’s do it, we can do it. . . . You’ve got to have faith to go ahead.” Others present at that meeting felt “If she has that much confidence, we shouldn’t be scared.” (Bliss interview, August 12, 1989)

   The membership believed that with its current pledges, it would be able to pay a pastor about $5,500.00 per year. In January 1979 the pastoral search committee, chaired by Gordon Sherman, invited the membership to a buffet supper to meet William Salt, their choice to be the new pastor. At the time Bill Salt was in the process of ordination and still had courses to finish at Keene State in order to graduate. After he preached his first sermon on February 4, he was unanimously voted in as the new minister.

   Rev. Salt came to live in the parsonage and assume his ministerial duties on May 27, 1979. He was to work at the church four days per week, while completing his course work. The membership helped his wife Lee and their two daughters move from Bangor, Maine, to the Eleanor Campbell parsonage.

   Bill Salt, who had accepted God’s call in mid-life, after attending Bangor Seminary, came to Deering as a 48-year-old “rookie minister.” Rev. Salt initiated our World Service and Prayer Committee and nurtured our membership’s compassion for the wider world. The first year of his ministry, Bill Salt made an astounding 104 home visits. He also conducted Bible study, ran a confirmation class, and began a Church newsletter, all accomplished while attending college, looking after a family and supposedly working only part time.

   Kay Bliss remembers Bill Salt’s constant kindness and Leo Vogelien recalls “how much at home Bill made the newcomers feel and how down to earth he was.” The 1980 annual meeting attracted 57 participants, the largest number since the 1930s. The meeting learned that pledges had increased from $9,000.00 to $13,000.00 and that the 1981-82 budget could be met. That year was Bill Salt’s last in Deering. He had accepted another full-time position in Vermont and would later move to Tom’s River, New Jersey. He now serves as the pastor in Washington, New Hampshire, and is a frequent visitor to Deering, the place of his first call as a gospel minister.