Rev. John Ball: 
Church Founder, Rights Leader

In 1940, Ridgefield’s black community was large and active enough that members decided to establish their own church. They approached the Rev. John Ball, who had recently become a pastor in Norwalk and, led by Ball, the Goodwill Community Baptist Church had its first service March 5, 1941, in the First Congregational Church chapel. 

A year later, the 34-member congregation bought the former creamery on Creamery Lane from Samuel S. Denton, and converted it to a house of worship under Ball’s leadership.  

Born in 1908 in Richmond, Va., John Percell Ball was the son of a Baptist minister who was pastor of the Goodwill Baptist Church in downtown Richmond — Ridgefield’s church was named after his father’s congregation. He graduated from Virginia Union University in Richmond and was ordained a Baptist minister in 1934. 

He came north in 1938, first serving as pastor of a Methodist congregation in New London and soon settling in Norwalk where he was pastor of Grace Baptist Church for 20 years and then founder of Canaan Institutional Baptist Church. 

The new church on Creamery Lane was officially dedicated in 1942, and chief speaker at the service was the Rev. W. B. Ball, the pastor’s father. Among the guests were the Rev. William Lusk of St. Stephen’s, the Rev. George Tompkins of Jesse Lee Methodist, and the Rev. Hugh Shields of the First Congregational as well as Selectman Harry E. Hull.

Though he was primarily a pastor in Norwalk, where he lived, he participated over the years in many Ridgefield community events and was well known and liked here. At the town’s memorial service for President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945 in the high school auditorium (what’s now the Ridgefield Playhouse), he was one of two soloists to sing — the other was Metropolitan Opera star Geraldine Farrar.

In Norwalk, he was much more active, serving on the Norwalk Common Council and as head of the NAACP. He was instrumental in getting Norwalk to hire its first black teacher, and was also behind efforts to hire the first black firefighter and policeman. He helped pass the city’s Fair Housing Law and was involved in creating the Fair Rent Commission. He co-founded NEON, Norwalk’s anti-poverty agency, and worked to help the homeless. 

Over the years, he lobbied for civil rights not only in Norwalk, but also in Hartford and Washington. 

Ball served the Goodwill congregation until 1959, and returned in 1969. However, dwindling membership led to the closing of the Goodwill church by 1975. The building is now an apartment house. 

Ball died in 1992 at the age of 83, leaving “his mark upon Norwalk as a mighty warrior and an ambassador for the cause of Christ,” his Canaan congregation said. 

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For years it was thought that the Goodwill building had been moved to the site from the old Village Green, where it had served as the First Congregational Church from around 1800 to 1888.

However,  Robert J. Walker, who bought the building in 1976 and converted it to apartments, believed this to be impossible.

In renovating the structure extensively, he found that the first floor, rotted and termite-infested, was the only portion of the three-story building that could have been the old creamery. His study of the framing – it was actually two buildings joined together – indicated that the structure was not large enough to have been the old Congregational church, photographs of which he had examined. However, pieces from the old church, such as beams, may have been used in constructing the creamery.

William B. Lusk: 

“Daddy”

“After completing a 35-year job, many men would be content to slip quietly into retirement,” said a Ridgefield Press editorial in 1950. “Not Mr. Lusk. Long ago his stout heart committed him to a lifetime of devotion to humanity.”

Indeed, the Rev. William Lusk, rector of St. Stephen’s longer than anyone in the church's three-century history, had retired in Ridgefield, but was heading off to England on an unusual mission. He had joined the staff of London’s All Hallows-by-the-Tower Church, which despite having been bombed out in the recent World War II, was still holding “open-air” services every day in its roofless building — All Hallows had been holding services daily for 1,275 years and wasn’t about to stop because of a German bomb! Lusk was to minister to the congregation and help London’s oldest church raise money to rebuild. 

He was 80 years old when he undertook the task.

A native of Northern Ireland,  William Brown Lusk was born in 1869, and graduated from Queens College, Belfast, where he was a rugby and track star. He came to this country in 1894, graduating three years later from Princeton Theological Seminary. 

He became a Presbyterian minister in the Adirondacks, but finding the Presbyterians too dogmatic and rigid, he joined the Episcopal Church in 1907 and in 1915, was called to Ridgefield. That was the same year the current stone church building was completed. A year later, a new rectory opened. 

During his years here, he came to be known as “Daddy,” not only by parishioners but also in the community. 

“Those who knew him recall his fine Irish humor,” said Robert Haight in his history of St. Stephen’s. “He was articulate, somewhat of a nonconformist, open, warm, and comfortable with all people, though seeming to relate most closely with persons of intellect and wealth. He was an avid reader and a classical scholar, conversant with both Latin and Greek.”

Lusk was also the first rector who employed non-scriptural material in his sermons. “The texts of his sermons were often taken from books or poems he had read, or from events of the day,” Haight said. “While this is commonplace today, Mr. Lusk’s progressivism then cause some consternation among the more conservative members of the parish.”

Nonetheless, he gained a wide reputation as a preacher, and was often invited to speak at other churches, as well as at the Episcopal cathedral in Hartford and Berkeley Divinity School. 

One of the first things Lusk did in 1915 was to create the St. Stephen’s Men’s Civic League, aimed at “bringing the men of the parish closer together and to promote free and methodical discussion of questions concerning the social and moral well-being of the community.” To the latter end, the league had an orchestra that played many community concerts. But it also sponsored debates on timely topics, such as local liquor laws and the advantages of automobiles.  

The league also got involved in more controversial social issues, such as fighting discrimination being practiced against the local Italian population.

Lusk led the congregation during two world wars — in World War I, he traveled to France to visit and encourage the troops. He set up a YMCA hut for the Connecticut soldiers in France, where they could relax and have a taste of home. 

After World War II, he served on the Postwar Planning Board, which aided returning servicemen.

During his years, St. Stephen’s Church prospered, but maintained a country flavor — for most of their years here, William and Edna Lusk had chickens, a cow, and some rabbits out back of the rectory. (In 1938, the vestry ordered a halt to the brooding of chickens in the rectory basement because of the “disagreeable odor.”) 

After working in England, the Lusks returned to Ridgefield, living on High Ridge. William Lusk died in 1953 at the age of 83. Edna Lusk, also a native of Northern Ireland who was active in the Red Cross here and was known as “Monie,” died 10 years later, age 79.

Clayton R. Lund:
Uncontainable Compassion

Only two pastors in the three-century history of Ridgefield’s oldest church have served longer than the Rev. Clayton R. Lund. One was his predecessor, the Rev. Hugh Shields, and the other was the Rev. Jonathan Ingersoll, from 1740 to 1778. 

The 17th minister of the First Congregational Church arrived in 1956 and retired just 30 years later. During Lund’s first 10 years here, the congregation tripled in size to 800 people, a church school was added, and an assistant minister was hired. 

A native of Providence, R.I., Clayton Reginald Lund was born in 1919 and graduated from Clark University and Andover-Newton Theological School.  He served congregations in Massachusetts and New York before coming to Ridgefield at the age of 37.

“A ministry is a life of service to other people,” Mr. Lund said in 1986 when he was retiring after 42 years of parish work. “My daily agenda is created by the needs of others. A minister has to be a teacher, preacher, pastor, administrator, and community leader.” 

Lund was all of those, often participating in community organizations and speaking up for people in need. 

He was also a strong leader. In 1978, just after extensive renovations were completed, a child playing with a candle ignited a fire that destroyed the Church House. Lund led the efforts to build a new church house, which was completed in 1980 and named Lund Hall in his honor. 

However, over his three decades in Ridgefield,  Lund was best known for comforting those in need. At his retirement, novelist and historian Kathryn Morgan Ryan, whose Roman Catholic husband, author Cornelius Ryan, was a close friend of the minister, called  Lund “a man of surging talent and uncontainable compassion. Very soon now…we in the town he loves will realize that, like others in our lives, we took him for granted, that we believed he would always be here for us — all of us, any of us, at any time. It is hard to let go of the security he represents.” 

He was so respected as a minister that in 1990, Andover-Newton, his alma mater, established a $20,000 Clayton R. Lund scholarship for ministerial students. 

Lund, who had moved to Danbury after his retirement, died there in 2000 at the age of 81.

“Clayton Lund brought a powerful blend of dignity, faith, wisdom, flair, and charm into the pulpit,” wrote the Rev. Dr. Charles Hambrick-Stowe in his 2011 church history, “We Gather Together.” “He was well-suited for leading the church through the rapid changes coming to the town of Ridgefield from the 1950s through the 1980s.”

Lund himself described those changes concisely in a 1987 church history, “Ridgefield … was on its way to becoming one of the East’s most desirable and expensive places to live. Ridgefielders watched with some apprehension as their beautiful town, in which they knew and greeted one another, was ‘invaded’ by newcomers. Change was rapid, construction was everywhere. Woods were cut down for new development; oddly named new roads ribboned the hills and valleys; personal service and shopping became a thing of the past.”