ADRIAN ­— From baptisms to weddings to funerals, the pipe organ at First United Methodist Church has been there for decades’ worth of milestones for the church community.

“It’s a member of the family,” said organist Laura Langley. “It’s part of our church. It’s with us as we celebrate, it’s with us as we mourn. Generations of people have sung with this organ.”

The organ was built by Schantz Organ Company in 1964. After 60 years of use, as well as some water damage from a roof leak several years ago, it was showing its age. An entire row of keys no longer worked, and it was clear that the church would have to choose between restoring the instrument and going in another direction.

“It turned out that the congregation really did want to restore the organ,” said the Rev. Alice Ford, senior pastor at First United Methodist. 

People loved the history of the organ, Ford said, and also wanted to embrace the church’s identity as a place where music has always been a big part of worship.

So the church undertook a fundraising campaign, not just for the organ, but also for the building as a whole. “People just really stepped up,” Ford said. “It was quite amazing.”

To accomplish the restoration, every pipe had to be taken out, laid across the pews, and then carefully boxed for shipping. The organ has thousands of pipes, some of them no bigger around than a drinking straw, so this was a major undertaking.

The console was shipped out as well, and its controls were upgraded from pneumatic to electronic. The process took several months, and the restored organ was brought back into service on Easter Sunday.

Ford said the idea of restoring the organ was also in the heart of the church’s previous pastor, Eric Stone, who died from cancer in 2023.

“It was certainly something he intended to do, had he been gifted the time to do so,” she said.

While an organ resembles a piano in some ways, it’s a very different instrument, both in how the sound is created and how it is played.

An organ has multiple rows of keys, called manuals. “Some organs have two, some have three, some have five,” Langley said. “But what all organs have is the foot pedals.”

Langley is an elementary school music teacher in the Madison district. She took over as organist in 1997 upon the retirement of Richard Wegner, who — in addition to serving as superintendent of Clinton Community Schools — had been the church’s organist for more than 50 years. She was already a pianist, but learning to play the pipe organ was a completely new challenge.

“It was teaching my feet to play what my fingers already knew how to do,” she said.

In addition to the manuals and the foot pedals, pipe organs have a series of knobs called stops that govern the flow of air to the pipes, giving the organ one of its unique characteristics — the ability to reflect any mood, from contemplative to triumphant.

“It can take on any character you want,” Langley said.

“On Christmas Eve, for instance, we go from ‘Joy to the World’ with almost all the stops to ‘Silent Night’ where I literally go down to nothing,” she added.

For Lent, something quieter and more reflective is in order, while Easter calls for the kind of joyful, triumphal music that utilizes the organ’s full range of voices — and is, in fact, where the phrase “pulling out all the stops” comes from. 

Langley, who grew up attending First United Methodist, said the church has always been known for having excellent music — but when she was sitting in the pews as a high school student, she didn’t fully realize it.

“Growing up, I took that for granted,” she said. “I thought that’s what church was.”

It wasn’t until she left Adrian as a young adult, she said, that “I realized what a gift we had.”

Part of the pipe organ’s appeal, Langley said, is that it’s the instrument that composers like J.S. Bach were writing for when they created some of the sacred music that remains part of the church’s repertoire today.

“It’s that sense of history,” she said. “It’s connecting those masters to today.”

First United Methodist Church will celebrate the organ’s restoration with a concert by Ohio-based organist Todd Wilson on Sunday, May 24, at 4 p.m. The concert is open to the public, and a freewill offering will be accepted.

The church is located at 1245 W. Maple Ave., Adrian.