Baltimore Church Spiffs Up Building for Just Peanuts

Baltimore’s oldest church was losing hope. Its congregation was shrinking, and its building was deteriorating. Gleaming high-rise hotels and a modern glass-and-steel convention center pressed against the 227-year-old brick church, dwarfing it.

At one point, the city even suggested that the church, which remained standing after a 1904 fire devoured much of downtown, give up and move out.

But that was before a new stadium for the Baltimore Orioles was built a block away. And before Otterbein United Methodist Church discovered peanuts.

Now, before almost every Orioles game, church members sell $1 bags of peanuts, along with the vendors selling soft pretzels and T-shirts on the street next to the ballpark.

Former Pastor Max Powers got the idea five years ago when a church member sold only two bags of peanuts at the church’s strawberry festival.

It was game day for the Orioles, so Powers made a cardboard sign to wear and headed outside with 102 bags. He returned less than 20 minutes later with $102.

Since then, the church has gotten a new coat of paint and its 100-year-old organ has been restored. By opening day next year, congregants hope to have enough money to extend a wrought-iron fence around the building.

Baseball, Powers said, has saved the church’s spirit.

“Too often, people view the ministry of a church as something that happens on Sunday morning from 10 to 11,” he said. “The reality is, the ministry has to reach out and encompass the friendship and sharing of goals, socially as well as religiously.”

Christian music blares in the Bible study room, where a group of 70-something church members in yellow “Old Otterbein U.M. Peanut Packer” T-shirts gather each Wednesday to bag the nuts.

The group renews its vendor license annually, even though by law it isn’t required because all of the profits are used by the church.

The Rev. Millard Knowles noted that the church has one simple rule about its business: “We don’t sell on Sunday.”