Little Brown Church Marriage Reunion offers inspiration and sage advice

For 70th year, historic Little Brown Church welcomes couples and celebrates marriages

By Bob Fenske, editor@nhtrib.com

Meredith and Quintin Becker sat in the famed Little Brown Church near Nashua on Sunday and found inspiration all around them.

“When you hear 50, 60, 70 years it is inspiring, that is the right word,” said Meredith Becker, who has been married all of 22 days, reacting to the lengths of time other couples have been together.

“Both our parents have been married a long time, our grandparents have been married for 50 years, so we have some great examples to follow. And now we have all these people, too,” she said.

That’s what the annual Little Brown Church Marriage Reunion is all about. It celebrates all marriages – those that are decades long and those like the Beckers’ that are still measured in weeks.

Dozens of couples from near and far attended the two-day reunion that started with a pastor’s reception on Saturday evening and continued with a host of activities including the worship service and renewal of vows on Sunday.

In many ways, it was a typical Marriage Reunion. Couples rang the church bell, listened to an insightful sermon from the Rev. Drew McHolm, made new friends and celebrated the love they have for each other.

This 2023 reunion marked the 70th year the “Church in the Wildwood” held its reunion, and it featured a guest singer in Nashua’s own Dustin Weiss, whose parents, Robin and Shelly, celebrated 41 years together by attending their first-ever Marriage Reunion.

And after the worship service, the group gathered to dedicate the new Marlys Sinnwell Wedding Garden, the latest addition to a church where more than 77,000 couples have said “I do.”

Faced with a gray, rainy Sunday, McHolm remarked that had had prayed for good weather for the event, “but God loves farmers more than pastors,” and the crowd agreed the rain was needed.

Couples not only filled the small sanctuary for the service but also were a part of the service via close-circuit televisions in the church basement and in tents set up on the church grounds.

McHolm’s sermon was centered on how couples can keep things fresh and his suggestion was to always focus on the three C’s – clarity, commitment and compassion.

He pointed out that any relationship will involve confrontation, but when properly resolved that brings clarity.

McHolm used his own marriage to talk about the two “buttons” couples have access to – the blessing one and the destructive one – and that even with his own wife, Jesse Boatright, it’s a learning process.

“Crumbs on the counter, who knew? I found out that’s a big thing,” he said, before repeating himself. “Who knew?”

“Not you,” Boatright quickly piped in from her pew, as the church erupted in laughter.

The key to commitment is trust, McHolm said, and the way to develop trust is to keep your promises – the simple ones as well as the big ones.

The pastor said compassion is sometimes most difficult with the people we love the most.

“It’s why we have to ask God every day to clothe us in compassion,” he said.

To the couples who attended this year’s reunion, McHolm’s words resonated.

“We were really drawn to the history of this place, this church,” said Quintin Becker. “But we couldn’t have asked for a better pastor. What he said this morning, that was really impactful to us.”

To the Beckers’ right sat Doug and Rena Cling, who were married at the Little Brown Church in July 2018, just 10 days before McHolm became the full-time pastor. They returned in 2019 for the Marriage Reunion and were back in the church on Sunday.

“We live in Urbandale, but I can tell you if it wasn’t 2½ hours away, we’d be here every Sunday,” Doug Cling said. “What I appreciate not just about Drew but really this whole church is the value it puts on marriage.”

“It’s just so real, too,” said Rena Cling. “Every time we come here, we get something that makes our marriage even stronger. It’s not just because we were married here, it’s because this little church understands that everything isn’t always perfect, it takes work.”

In between Sunday’s food and entertainment, the Little Brown Church dedicated its new wedding garden in memory of Marlys Sinnwell, the longtime secretary at the church who both McHolm and Boatright said was great comfort to them when they came to the church five years ago.

“There was only one Marlys, and God blessed us by having her here when we got here,” McHolm said.

After McHolm and Boatright shared some great “Marlys stories,” they turned over the honors to Sinnwell’s husband to cut the ribbon opening another venue for Little Brown Church marriages.

“It’s been a good day,” Boatright said as the Sinnwell family posed for pictures in the garden. “Then again, they’re all good days when it comes to our little reunion.”