By Deb Gruver and Stan Finger
The Wichita Eagle
WHITEWATER, Kan. — As the smell of smoke hung crisp in the bitter air, Herbert and Selma Entz reminisced Tuesday about how closely tied their lives have been to Emmaus Mennonite Church.
The church just northeast of Whitewater burned to the ground early Tuesday, leaving the Entzes and about 500 other members without a place to worship.
Investigators hadn’t determined a cause Tuesday evening.
Emmaus was where Herbert Entz’s parents married in 1928. The ceremony took place in the basement “because the church wasn’t completed yet,” he said.
“And my dad was the janitor there for the first 27 years,” Selma Entz chimed in.
But perhaps most important, the church was where the couple met -- in the nursery as babies.
“I was born in ’30, and she was born in ’29,” Herbert Entz said. “We met in the nursery in 1930.”
Then, with a devilish grin, he added: “She started holding hands, so they had to separate us.”
“He likes to tell that to people, so I let him,” Selma Entz countered.
The Entzes, who married at the church in 1954, raised six children, three of whom went on to be missionaries.
“We have a lot of memories here,” Herbert Entz said. “It’s the only church that both of us have attended all our lives.”
The state fire marshal’s office and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives have joined Wichita and Newton fire officials in investigating the fire, reported shortly after midnight Tuesday.
“It is completely burnt to the ground,” said Dave Higday, an investigator with the state fire marshal’s office. “There’s just nothing left.”
Part of the church, on Meadowlark Road three miles east and two miles north of Whitewater, dates to 1927. The “new” part of the church is more than 25 years old.
Witnesses who passed by the church about 11 p.m. Monday reported that it looked fine. A little more than an hour later, flames were engulfing it, Higday said.
The Wichita Fire Department was at the scene early Tuesday with a dog trained in detecting accelerants, but Higday warned it will be difficult to determine the cause. The damage, he said, is that vast.
The 9,000-square-foot church had an appraised value of more than $900,000, according to documents that investigators had collected.
“If it’s accidental, we’ll never know what the cause was,” Higday said. “If it was intentional, someone’s going to have to run off at the mouth.”
The church had nine furnaces, and it’s possible one of them malfunctioned and started the fire, he said.
The church has been without a minister for some time; elders in the church have been filling in.
Copyright 2008 The Wichita Eagle