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Jenkins Chapel on Rt. 563 in the Pine Barrens

(Peter Genovese/The Star-Ledger)

The small green-shingled church rests peacefully on a hill along a curve in the road deep in the Pine Barrens.

The church - Jenkins Chapel, about halfway between Chatsworth and New Gretna - is nestled in a cathedral of pine trees, a living postcard for a Jersey most of us thought had disappeared years ago.

A snowstorm is approaching, but there are lights on inside the chapel for the Sunday night service. Besides the pastor and organist, only eight people are here tonight, but that's about normal and this is, after all, probably the state's smallest church.

There are no pews, just rows of 1950s-vintage chairs, 16 chairs on the left, 12 on the right. There's an organ on the right and a pulpit up front. Electric candles flicker at each of six white-framed windows, topped with plain white drapes. The chapel is lit by two fluorescent lights.

This is not one of those churches or congregations, though, where everyone sits quietly in the pews waiting for the service to begin.

Tonight, members mill around, talking, laughing, catching up on news.

"We don't have any vestibule,'' Bob Hagaman says. "If you have something to say, say it before or during the service.''

Through storms and tempests, during times when no one showed up for service, despite the occasional break-in and leaky roof, Jenkins Chapel, in Hagaman's words, "just keeps going.''

He won't take the credit, but should. He took over as pastor of the chapel in 1970. Hagaman, a minister who had worked the Pinelands "circuit'' by preaching at country churches in Green Bank, Lower Bank and elsewhere, heard the Episcopal Church wanted to sell the church, so he and his sister saved up $2,000 to buy it.

Hagaman met with a diocesan official and asked him how much he wanted for the

church and 1/8-acre property. "$2,000,'' the official said.

Today, Hagaman smiles at the memory. Some things were just meant to be.

His resolve and faith were tested Initially. For the first two winters - 1970 and 1971 - pretty much no one showed up for services at Jenkins Chapel. "It was just me and the Lord,'' Hagaman said.

Slowly, a congregation formed. Hagaman started holding services at local campgrounds during the summer. A teen youth group painted the church in the mid-70s. A Sunday school at Jenkins Chapel started, and lasted into the 1980s.

The church is actually a former schoolhouse that opened just down the road in 1889, moving to its current location in the early 1900s.

Bob Hagaman, former pastor, Jenkins Chapel, outside the tiny country church.

"Numbers don't count,'' Hagaman once said of the church's small attendance. "It serves its purpose where it's at. People can come in and sit down and be quiet.''

Hagaman calls Jenkins Chapel a non-denominational "Bible-believing mission.'' The Weekstown resident, now 82, has turned over pastor duties to Bob Hund, a minister who happens to be a bellman at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City.

"I got a shift change at work,'' Hund tells his congregation tonight. "I'm now 8 p.m. to 4 a.m.'' He smiles. "I said, Lord, what are you doing to me?''

The guest speaker this night is Brian Dehner, who reads from the Bible and advises those in the chapel that they should not run hot and cold as Christians but always be "hot'' - impassioned in their faith.

Dehner later shares a joke. An elderly couple is riding in their pickup truck, not speaking to one other. The wife, in the passenger seat, looks out the window. Her husband asks: ''Honey, what's wrong?'' "When we were younger,'' she says, "we used to sit next to each other.'' His reply: "I haven't moved.''

Dehner says he was supposed to speak at a service a month or so back, but a snowstorm nixed that.

"I said, 'Lord, if there's another snowstorm I will take that to mean you don't want me to preach,' '' he says, to laughter.

He just beat Mother Nature this time; about six inches of snow would fall in the area later that night and the next morning.

The sign for Jenkins Chapel is at a bend in the road on Route 563.

After the service, the congregation chat amongst themselves.

"This is great,'' Jeff Ford says. "I've been coming here for two years.'' His mom, Barbara, is the organist here.

Ford belongs to Pinelands Church, a United Methodist Church

with churches in Pleasant Mills, Green Bank, Lower Bank and Nesco.

They're all country churches, but none with quite the staying power of the little chapel at the bend in the road in Jenkins.

Three summers ago, two men, both around 20, broke into and ransacked the chapel. They were caught only because a neighbor heard the commotion and chased them down the road, later calling the police.

Hagaman saw the damage - broken windows, cross torn down, fire extinguisher foam sprayed everywhere.

"I stood in the door and wept,'' he recalls.

When the chapel needed its roof repaired several years ago, members dropped off church-shaped coin boxes at local stores to raise money.

On Tuesday, the day after the snowstorm, Hagaman shovels a path to the chapel, then

searches in his pockets for the keys. He shakes his head; they are nowhere to be found.

"I picked them, must have left them on the table,'' he says. "My wife is probably saying, that old guy forgot the keys.''

He may no longer be pastor here, but the 82-year-old still works his sod farm, operating a mower and baler. "I got 13 acres now; that's enough,'' he says.

He is asked about Jenkins Chapel's current members, in their 60s and 70s. What happens to the little church in the pines when they pass on?

"We've had older people before,'' Hagaman replies with a smile. "They passed on; others replaced them.''

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