WILSON — Just about everyone at this little country church has been coming for years, either because they grew up in one of the nearby farming towns, or because they married someone who did.

“When we get strangers,” said Arlene Jandt, who has attended Trinity Lutheran Evangelical Church in Wilson since her baptism there 75 years ago, “we know it right away.”

If there’s a single reason why Trinity is still standing, why it’s outlived so many other country churches, it’s the loyalty of core parishioners. The congregation first met in 1866 in a log cabin for a service conducted in German.

An ever-changing group of families has been meeting ever since — and this week, parishioners are celebrating the 150th anniversary of the first gathering.

Beginning Sunday morning at 10, there will be a special service, an anniversary lunch and a re-enactment of the congregation’s founding.

“We’ll be in costume,” said Andy Straseske, Trinity’s pastor.

They’re coming together, essentially, to celebrate a tradition of coming together.

The first parishioners spent four years attending services in one home or another, moving into a wood-frame church, on what later became County Road 12, in 1870. Their current home was built in 1914 on the same road, and is a testament to the relative health of the congregation a century later.

A bulk of red brick with a new facade, the church sits on a patch of tightly mowed grass that interrupts a long stretch of cornfield. The pastor lives at the back of the property in a white house guarded by trees. Inside the church, the original altar and stained glass windows don’t yet look 102.

“The stained glass is beautiful,” said Lila Salwey, who has attended the church for 55 years.

“We’ve got one of the prettiest altars around,” Jandt said.

“Don’t make it sound like we’re bragging,” Pastor Straseske said and waved their words away.

But even here, numbers are dwindling.

The parishioners who have been here the longest — among them 98-year-old Violet Herold — are old enough to remember how women in hats and men in suits used to fill the pews on Sundays.

“The women sat on one side, and the men sat on the other,” said Sandy Koeller, who has attended for 45 years.

Now the balcony rarely gets used, Straseske said, and it’s the same with the pews in the back.

So many of the parishioners have seen children or grandchildren grow up and move away, or simply lose touch with religion. Sports, they say, has started to take over Sundays.

“Society is just not as church-minded as it used to be,” Straseske said.

But their church is growing, the congregation says, in small ways.

The kitchen in Trinity’s basement just got new countertops and a new refrigerator. More notably, in 2009, an entrance hall was added to the church, with an elevator for parishioners who can’t use the stairs.

And there are opportunities like the celebration Sunday to reflect on the idea of 150 years and to draw others into the church.

The congregation realizes Trinity can’t go on for a whole lot longer unless new people come in. Every year, it seems, they lose parishioners to rest homes or to the church cemetery down the road.

“Some have died,” said LeAnn Salwey, Lila’s daughter-in-law, who married into the church 25 years ago. “They don’t get replaced.”

Ask the congregation about the history of their church, and about its future, and the conversation gets wistful like that, like a cloud passing over the sun.

“Unlike many country churches,” Lila Salwey reminds her friends, “we’re fortunate to still be a church.”