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Church of the maze no longer haunted by cost of new roofColumn by Frank Gray Some of the skeptics are finally coming forward. They are acknowledging that they had serious doubts about whether a church near Poe could really raise $30,000 for a new roof by building a maze in a cornfield. There was plenty of reason for doubt. The maze was in the middle of nowhere - on a lonely road between Poe and Decatur. It was designed by an amateur who had never drawn a maze before. The church's promotional budget was slim, and if you looked for mazes on the Internet, you wouldn't find any mention of the church's effort unless you knew the church's name - Zion-Friedheim Lutheran Church. Well, the season is over. The maze will come down Saturday. But it has produced two surprises. The maze raised $37,000, significantly more than the church hoped, and the ears on the corn plants in the maze are larger than those in the surrounding cornfield. The conclusion is a big relief for those who spent four months manning the project, selling tickets, explaining how the maze worked, guiding the lost out, and selling pop, bottles of water and produce from parishioners' gardens. Business wasn't gangbusters in the beginning. Only 24 people showed up for the maze's grand opening. Through the season, to make the maze more attractive, church volunteers tinkered with the concept. They devised a murder mystery to get people to go through every part of the maze and solve the puzzle. But traffic remained slow through much of the summer. Judy Werling, who designed the maze, which sits about 75 yards from her door, blamed the meager turnout on the heat and the lack of rain. People didn't feel like spending an hour or more in a dusty cornfield when the temperature was 90 degrees. But, Werling said, "I knew eventually they would come. I talked to a lot of people, and they were waiting for it to cool down." Cool weather arrived in mid-August, but by the end of September, the maze had still raised only $20,000. So church members decided they needed to do more. Playing on the scary aspects of Halloween, they created a haunted maze. "It's really easy to scare people at night in a cornfield," Werling said. That final effort proved as profitable as anything. In its last 30 days, the maze generated as much business as the previous two months. Today, for the first time in months, Werling and her husband, Mike, can look out the window and not see a collection of cars using part of their farm as a parking lot, packing the ground rock hard. Judy Werling gets a feeling of relief. Sure, the attraction drew tourists visiting from Mexico, Japan and Germany. One family even came all the way from Tennessee specifically to go through the maze, and a man from California sent in $20, enough for four tickets, though he knew he wouldn't come to go through the maze. The volunteer hours required to run the maze were phenomenal, Werling said. Two shifts of eight volunteers each were needed every Saturday and Sunday throughout summer and fall, four volunteers were needed for weekdays when groups arrived, and 13 were volunteers were needed each night for the haunted maze. Now the harvest will tell just exactly how much the maze cost the Werlings in yield on their three acres. In an odd twist, the maze might have been the wisest thing to do with that plot last summer. There were fewer plants to compete for water in the drought conditions. The plants that remained were healthier and produced larger ears. So yield on that land might be nearly as good as on surrounding land, even though one-third of the plants were tilled under in early July.
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