Christoph Geiger, a Lutheran pastor from Germany who had arrived in the U.S. in 1860, was sent as a traveling missionary to this area in 1867. The original congregation was organized on April 12, 1868, in the nearby village of Strunkville. Its first church building, called Bethlehem, was dedicated in 1870 on the present site of Geiger Cemetery, three miles north. A need for more space led to the erection of a new church in 1887, dedicated as Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church, and around that time the establishment of the village of Sublime shifted population patterns. By 1904, the congregation decided to move into the new town. Under pastor Karl Roth's direction, the building was taken apart and each piece of lumber carefully numbered for reassembly on this site. Construction was completed in 1905, and Roth is credited with the design and carving of the altar and pulpit still in use. The exterior walls are cypress and the interior is pine. For more than a century, the church has served as a center of the community's religious and social life, and its original congregation consisted primarily of German immigrants whose services were conducted in German until the late 1930s.