MISQUAH — First Methodist Church will repave its parking lot the week after the Fourth, the congregation having approved the roughly $19,000 project at its June meeting after several seasons of what the Rev. Tom Eckert described, from the pulpit and elsewhere, as “more pothole than fellowship.”

The lot has been patched and re-patched for the better part of a decade, to the point where longtime members navigate it by memory, and visitors by surprise. “We’ve had people turn an ankle between the car and the door,” Eckert said. “You hate to think the last thing keeping someone from church on a given Sunday is the parking lot, but we couldn’t rule it out.”

Most of the cost will be covered by a memorial gift left to the building fund by a late member, with the balance drawn from the fund itself — money the congregation had been quietly saving toward a new furnace. The choice between the two was, Eckert allowed, not strictly how budgeting is supposed to work: “We’re paving a lot we can see and praying about a furnace we can’t. I’m aware of how that sounds. We took a vote and the lot won, and we’ll deal with January in January.” The work will be done by a contractor out of the county seat; the congregation will provide the coffee.

The announcement was received warmly across town and, at First Lutheran two blocks away, with what observers called “a certain quiet.” Asked whether the Lutherans had any repaving plans of their own, a Ladies’ Aid spokeswoman said only that the Lutheran lot “is fine,” that it had “always been fine,” and that she did not see what “certain other congregations” were “trying to prove.” The two lots sit two blocks apart and have, residents note, coexisted peaceably for the better part of a century — the kind of peace, it should be said, that survives precisely by being mentioned this often.