National City Christian Church | |
| |
Location | 5 Thomas Circle, NW Washington, D.C. |
---|---|
Area | Greater Fourteenth Street Historic District |
Built | 1930 |
Architect | John Russell Pope |
Architectural style | Neoclassical |
Part of | Greater Fourteenth Street Historic District (ID94000992 [1] ) |
Added to NRHP | November 9, 1994 |
National City Christian Church, located on Thomas Circle in Washington, D.C., is the national church and cathedral of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). [2] The denomination grew from the Stone-Campbell Movement founded by Thomas Campbell and Alexander Campbell of Pennsylvania and West Virginia (then Virginia) and Barton W. Stone of Kentucky. National City Christian Church is currently led by The Rev. Stephanie Kendell, the church's first woman called to be their Senior Minister and President. [3]
The congregation that eventually became the National City Christian Church was organized in 1843. James Turner Barclay (1807-1874), a physician and pioneering Stone-Campbell Movement missionary, helped to organize the congregation. [4] Prior to the erection of this building the congregation was known as Vermont Avenue Christian Church, previous building is now the home of Mt. Olivet Lutheran Church.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the church had a congregation of some 800 regular Sunday worshipers. Attendance declined over time, however; in 2011, Sunday attendance was about 125, with mostly older congregants. [5]
Over the years, National City has housed and supported numerous justice seeking ministries most notably the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival. [6]
In 2023, the church called their first female senior pastor and president, The Rev. Stephanie Kendell. [7] Pastor Stephanie, who previously served as the first Executive Minister at Park Avenue Christian Church and who served as the First-Vice Moderator of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) from 2019 to 2023, [8] is a dynamic preacher, [9] profound justice seeker, leading podcaster, and published author. [10] [11]
The large neoclassical church building was designed by John Russell Pope and completed in 1930. [12] The structure has a "monumental character" typical of Pope's style and seen in his other works, such as the Jefferson Memorial. [13] The church's design was partly influenced by James Gibbs' St Martin-in-the-Fields church, built at Trafalgar Square, London, in the early 18th century. [14] The building is built of Indiana limestone. Scholar Thomas A. Tweed writes that the building's facade, "high on a terrace overlooking Thomas Circle, a prominent location in the city ... demands the attention of motorists and pedestrians." [13]
The church "features stained glass windows commemorating the two presidents associated with the denomination, James Garfield and Lyndon Johnson." [15]
The church is a contributing property to the Greater Fourteenth Street Historic District. [16]
Across the street from the National City Christian Church is the Luther Place Memorial Church, which is also a historic church. Luther Place Memorial Church's neo-Gothic style sharply contrasts with the Neoclassical style of National City Christian Church. [17] Other historic churches nearby include the Universalist National Memorial Church. [13]
Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th president of the United States, occasionally attended National City Christian Church during his time as president. His state funeral was held here in 1973. [18]
James Garfield, the 20th President of the United States, was a member of National City Christian Church in one of its previous buildings. [19]
Jane L. Campbell, the first female Mayor of Cleveland. Current President and CEO of the United States Capitol Historical Society.
The Rev. Dr. Amy Butler, served as the interim senior minister from June 2020 to January 2023.
Lawrence P. "Lon" Schreiber, organist and choirmaster. [20]
In 2004, the church's senior pastor, the Rev. Alvin O. Jackson, resigned following a heated acrimonious dispute. The ouster of Jackson followed the resignation or firings of some two dozen church staffers, and the development of a deep intra-congregational dispute. [21] Jackson was replaced as senior pastor by the Rev. Stephen Gentle, "a soft-spoken pastor of a Florida church." [5]
Subsequently, the church's chief financial officer, Jason Todd Reynolds, was discovered to have embezzled $850,000 in church funds from 2003 to 2008. In 2011, Reynolds was convicted of 12 fraud-related charges. [5] [22] He was sentenced to eight years in prison. The losses from Reynolds' embezzlement scheme caused serious damage to the church's financial health. [5] [23]
The 2011 Virginia earthquake caused structural damage to the church building, causing financial troubles for the church. [5]
The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) is a mainline Protestant Christian denomination in the United States and Canada. The denomination started with the Restoration Movement during the Second Great Awakening, first existing during the 19th century as a loose association of churches working towards Christian unity, then slowly forming quasi-denominational structures through missionary societies, regional associations, and an international convention. In 1968, the Disciples of Christ officially adopted a denominational structure at which time a group of churches left to remain nondenominational.
The Restoration Movement is a Christian movement that began on the United States frontier during the Second Great Awakening (1790–1840) of the early 19th century. The pioneers of this movement were seeking to reform the church from within and sought "the unification of all Christians in a single body patterned after the church of the New Testament."
Alexander Campbell was a Scots-Irish immigrant who became an ordained minister in the United States and joined his father Thomas Campbell as a leader of a reform effort that is historically known as the Restoration Movement, and by some as the "Stone-Campbell Movement." It resulted in the development of non-denominational Christian churches, which stressed reliance on scripture and few essentials. Campbell was influenced by similar efforts in Scotland, in particular, by James and Robert Haldane, who emphasized their interpretation of Christianity as found in the New Testament. In 1832, the group of reformers led by the Campbells merged with a similar movement that began under the leadership of Barton W. Stone in Kentucky. Their congregations identified as Disciples of Christ or Christian churches.
The United Church of Christ (UCC) is a socially liberal mainline Protestant Christian denomination based in the United States, with historical and confessional roots in the Congregational, Continental Reformed, and Lutheran traditions, and with approximately 4,700 churches and 745,230 members. The UCC is a historical continuation of the General Council of Congregational Christian churches founded under the influence of New England Pilgrims, as well as Puritans. Moreover, it also subsumed the third largest Calvinist group in the country, the German Reformed. Notably, its modern members' theological and socio-political stances are often very different from those of its predecessors.
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The group of churches known as the Christian Churches and Churches of Christ is a fellowship of congregations within the Restoration Movement that have no formal denominational affiliation with other congregations, but still share many characteristics of belief and worship. Churches in this tradition are strongly congregationalist and have no formal denominational ties, and thus there is no proper name that is agreed to apply to the movement as a whole. Most congregations in this tradition include the words "Christian Church" or "Church of Christ" in their congregational name. Due to the lack of formal organization between congregations, there is a lack of official statistical data, but the 2016 Directory of the Ministry documents some 5000 congregations in the USA and Canada; some estimate the number to be over 6,000 since this directory is unofficial.
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