Washington Street Church in Waynesburg is inviting old members and new neighbors to “Fall – Back to Church” on Sunday November 5. Service is at 9 a.m. “with fellowship and refreshments to follow.“
Yes, Washington Street Methodist Church has been renamed but its new signage lets you know – “A New Name A New Sign But Still United with Christ.”
And Reverend Bill Parker, who has been pastoring here for 17 years, is still spreading the Good Word envisioned in John Wesley’s three simple rules: ”Do no harm. Do good. Stay in love with God.”
This isn’t the first time this historic church, tucked behind the modern trappings of Pecjaks Sunoco on Greene St. has been renamed. A browse through G. Wayne Smith’s History of Greene County tells us the Methodist Episcopal Church arrived with the first frontier preachers of the Redstone Circuit of 1784. In Waynesburg, a first wooden church was built in 1803 on Liberty Street beside the Methodist cemetery. (Later it would find its forever home on Richhill Street, next door to Waynesburg University and the First Presbyterian Church.) For many years, Methodism was the largest denomination on the Western Frontier; with circuit riding pastors bringing services every two weeks or so if the weather was good, to the scattered communities of the Redstone Circuit.
The Methodist Protestant Church broke away in 1828, and a congregation formed in Waynesburg in 1829. By 1831 they purchased a brick meetinghouse at the edge of a lot on Washington Street, just south of the town limits. The old “cornfield church” would be torn down, and when the church you see today was dedicated on July 30, 1893 “no other churches in town held services, and their pastors were invited to participate in the Grand Occasion.”
The new church cost “about $6000” and had stained glass windows, frescoed interior walls, electric lights, forced air heating and a new oak organ. It added a brick Sunday school building in 1914, complete with classrooms upstairs and a kitchen and dining hall downstairs.
When the Methodist Episcopal, Methodist Protestant and Methodist Episcopal South churches merged nationally in 1939, community churches could merge voluntarily. In Waynesburg “the congregations chose not to merge” and instead changed their names to First Methodist Church and Washington Street Methodist Church. By now the cornfields at the edge of town were long gone, replaced by the bustling businesses and working class neighborhoods of the South Side that stretched down to the railroad tracks along Ten Mile Creek.
Longtime member Bob Beabout found the folks attending church on Washington Street to be to his liking more than 30 years ago when his mother, who was a member, died, and he stopped by to celebrate her memory. “Everybody made me feel welcome and I’ve been here ever since!”
The best ending to this fall back to church story came when I dropped in to see for myself how doing no harm, doing good and loving God is doing at this church whose membership stretches from Waynesburg to Hundred to Hopewell Ridge.
It didn’t surprise me that I already knew many of the people who came through the door, stopped to chat and stayed for a group photo after services.
Reverend Parker combines the joy of singing hymns and the call and response prayers of pastor to congregation with that one thing good preachers are masters of – adding modern meaning to what the Good Book says.
This morning, “The Secret” that the apostle Paul shared with the world takes a deep dive into relevance by way of the old TV show “I’ve got a Secret” and a trip to Rolling Thunder in Washington DC that Reverend Parker once took by way of the back roads of West Virginia.
I’m not going to fill you in on all the details of the service – Heaven help me if I tried! But if you stop by on November 5 you can hear for yourself just what makes this church and its congregation feel so at home and neighborly.
