History
The roots of Fountain Street Church date back to 1824, when the region’s original Baptist mission established itself “to convert the Ottawa Native Americans.” A lengthy history of institutional squabbles between themselves and other area Baptists eventually culminated into the two factions' reuniting in 1869 to create Fountain Street Baptist Church (so named for the building they erected on the east side of downtown Grand Rapids).
Following the ministry of John L. Jackson, the church selected John Herman Randall, a young graduate of the new University of Chicago Divinity School . Over his 10-year ministry, Randall effectively converted Fountain Street Baptist Church from orthodox to progressive, reflecting the spirit of the Divinity School which is still known for its liberal approach to religious studies. He left to serve Mount Morris Baptist Church in New York City and eventually moved on to serve with John Haynes Holmes' Community Church of New York, beginning a kinship with Unitarians that exists to this day. Randall's son, John Herman Randall, Jr.., became a noted philosopher at Columbia University
While Randall's career moved the church toward a more liberal direction, his successor, Alfred Wesley Wishart — also a graduate of the UC Divinity School— permanently set FSC on a liberal path. Wishart's career was marked by three significant events: 1) The 1911 Furniture Workers Strike, 2) the rebuilding of the church following destruction by fire in 1917, and 3) the use of FSC as a public venue for debates and lectures that brought world famous faces and voices to Grand Rapids.
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“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
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—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)