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.
Read more about this topic: Fountain Street Church
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)