Sesquicentennial History, part 4

No Longer a Frontier Church, 1873-1921

The changes overtaking First Congregational Church in the years following the Civil War were many. Some of these changes occurred within the congregation itself. In 1873 Luther Clapp resigned to become General Missionary of the Milwaukee Congregational Convention, a position in which he aided a number of weaker churches in the region. He left a strong church but one that would not again experience a pastorate of a decade or more until the twentieth century (see Appendix for List of Ministers). All the while, the community around the Church was growing, and changing. By the 1870s Wisconsin was no longer the frontier and Wauwatosa ceased to be a farming community and more and more assumed its current role as a suburb of Milwaukee.

Growth in Wauwatosa meant growth in the congregation of the Church that required accommodation. In 1870 a lecture hall had been added to the rear (west) of the Church. Built at a cost of $2,076.29, it was entered through doors on either side of the front of the sanctuary. Additional growth led to further expansion of the Church's physical plant. A parsonage was constructed for $2,200 in 1884 opposite the Church. In 1888, at a cost of about $8,000, the original Church building was raised and a "good basement" constructed. A vestibule   was added to the front (east side) of the church, red-cushioned theatre seats replaced the original pews, and a space was provided for the eventual placement of an organ behind the pulpit.

(NOTE: Three views of the 1888 church: side, front, and the Nave internals with the Organ installed)

Such renovation of the original building, however, still failed to meet the needs of a growing congregation. At the annual meeting in 1911 a sinking fund was established for a new building, and the Church's seventy-fifth anniversary, although observed on the brink of World War I on March 1, 1917, provided the opportunity to accelerate fund raising for a new church. With the end of World War I, construction became possible. The last services were held in the original Church on July 20, 1919 because the new Church was to be built on the site of that structure. For several months, the congregation was without a home: it held joint services with the Methodists, who also were building a church, in the Masonic Temple through August 17, 1919; and then the congregation held Sunday afternoon services in the basement of Underwood Baptist Church.

Finally, the Congregation leased the lot on the southeastern corner of Church Street and Milwaukee Ave. and there constructed, with donated materials and the congregation's labor, led by the example of its minister Howell Davies, a structure known as "The Tabernacle" that was used for services from November 1919 through May 1921.

On May 20-23, 1921 the Church dedicated its new sanctuary. Designed by architect E.E. Kuenzli, a Church member, the building and its furnishings represented an investment of $118,258.04 funded in part by a mortgage of $38,650.00 on the Church and parsonage. This sanctuary, presently still in use, was connected to the original structure which had been turned ninety degrees and moved back on the Church grounds to form a wing for Sunday School classrooms and recreation facilities.

The activities of the congregation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were numerous because this church, like so many others of the period was really the center of its members' social as well as religious lives. Church benevolence grew in size and scope of interest, and by its fiftieth anniversary the Church had contributed $23,526.97 to such worthy causes as Beloit College ($13,100), Chicago Theological Seminary ($900), Ripon College ($200) and missions ($9,326.97).

The various nineteenth-century women's groups merged into the Women's League in 1907 and that body first divided into circles in 1921. Women also participated in the Daughters of the Tabernacle, a group meeting in the evenings that drew its name from the Church's temporary place of worship, and the World Fellowship Council interested particularly in missionary work. Indeed, interest in missions was great and several women of the Church went into missionary work, including Sarah Clapp Goodrich who worked in China. Women's groups, particularly the League, did much other important work for the Church, financing Weekday Bible School with their fund raising, running the Junior Choir and the Nursery, staffing a Hospitality Committee to contact potential new members and visit shut-ins, and providing meals for important Church events.

Youth activities assumed increasing importance in the life of the Church in this period. The focus of youth activities in the late nineteenth century and the first years of the present century was the Young People's Society for Christian Endeavor, an international, interdenominational Christian Youth group founded in 1881. It was supplanted in First Congregational Church in 1925 by the Pilgrim Fellowship. Ministry to the youth of the community was further enriched by the opening of Weekday Bible School in 1923. In this endeavor, the Church was something of a leader. After his arrival in 1925, the Reverend Henry James Lee prepared lessons for this program which were used for a time by the majority of Milwaukee area churches conducting such programs. Today, in 1992, First Congregational Church's weekday program remains as one of the few such programs in the metropolitan area.

As the First Congregational Church changed, so did much around it. America became an urbanized society in the early twentieth century, and the automobile, as a former Church member from the era, Thomas Kraseman, recalled, brought a personal mobility that spelled the end of the Church's primacy in social life. Congregationalism itself was also changing in very significant ways.

Developments in American Congregationalism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries certainly reflected developments in American Protestantism as a whole. There was a growing desire among many for Christian unity and for centralization of denominational activities. Many would find in such trends increasingly disturbing contradictions of the Congregational Way.

American Congregationalists founded the National Council of Congregational Churches (NCCC) at an Oberlin, Ohio meeting in 1871. Delegates representing 3,300 congregations concurred that the NCCC was not established to abridge "the scriptural and unalienable right of each church to self-government and administration," but they went on to state their desire "to cooperate with all the Churches of our Lord Jesus Christ . . . It is our prayer and endeavor that the unity of the Church may be more and more apparent, and that the prayer of the Lord for his disciples may be speedily and completely answered, and all be one . . ."

The Oberlin actions provided the basis for increasing efforts at both centralization of Congregational activities through the NCCC and a federation with other Protestant groups. The NCCC in 1910 created a Commission of Nineteen to coordinate and develop national budgets for Congregational benevolence and in 1913 appointed a full-time, paid General Secretary. Christian unity efforts continued at the same time. In 1892 Congregational Methodist Churches in Alabama and Georgia affiliated with the NCCC and in 1931 the NCCC joined with the General Convention of Christian Churches to form the General Council of Congregational Christian churches.

The almost five decades encompassed in this period of our history culminated, therefore, with a stronger First Congregational Church. Housed in a new building and part of an increasingly urbanized America, the Church, however, found itself also part of a religious fellowship in which there was apparent tension between the traditional independence of individual churches and the growing institutional structure of denominational governance.

Next Page: The Challenges of the 20th Century 1921-1991

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