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If Methodists had cathedrals, Manchester United Methodist would have a good claim to being one. Its new building, seating 1,300 people, is a visual landmark for miles as seen from the west and serves the largest congregation of the denomination in the State of Missouri.
The congregation, like the town of Manchester itself, probably began shortly after the state legislature moved to Jefferson City in 1825, when the new road was laid out to link Market Street in St. Louis with the new state capital. The Rev. Samuel G. Patterson reported in 1837 that he was preaching at Manchester on the Methodist circuit, and the church calculated its centennial in 1937 from that event. The present chapel facing Woods Mill Road was started in 1856 but not completed until the end of 1859, at a cost totaling $6,389. Its Greek Revival lines have been modified somewhat by the Beaux Arts porch, presumably built early in this century. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
As Manchester evolved after World War II from a rural crossroads to a modern suburb, the Manchester congregation added an education building to the west of the chapel in 1964 to designs of Leslie Black and a new sanctuary four years later by P.J. Hoener and Associates. That is now the fellowship hall. The present sanctuary was completed in 1998 to the designs of Doug Kouba, project architect for Gale A. Hill & Associates.
Hill established his firm in 1966, and since then he has designed more than 300 churches, mostly in eastern Missouri, among them the First Baptist Church of Jefferson City and St. John’s Lutheran in Ellisville. The firm’s two-thousand seat Evangelical Free Church recently opened near here at Weidman and Carman roads. For the Manchester church, Hill and Kouba wrapped a traditional Georgian (some would say Neo-Georgian) exterior around a modern interior, defying expectations with an entry at right angles to the axis of the sanctuary. Inside, the distance from front to back is not much more than in the 1968 church, but the width is much greater. On the front platform, all the furnishings are movable, including the organ console, and the choir seats 150. Rear projection video screens flank the organ, and slots in the ceiling permit the direction of theatrical lighting when required. The windows, including the rose window, have automatic shades.
The name of the church has followed changes in denominational organization over the decades: first Methodist Episcopal, the American denomination founded in 1784; then Methodist Episcopal, South from the national split of 1844 until reunification nearly a century later in 1939. In 1968 a merger with the Evangelical United Brethren Church created the United Methodist Church. Contrary to the impression of some foreigners, Manchester United Methodist Church has no affiliation with Britain’s leading soccer team, Manchester United!
The Chorus first performed here on May 21, 2000.
| Notes by Esley Hamilton
and Philip Barnes Photo by Roger Hill |