A documented history of the Austin Avenue congregation

The congregation that worships today at Austin Avenue and South 13th Street began as a decision made in a quarterly conference on the last day of 1900. On December 31 of that year, the Fifth Street Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in Waco voted without dissent to organize a new congregation, the Austin Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and to elect a board of nine trustees to hold its property. If you have walked past the brick sanctuary at 13th and Austin and wondered how a second Methodist church came to stand so close to the first, the answer lies in a building that filled too quickly and a bishop who agreed to plant a new one.

Why did Waco need another Methodist church in 1900?

By the close of the nineteenth century, the Fifth Street congregation had outgrown its building. Its members convinced Bishop Warren A. Candler and his cabinet of the Northwest Texas Conference that Waco needed another Methodist church. At the annual conference session in November 1900, the bishop appointed two pastors to the Fifth Street Church for 1900 to 1901: the Rev. John R. Nelson, who had served there since 1898, and the Rev. Milton S. Hotchkiss. Nelson's time was to be devoted to organizing the new church, and the documentary trail of that work survives in registers and conference minutes that historians still consult. The Austin Avenue Church records begin, in effect, with that appointment.

Nelson directed the purchase of three lots at the corner of Austin Avenue and 12th Street for $5,500. He and Hotchkiss then chose a building committee, charged with raising $35,000 by subscription and selecting an architect. A Home Mission Society formed around the same time to raise funds for furnishing the interior. The whole sequence places the congregation inside a wider movement of Methodist planting and consolidation in the city, a story traced in the guide to Methodist Congregations in Waco 1900.

A cornerstone, a Sunday school, and a charter of eighty-one

On May 6, 1901, the building committee accepted the architectural plan of W. A. Cann of St. Louis and engaged W. C. Dodson of Waco as supervisory architect to review the plan and its specifications and to oversee construction. At the Northwest Texas Conference session in November 1901, Bishop A. W. Wilson appointed Nelson to the Austin Avenue Church of Waco, making him its first pastor. Representatives of the Grand Lodge of Texas laid the cornerstone on December 2, 1901, at the building site at 12th Street and Austin Avenue.

The congregation did not wait for walls. Its Sunday school was organized on December 29, 1901, at the Maccabee Hall at 6th Street and Austin Avenue, and the first service of worship followed there, conducted by Nelson. At that service the charter membership was formed with eighty-one members and recorded in the church register. Sunday school and worship continued at the hall until the edifice was finished. The first service in the new church took place on April 13, 1902, and after all debts were discharged the building was formally dedicated on November 11, 1906, by Bishop Elijah Embree Hoss.

What the 1920s did to a growing congregation

As Waco expanded, so did the church. In the early 1920s the Rev. Robert E. Goodrich, Sr., took in more than 1,100 new members, and a building committee was soon appointed to oversee a larger edifice. On March 25, 1925, the cornerstone was laid at 13th Street and Austin Avenue. The cost was estimated at $350,000, and the architect was R. H. Hunt of Dallas. The last service at the 12th Street building was held on Sunday, April 26, 1925, and that building was subsequently sold to the congregation of Trinity Presbyterian Church of Waco.

The 1920s sanctuary is where the congregation's glass belongs. The guide to the Stained Glass of a 1920s sanctuary follows what a building committee of that era expected of windows and how a Dallas architect detailed them. The tower belongs to the same decade. For how a downtown block carries that tower's presence, see the piece on the Sound of a Downtown Block.

From Methodist Episcopal, South, to United Methodist

On May 10, 1939, the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Methodist Protestant Church, and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, united into the Methodist Church. The congregation at Austin Avenue, South, thus became the Austin Avenue Methodist Church. The edifice at 13th Street and Austin Avenue was dedicated by Bishop Ivan Lee Holt on March 12, 1944, and a printed church history by W. H. McCullough was distributed for the occasion.

During the 1940s the congregation provided recreation and refreshments for men and women in military service on Sunday afternoons and later joined other congregations and denominations for Sunday evening services. It also contributed generously toward building the Latin-American Methodist Church of Waco and toward the purchase of a parsonage. That decade of shared services and shared money is exactly the kind of thing a church register records unevenly, which is why the essay on Records and How Historians Use them matters to anyone trying to reconstruct a congregation's weekday life.

What happened after the 1954 fire?

On November 13, 1954, an early morning fire destroyed the sanctuary. The congregation met at the 25th Street Theater for worship the next day. A building committee was soon elected to rebuild the sanctuary and to build a three-story education building along Franklin Avenue and 13th Street. Walter Cocke served as architect for both. The new structures were consecrated by Bishop William C. Martin on March 11, 1956, and dedicated on March 5, 1961.

Two unions, two new names, and a Baylor student center

In 1964 the church built a Methodist Student Center for the Wesley Foundation at Baylor University. In 1968 the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren Church united and became the United Methodist Church, and the congregation became the Austin Avenue United Methodist Church. The names track the mergers: a new church planted in 1900, renamed once in 1939, renamed again in 1968.

Meals, Montessori, and the rooms the church lent out

The church began the Montessori Child Development Center and a Meals-on-Wheels unit during the 1970s. For its eightieth anniversary a new church history was prepared. A Texas Historical Marker honoring the church was dedicated on April 22, 1990. By the 1990s its ministries included Meals-on-Wheels, a program called Beyond-Our-Doors that provided money to needy homes, and the Austin Avenue Montessori School. Membership stood at about 2,100.

In the early twenty-first century the church continued to expand its outreach, including support for the physically challenged, the elderly, Alzheimer's patients and their caregivers, and special needs children. It ran a preschool and supported children's, youth, and adult ministries, a choir, and a handbell ensemble. In the 2010s it also housed the Youth Chorus of Central Texas, the Waco School of the Arts, and Alcoholics Anonymous. It published a monthly newsletter, Austin Avenews.

The Sunday school register and the date that is missing

The record on which much of this narrative rests is the one kept from 1901 onward, and it is worth knowing how the church itself told the story: McCullough's printed history covered 1900 to 1944, and Cecile Swayze Ramsey's history followed in 1980. Conference minutes, historical marker files, and Waco newspapers from December 1901, March 1925, and November 1954 fill in the dates that a register omits. The wider context of downtown congregations founded and merged in these decades appears in the collection at Downtown Waco Congregations Founded and later consolidated across the city.

One fact does not appear in the published record: the Texas State Historical Association entry gives no closing date for the congregation, while the church profile on UMData lists Austin Avenue United Methodist as closed without a date of its own. If you want the full argument for each year and each name change, the Texas State Historical Association entry is the place to start, and it will send you onward to the church archives in Waco.

About the entry cited: the Handbook of Texas Online is published by the Texas State Historical Association. Its entry on Austin Avenue United Methodist Church, by T. Bradford Willis, runs from the 1900 quarterly conference through the congregation's twenty-first-century outreach, and it lists the church histories by McCullough and Ramsey, historical marker files, and Waco newspaper issues among its references.