Rogers Heights Christian Church: 1945-2007

Note: This post contains a correction added on 8/22/08.

August 26, 2007 was the final worship service at Rogers Heights Christian Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I grew up. My parents, Jim and Frances, were members of another Christian church when they were recruited in the winter of 1945 to help start a new congregation on the east side of the city, across from the "new" Will Rogers High School that had opened in 1939. I recall being in the "nursery" class that met in Ms. Dessa Bedford's home, and I have a fond memory of my three-year old self drawing pictures with my finger in the condensation on her window panes the next spring. In the summer of 1946, men of the church laid a foundation for a simple rectangular building that would be worship and fellowship space until 1949, when the sanctuary (above, with the steeple) would be completed. My dad and the other men built that first church building with their own hands. When the charter closed in 1947, my parents' names were on it, as well as my grandparents Hugh and Ada Burch, and my aunt Martha, daddy's younger sister. My name is not on the charter, because our denomination (it was a Brotherhood back then!) practices believers' baptism and I of course was not yet of age to make such a decision.

Over the next five decades, more structures would be built and added on to those two original buildings. Where we once faced north to worship, by the time of the closing, we faced south. Where once simple amber glass in casements illuminated the sanctuary, in the 1980s stained glass windows , such as this one behind the communion table at the last service, replaced them. Pews replaced the plastic chairs that had replaced the metal folding chairs that had replaced the wooden folding chairs! Paneling covered the concrete block walls. The bell still hung in the steeple, and on the last day, someone went behind the pulpit, through the prayer room, grabbed the rope and rang it, clear and true, one more time.

Why did the church decide to close at this time? An article in the Tulsa World quoted one of the few remaining charter members as saying the membership, once in the hundreds, had declined to about 15 active folks, not enough to carry on the mission of a church or support a minister. The area was not growing, and demographics were not in favor of a progressive, mainline church in that part of Tulsa any more. After several months, they decided to plan to close and turn over the assets and property to the Oklahoma Christian Church Foundation. The Rogers Heights Christian Church endowment will support other missions and church starts, carrying on the legacy of this faithful congregation into perpetuity. I think my father, and the other founders, would approve, and when everyone gathered in a circle around the sanctuary at the close of the service, I told them so.

In this view, five different roof lines are visible, and they show the stages of the church's growth. At the lower far right is the original little building that housed the charter congregation. It was the site of fellowship dinners, Sunday morning worship, Wednesday prayer meetings, and more. A house stood on the lot where the parking lot is now, with room for the church office and Sunday school. In that tiny building, those first winters, a free-standing gas stove heated the space. I remember backing up too close to it one cold night at a fellowship dinner and charring the backside of a new winter wool coat! The section with the steeple came next, dedicated in 1949. In the mid 1950s the three-story education building in the background was built, and the "bridge" section (the part with the higher roof line) connecting it to the sanctuary was added. The spring I was baptized, 1956*, the baptistry was a copper tank sitting on the grass between the two unconnected buildings, and my baptism took place on a Sunday afternoon at East Side Christian instead.

*Update on 8/22/08: After corresponding with Patricia Ferguson (see comment #3) we discovered a discrepancy in our memories about our baptisms. I finally went back and checked and I was baptized on Mother's Day of 1954, not 1956, at East Side. I know it was because our baptistry was unavailable, but I'm no longer sure if it was because of the construction mentioned above. Thanks, Tricia, for reading, commenting and reconnecting!

The final building addition in the foreground of this picture took place in the 1970s, expanding the first building into a proper fellowship hall with a spacious kitchen and accessible restrooms.

But a church, any church, is so much more than its buildings. Mostly it's memories for me, because Rogers Heights was my only church from the time I was on the cradle roll until I graduated from college and moved to Kansas to start my teaching career. This is where I learned the names of 66 books of the Bible and understood that the Bible was a library of writings of faith, not simply an infallible "word." This is where I learned to sing "Jesus Loves the Children of the World"--red, brown, yellow, black and white. This is where, after I was in high school, I taught the second grade Sunday school class and played piano for singing in Children's church, slipping back into the sanctuary just in time for communion and one of Lloyd Lambert's sermons. After I was in college, I was invited to give the Youth Sunday sermon one year.

As children, one of the boys and I kept the church librarian, a single lady named Edna Mary Letson, in poverty as she undoubtedly bought with her own money the two new books a month she added to feed our appetites for new stories to read. (At the church's 50th anniversary in 1995, Norm and I visited and I went up to the library in the educational building and found the row of orange-bound biographies of famous people. I opened one and pulled the card out of the pocket and yes, there was my name!) Knowing that my name was still on a card in a book in that library somehow made me feel still connected to Rogers Heights, although my last contact with most members of the congregation was in the summer of 1968 when a group of the women gave me a bridal shower. Shortly after that my parents moved and transferred to East Side, which was closer to them.

Because of Rogers Heights, I entered adulthood with a useful grounding in biblical history and the Christian faith. I knew my baptism had not been into one congregation, but into the universal church. During the next seven years of college and work, I would undergo the usual periods of young adult questioning, and doubt, and begin the recovery and re-creation of my faith. Because of the love and encouragement I had always known at Rogers Heights, I continued to attend church, first in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and then in Pittsburg, Kansas. Somewhere in those early years at Rogers Heights, I got the idea that if I persisted, even if I thought I had lost touch with God, God would somehow find me.

It was a very bittersweet experience, the closing and decommissioning of my childhood church. I found out about it in an e-mail my cousin sent me by chance, mentioning the article in the Tulsa World that appeared on Aug. 18. Although I wanted to be there, I would not have made a special trip, but Norm and I found ourselves in Tulsa that week anyway when the same cousin's mother-in-law died and Norm was to conduct the memorial service. It seemed a sign that we should stay over, and I'm glad that we did.

The "little church on the corner" belongs to history now, but it will live on in the memories I have and in the bequest it has given to the larger church. I have said that the death in my cousin's family and our trip to take part in the service had seemed a sign that we should be there for the closing of Rogers Heights. Imagine my astonishment when, at the close of the service, we all repeated the same words of Isaiah that had been the text for the service for my cousin's mother-in-law three days earlier:

For you shall go out in joy,
and be led back in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you
shall burst into song,
and all the trees of the field
shall clap their hands.
Isaiah 55:12