“The nation is in the midst of a profound moral crisis. Americans are hungry for a legitimate spiritual connection.”
So declared the talented young preacher who is the minister of the historic First Congregational Church located within blocks of the White House in downtown D.C. The Rev. Amanda Hender-Voss, pastor there since 2020, has seen her congregation grow with an increasingly racially diverse membership.
She declared to that membership at a spring congregational meeting last weekend that she’d received an invitation from House Speaker Mike Johnson to participate in last Sunday’s National Mall religious rally that was covered on the front page of Monday’s Washington Post with multiple photos on the inside.
“I had to decline that invitation,” she explained, because it was being led by “Christian nationalists” whose conception of the faith is profoundly different than her own and those of many downtown D.C. congregations whose commitments to the faith are rooted in service to the poor and needy, and not to the aggrandizement of the powerful.
The Sunday Mall event included presentations by no less than Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. It was a worship of the current administration and its version of Jesus Christ is more as a disguised version of the pagan god Fortuna, or luck, something that early church fathers like St. Augustine wrote about extensively in their efforts to distinguish true faith from the many heresies, or false gods, of their times.
Of course, many progressive D.C. faith institutions joined the Rev. Hendler-Voss in rejecting the invitation to the Sunday mall service, but what makes the First Congregational Church unique in this context is its history being founded in the immediate period following the end of the Civil War by abolitionists and leaders of the underground railroad on land acquired only a few blocks, in fact, from the Ford’s Theater where President Lincoln had been slain in April 1865.
In minutes of an 1847 meeting recently unearthed, it was noted that one Jacob Bigelow, a leader of the underground railroad, led a meeting that resolved at that time to form an anti-slavery congregational church.
The minutes of that August 3, 1847 meeting read, “A meeting of gentlemen was held this day at the office of Bigelow & Peugh at the corner of E and 7th Streets and was organized by appointing Jacob Bigelow Chairman and William Blanchard Secretary. The chairman stated in general terms the object for which the meeting had been called and presented for its consideration the following preamble and resolution which after having been duly considered and discussed was unanimously adopted, to wit: Whereas this meeting approving the object for which it has been called, to wit, the organization of a Congregational Church and Society in the City of Washington, essentially on the plan of the Cambridge platform, whose standard of piety shall be high, whose doctrine shall be Evangelical, and whose action shall favor the leading reforms of the day, including Bible, Missionary, Tract, Anti Slavery, Sunday School and temperance efforts.”
About Bigelow, it was written at the time this: “Jacob Bigelow, a lawyer, stepped in to resurrect Washington’s Underground when its tireless leader, William Chaplin, was arrested. Bigelow, like many members of the underground, participated in the day-to-day toil of the underground even as he organized the work and movements of others. Once, he smuggled a young slave girl to freedom by dressing her as a boy. Additionally, he corresponded with the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee under the apt nom de plume ‘William Penn.’ The bulk of his correspondence provides evidence that Bigelow had regular contact with covertly operating underground conductors, and that a more expansive underground network than historians have previously allowed, may have existed.”
Among other members of that church, whose construction began at its current 10th and G Street location in 1867, was Union Gen. Oliver Otis Howard, who played a central role in the Reconstruction era as commissioner of the Freedman’s Bureau, whose purpose was the education of newly-freed Black Americans that led to the founding of Howard University.