WASHINGTON—Calvary Baptist Church, a 150-year-old congregation in the heart of the nation’s capital, is emerging as the destination of choice for an increasing number of mission trips and summer camps for churches in the Mid-Atlantic.
Calvary Baptist Church
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This summer Calvary will host three sessions of Passport Missions 2, an intensive service opportunity for youth held in cities around the country under the auspices of Passport, a Birmingham, Ala.-based camping program with ties to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
For several years, the CBF of Virginia has held its mission immersion events at Calvary, encouraging youth groups in Virginia churches to participate in a week of intense missional engagement with urban life.
Calvary’s urban setting and commitment to social ministries lends itself well to raising youths’ awareness of poverty and homelessness that exists in America’s cities. In 1955 it was the first white Baptist church to admit an African-American member and it was the first to open a shelter for homeless women in Washington. Its location near Chinatown has provided opportunities for outreach to Asian communities in the capital, and it offers a worship service in Spanish.
Amy Butler has been pastor of Calvary since 2003.
“Calvary has a vibrant presence in our Washington DC community and we take pride in our work to bring some of the kingdom of God to our neighbors here in the city,” the church says on its web site.
Last year the youth at Haymarket (Va.) Baptist Church participated in CBFVA’s mission immersion at Calvary, taking them “out of their comfort zone,” wrote Matthew Hensley, Haymarket’s minister of education, in a blog.
“Everyone has an opinion about the plight of the poor—how they became poor and how to help,” wrote Hensley, “But most people don’t know the poor. For the youth at Haymarket Baptist Church, [the immersion experience at Calvary] gave them the opportunity to experience poverty and urban life up close.”
Hensley said that such experiences can make a dramatic difference in youth’s lives.
“Many churches desire ways to move their members from a discipleship that is removed from the rest of life to one that is holistic and intersects with the world’s needs,” he wrote. “In doing so, they are asking members to understand that God is at work outside the church walls, to look for God’s presence in all of life, and to respond to the places and people in which God is working. While Bible studies are useful in training our churches for this missional approach, mission immersion experiences like the one in Washington are truly formational.”
Calvary has a key role in Baptist history. It was in its sanctuary that the Northern Baptist Convention (now the American Baptist Churches USA) was founded in 1908. At one point, the church had simultaneously as members the presidents of two Baptist denominations: the American Baptists’ Clarence Cranford, then the church’s pastor, and the Southern Baptist Convention’s Brooks Hays, a former Democratic congressman from Arkansas.
Other well-known figures who have been affiliated with Calvary are Warren G. Harding, who attended while president of the United States, and Charles Evans Hughes, a chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court who was the first president of the Northern Baptist Convention.
Robert Dilday ([email protected]) is managing editor of the Religious Herald.