Our history · 1930s–1953
Beginnings: from a Sunday School class to a church
No one knows exactly when English-speaking Christians in Monterrey first began meeting for worship, Bible study and prayer in their own language. We do know that by the 1930s a group of 75 to 80 people met regularly for an English Sunday School class in the basement of La Trinidad Methodist Church, on the corner of Washington and Escobedo. Now and then a visiting minister would hold an English service for them.
Spring 1945: Bishop Holt’s visit
In the spring of 1945 one of those visitors was Methodist Bishop Ivan Lee Holt, a church leader with a keen interest in Union Churches around the world. His messages encouraged a community that had been praying and dreaming for some time about forming a church of its own.
On 29 March 1945, a group met at the Ancira Hotel to discuss organising a church: Dr. H.D. White, E.H. Weil, T.G. Gehring, Ramón Noble, Octavio Casavantes, Walter Thieme, M.E. Smith and Bishop Holt.
July 1945: the church is organised
On 1 July 1945, after preaching, Dr. Warren Johnson, pastor of First Methodist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, presided over the organisational meeting of the Union Church of Monterrey, and the first members were received.
On 28 July 1945, R. Drew Wolcott became the first pastor. A US Army chaplain about to leave the service, he went on to serve the church in two terms totalling 27 years and is lovingly remembered for his pastoral care. Under his leadership the congregation moved from La Trinidad to the Seventh Day Adventist church on the corner of Vallarta and Matamoros.
1953: a building of our own
The present building was built and occupied in 1953 and dedicated that May, when the congregation numbered about 160 members. For years it was described as the only English-speaking church in Monterrey.
On the 30th anniversary of the sanctuary’s dedication, Drew Wolcott wrote:
The intervening years have been a succession of people from many lands and many communities who, in loving tolerance of differences but in firm commitment to Christ, have sat and stood and knelt in prayer and listened to the proclamation of the Word. Here in the fellowship hall and adjoining garden they have met in Christian comradeship and laughed together and loved one another and lingered awhile and left to serve the community in countless ways in the name and spirit of the risen Christ.
This chapter will be expanded from the church’s own history books.