First Christian Church (1871)

Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) · organized 1871 as the West Jefferson Street Church of Christ · 4800 South Calhoun Street · active, November 2026

Founding: The Disciples' work in Fort Wayne began a generation before the congregation: the Columbus Convention of October 1846 sent John B. New to the town as a missionary, as Commodore Wesley Cauble's Disciples of Christ in Indiana records. The congregation itself dates from 5 November 1871, when the Rev. John Aylesworth conducted the first service at Anderson's Hall, at the northwest corner of Broadway and Jefferson Street. It organized as the West Jefferson Street Church of Christ, at 441 West Jefferson Boulevard; its longtime church stood at Jefferson and Fairfield, the address its seventy-fifth anniversary history carries in 1946. The first church, small and somewhat crude by its own account, housed the congregation for more than two decades.

Daughters and present state: In 1903 the West Jefferson Street pastor planted a church for the southeast of the city, Colony Heights Church of Christ, which the genealogical society's list carries active from that year. In 1952 the mother congregation built its present church at 4800 South Calhoun Street and took the name it now bears, First Christian Church. It remains active, a congregation of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).

Sources:

1. First Christian Church, Seventy-Five Years of Christian Achievement, 1871–1946 (congregation's anniversary history, Internet Archive), read first-hand.
2. Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana, Wayne Township churches page and church list (organized 1871 at 441 W. Jefferson; the 1952 building and name; Colony Heights planted 1903).
3. Fort Wayne Sentinel, 15 October 1904 (the West Jefferson Street Church of Christ, the Rev. E. W. Allen, pastor).