Disciples of Christ congregation at 6101 Ward Parkway in the Country Club District, organized in 1920 and housed at its present site since 1922. One of Kansas City’s prominent midcentury Protestant churches, it grew alongside J.C. Nichols’s residential development of the southern district and remains an active congregation today.
History
The church traces its origins to November 1919, when a Disciples of Christ missionary began gathering members of the denomination who had relocated to the southern reaches of Kansas City. Frank Bowen, director of the Kansas City Missionary Society, convened early meetings at the Brookside Hotel (now Crestwood Condominiums). By fall 1920 roughly sixty people had committed to form a congregation, meeting in Brookside Hall — a dance hall pressed into service as a Sunday sanctuary, with the J.C. Nichols Company contracted to lay canvas flooring over the slippery floor.
The church was formally organized in the fall of 1920. Dr. George Hamilton Combs, recently retired from Independence Boulevard Christian Church — then one of the largest Protestant congregations in the United States, with more than three thousand members — was called as founding minister. Combs had been ordained in 1885, served as president of the American Missionary Society from 1906 to 1907, and lectured at Wesleyan University and the Universities of Chicago, Washington, Texas, and Kansas. He accepted the call with the stated conviction that the new church’s success would be “determined solely by the measure of service it shall render the community.”
The congregation moved to its permanent address at 61st Street and Ward Parkway in 1922, the same year J.C. Nichols opened the Country Club Plaza roughly a mile to the north — the two institutions anchoring the religious and commercial life of the developing district simultaneously. The main sanctuary was dedicated in 1926. A second worship space, the George Hamilton Combs Memorial Chapel, was dedicated in 1962 and designed by Kansas City architect Edward W. Tanner.
Over its first century the church had eight senior ministers. Dr. Grafton guided the congregation through World War II. Dr. Bash led the church through the 1960s and championed interfaith dialogue. Subsequent ministers continued a tradition of civic engagement, theological openness, and LGBTQ inclusion, formally ratified in an open-and-affirming statement welcoming all people to worship, serve, and lead.
Architecture
The 1926 sanctuary at 6101 Ward Parkway is noted for its stained glass, which ranks among the finest concentrations of ecclesiastical art glass in Kansas City. Most of the large sanctuary windows were designed by Charles J. Connick (1875–1945), one of the leading American stained-glass artists of the twentieth century; the commission is cited as among the last he completed. The St. Cecelia window was created by the Jacoby Fine Art Glass Company of St. Louis; additional windows throughout the building are the work of Willet Studios of Philadelphia. The Combs Memorial Chapel also contains Connick windows.
The church’s musical program is anchored by a Schantz Organ Co. instrument, Opus 1059, built in 1971. The organ has four manuals and pedal, eight divisions, 78 stops, and 67 ranks, with antiphonal Great, Positiv, and Pedal divisions that extend its sonic range across the sanctuary.
See also
country-club-district, country-club-plaza-opening-1922, country-club-plaza, jc-nichols, grace-and-holy-trinity-cathedral, Wiki