Centennial celebration

“There’s a church in the valley by the wildwood, No lovelier spot in the dale.”

The Little Brown Church in the Wildwood

The little brown church turns 100.

Spokane Valley United Methodist Church celebrates its centennial Sunday.

Instead of its regular services at 9 and 11 a.m., a special service at 10 a.m. will feature an address by Bishop Edward W. Paup. The celebration will continue next Saturday with a dinner and auction. The meal will be served at 5 p.m. with the bidding beginning at 6:30. The cost of the dinner is $10 for adults and $5 for those 12 and under.

Methodist churches in the Spokane Valley met in individual homes 100 years ago. Opportunity Methodist Church built a formal sanctuary in 1908.

“That was at the corner of Appleway and Bowdish,” church historian Doris Swehla said. “As someone wrote at the time, they hauled logs in all the way from Spokane, with horses and that sort of thing.

“That was the little brown church.”

The song “The Little Brown Church in the Wildwood” was popular in those days, and Opportunity Methodist congregation made sure the song and its church were linked.

“They really wanted to make sure that it was a little brown church,” Swehla said. “When they painted it, they put crankcase oil and brown pigment in the paint.”

The problem with little brown churches in a growing community is the fact that they are soon outgrown, and that’s what happened to Opportunity Methodist.

Ground was broken for a new sanctuary, Spokane Valley United Methodist Church, in 1939 at the corner of Main and Raymond.

“That was a combination of two different churches, the Opportunity Methodist Church and the Dishman Methodist Church,” Swehla explained. “On Palm Sunday the two churches merged physically. They walked from their churches to the new building.

“In 1970, the Greenacres Methodist Church merged as well, so this church is really made up of three smaller churches.”

The merger of three churches into one congregation mirrors the expansion and growth of the Spokane Valley.

“As the Valley grew and transportation became more common, those smaller communities expanded as well,” Senior Pastor David Johnson said. “The whole beginning of the smaller churches really began when irrigation hit the Valley. Before that there weren’t a lot of things out here, period.”

The current church continued to expand over the years. On Sept. 12, 1954, ground was broken for the education wing, which includes the gymnasium. In 1961 the cornerstone was laid for the new sanctuary, which sits immediately behind the original church.

Ironically, the church was one of the first buildings in its area, but the developing community grew to the south.

“We have aerial pictures of that original church,” Johnson said. “There was nothing out here then but orchards and farmland. The Valley grew up all around us and we still managed to be a little bit out of the way.”

Today, the area around the church has lost some of its identity. University City shopping mall, once a primary magnet to the area, is no more, and Sprague Avenue, long the primary thoroughfare through the Valley, has now split into a one-way street heading west a few blocks south of the church.

The centennial celebration is an opportunity to reflect on how far the church and the community have come in the past century, but it is also a chance to look forward, Johnson said.

“That will be something I believe the Bishop will be able to help us with,” he said. “He’s a dynamic leader who is doing a wonderful job taking us forward into the next 100 years.

“Certainly, this is a time to look back at how far we’ve come. But this is also an ideal time to look at what comes next.”

“Come to the church in the wildwood,

Oh, come to the church in the dale,

No spot is so dear to my childhood,

As the little brown church in the vale.”