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In different points in its life, the Philadelphia congregation known as Beacon has been a Sunday school mission, a nesting congregation, a mother church with its own college, a church in schism, and a new church development. A persistent thread in the fabric of Philadelphia's Kensington neighborhood, its population waxed and waned by turns, for 146 years.

Beacon began life in 1871 as a Sunday school mission of the First Presbyterian Church of Kensington. In 1872, the growing church bought a parcel of land from...

In anticipation of #GA223, let PHS introduce you to a historic St. Louis congregation!

In the 1890s, Mary Jane Thompson, a freedwoman, began teaching reading, writing, and the Bible to African American children, using the basement of St. Louis' Washington-Compton Presbyterian Church. The school grew into a mission church, and was formally organized by the Presbytery of St. Louis in 1898 as Leonard Avenue Presbyterian Church. In 1908 the congregation's first full-time pastor, Selden Parr, moved the church to Pine Street...