The Atlanta church I grew up in celebrates one hundred years of ministry this month.  Haygood Memorial United Methodist Church is located in the heart of the historic Morningside neighborhood, immediately adjacent to the elementary school.  When my parents and I moved to the area in 1968, we considered it a stroke of great fortune to find a home a little more than a block away from the church and school. We began attending Haygood that summer, when I was about to start second grade.  Haygood served as my home church for the next several decades; it nourished me in many ways as I grew from child to adult. When my mother relocated to Virginia in 2017, following my father’s passing the year before, we’d seen twelve pastors come and go.  Our Haygood connection had held strong for forty-nine years.  Because the congregation is still filled with dear friends, the link remains vital today. 

The impact of Haygood in our lives has recently become especially clear to me.  Looking back, I see what a blessing it has been to be part of a dynamic, caring, multi-generational congregation.  As the ideal faith community should, Haygood offered us ongoing opportunities to interact regularly with a wide variety of people of all ages, from infants to the very elderly. From the babies I first encountered when I helped with the nursery on Wednesday nights, to the spunky octo- and nonagenarian widows my father, as one of several Haygood van drivers, drove to and from Sunday services.  There were the older adults who taught me in Sunday School.  My parents, likewise, taught elementary Sunday School classes for years.  For me, the church was filled with benevolent parental figures I could trust, people who looked upon me with genuine concern. And then there were our peers—the children who came of age with me, and the young parents who became grandparents alongside my parents.  Such invaluable interactions accrue, with time, in a close-knit, friendly neighborhood; over the decades, strangers become family.  A compassionate, welcoming church accelerates that process.  At Haygood we found the key to an instant, but well-rooted and long-lived family.

The church was named after Georgia-born siblings Atticus and Laura Haygood.  Atticus (1839–1896) began his career as a Methodist circuit rider.  He later became president of Emory University and a bishop in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.  He was a strong advocate for education and rights of the formerly enslaved.  In books and sermons, he pushed for freed Blacks’ integration into society.  Laura (1845-1900)  was a champion of women’s education, a teacher who founded girls’ schools in Georgia and China.  After her Atlanta school merged with Girls’ High (the city’s first public school for girls) in 1877, she became its principal.  She was a leader in mission work at Trinity Methodist Church, where she established practical programs for aiding the poor.  At her death, she was serving as a missionary in China.   

I think Atticus and Laura would be pleased to see that their namesake church is one that cares for its members not as an end in itself, as a country club does, but to better equip them to serve God by serving others. They’d approve of Haygood’s emphasis on Bible study not to store up an armory of “gotcha verses” for scoring big wins in theological disputes, but to promote greater insight and to fuel compassion.  They’d be gratified to see a church that tackles the practical, often messy, civic-minded work of loving our neighbors.  They’d approve of a church that generally tries to leave the judgment to God in order to be His hands and feet in the wider world.  This is the Haygood I remember.  And it’s the Haygood that flourishes to this day, serving a vibrant intown Atlanta community.  

My family and I were there for Haygood’s  fiftieth and seventy-sixth birthday festivities.  We won’t make it in person to the centennial, but Mama and I will certainly be there in spirit.  Haygood will always be our family’s beloved home church.