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Our Building ...
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The fellowship hall which we built is presently used as the
sanctuary. The tower at the south end housed the minister's
study on its upper floor (now used for storage). The church
school wing was to have 17 classrooms.
As can be seen from the plan drawing, Mr. Wright's design
also included a sanctuary to seat 300 people, a chapel for 100,
and a north tower with additional office space, rooms for youth
groups, choir, library, etc. These are yet to be built. Mr.
Wright's design called for redwood poles from which to suspend
the roofs of the sanctuary and the chapel, but early in the
planning it was deemed impractical to transport these huge
timbers from the coast; also, redwood lacks suitable structural
qualities.
In 1967, ten years after the gathering of our church was
recognized by Conference, our membership numbered 246. The
current structure is about 13,000 sq. ft., and the cost of this
first unit was $217,000.
Pilgrim Congregational Church is one of the thirteen extant
Wright buildings in Northern California. In Mr. Wright's own
words, Only when the buildings are comprehended from within
and each in its place a feature of its own special environment
serving its own appropriate purpose with integrity are they
really seen.
Thus the words of founding minister Ray Welles' sermon of
December 27, 1961, have real meaning: We all have diverse
viewpoints and individual characteristics, and we come together
here out of isolated lives. As tumbling stones temporarily piled
together in one place, we would be lost unless we were cemented
and bound together redeemed, if you please by a common and
transcendent element causing us to adhere one to another. That
is the Holy Spirit of God, poured over us, covering and
combining our varied and unlike shapes, binding us together as
one. This is the Church of Christ, separate men, different
colors, different origins, different status, bound by the
mysterious, marvelous and unpredictable spirit of God.
The congregation still struggles to finish the task, one
which, as Ray Welles writes, has "all the earmarks of Israel's
40 years of wandering in the wilderness.
Barbara L. Ashbaugh
Historian
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