How St. Mark's became St. Mark's

St. Mark's opened its doors on October 4, 1959 with an all-white congregation of more than four hundred members. Within ten years the church and the Clanton Park neighborhood around it had both changed completely.
 

As Black families moved into the neighborhood in the mid-sixties, most white members moved away — but a handful of neighborhood children kept coming to Sunday School. The children led the way to a new St. Mark's. Eight Black adults joined the church in those years: Frances Shorts, Barbara Kiser, Robert and Rose Howie, Anelson and Mary Watkins, and Harry and Louise Ford.

In June 1969 the Western North Carolina Conference appointed the Reverend Clarence E. Strickland as our first Black pastor. He arrived to thirty-five adult members. Everything that followed — the choirs, the Child Development Center, the sanctuary, the outreach that now reaches hundreds of neighbors a week — grew from that beginning.

We are still here, still on Clanton Road, still convinced that a church belongs to the neighborhood it stands in.