Grace United Methodist Church

The United in this church's name came from a meeting held in Dallas. From April 21 to May 4, 1968, the Uniting Conference joined the Methodist Church, about 10.3 million members, and the Evangelical United Brethren, a Wesleyan body of about 746,000, into the United Methodist Church, and Grace took the new name that year. Before its first sanctuary the congregation, born in a women's meeting at 1416 Heights Boulevard, worshiped in a skating rink, the Harvard School and the Houston Heights City Hall, now the Historic Fire Station. It called its first woman pastor in 1992.

What the plaque says

Grace United Methodist Church Associated with the development of Houston Heights, this congregation began in 1905 with the meeting of several women who formed the Home Missionary Society of Houston Heights. The Rev. Stephen McKinney served as first pastor of Heights Methodist Episcopal Church, South, as it came to be called. Worship services were held in a variety of locations until the congregation erected a permanent sanctuary on this site in 1906. A larger building, constructed in 1911-12, served the congregation until 1971. Renamed Grace Methodist in 1950, the church has provided its members and the community with strong educational and outreach programs throughout its history. (2001)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 2.8 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
• Rothko Chapel — 3.9 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• The Menil Collection — 3.9 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 4.2 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.

More markers nearby

• Houston Heights — steps away
• Heights Church of Christ — 0.4 mi
• Reagan Masonic Lodge No. 1037 A. F. & A. M. — 0.4 mi
• Cooley School — 0.5 mi