The Greater Mt. Calvary Holy Church had a moving service last Sunday--literally. The 300-member Pentecostal congregation paraded down Kansas Avenue NW from its outgrown quarters in a Webster Street house to its first church building at 625 Park Rd. NW.
For the pastor, the Rev. Alfred A. Owens Jr., who founded the holiness church 17 years ago as a teen-age clergyman, it was like a homecoming. Owens said he had grown up attending Sunday school in the 75-year-old stone-and-brick building when it housed Trinity African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.
"It's the greatest thing that's ever happened to me," Owens said of the move. "I never thought I'd be coming back to this church as pastor."
Owens said his church had been negotiating to buy the building, which cost about $500,000, since last spring when Trinity vacated it for larger quarters. Although the church was able to pay $90,000 down, he said financing the purchase was not easy. "Four banks turned us down. I didn't know it was so difficult for churches to get money."
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Greater Mt. Calvary's history and its latest relocation move, conducted under the slogan "Moving Forward," are typical of many urban churches.
Called to preach at 16 when he was a freshman at Cardozo High, Owens said, "I became known as a teen-age preacher and was preaching all around" before he joined the Mt. Calvary Holy Church of America, the parent body of about 14 churches around the country.
At 19 he acquired storefront space and founded the Christ Is the Answer Church, on Morse Street NE--the forerunner of his present congregation. As the membership expanded, the church moved to increasingly larger locations: from the storefront to a house church near 16th Street and Colorado Avenue NW, then five years later to the larger house on Webster Street in 1976.
Owens, who taught English at Cardozo High School until 1981 and now teaches at Howard University, said Greater Mt. Calvary's membership has grown from about 50 to around 300 in the last three years.
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One asset, Owens said, is his assistant pastor, the Rev. Mabel B. Lewis--"a senior citizen. The mixture of her wisdom and my youth and experience makes a good combination."
Owens attended the Howard University Divinity School and is now working toward a master of divinity degree there, he said.
From its new home, he said, the church wants "to do a lot of community outreach, to start after-school programs, to help combat the drug traffic" in the neighborhood.
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