Bethel Methodist Church to celebrate centennial milestone

The distinctive crimson doors of Bethel United Methodist Church in Lewes have a fresh coat of paint this week as the church prepares for a weekend celebration of its 100th anniversary in its current location.

The congregation will gather for a combined 10 a.m. Sunday service, Oct. 3, followed by a walk through Lewes to visit the site of its first and second churches, both on Mulberry Street. The congregation will then return for a 2 p.m. celebration service followed by a communal feast in fellowship hall at the Fourth Street church.

A 68-page color booklet commemorating the celebration has been published and includes profiles and remembrances of many members of the church, along with a detailed history of the building and the innumerable activities and milestones hosted there over the decades.

Although officials of the church laid the cornerstone for the distinctive stone building and its bell tower on Sept. 5, 1910, the roots of Methodism in Lewes were heading toward the 200-year mark when construction started that fall. Methodism founder John Wesley sent his emissary, George Whitfield, to the new world in 1739, to spread the word of his new approach to Christian worship. According to Lewes historian Hazel Brittingham, Whitfield stopped in Lewes twice – in 1739 and again in 1741 – to sow the seeds of a Methodist congregation. “He preached from the balcony of a house still standing at the corner of Madison Avenue and Kings Highway,” said Brittingham, “but it was 40 more years before the first Bethel congregation really began to take hold in Lewes.”

The Fourth Street building turning 100 this year and housing the current Bethel congregation is the third home to the congregation. Its first home – a one-story structure with wooden siding known as Bethel Chapel - was constructed at the corner of Third and Market streets in 1790. That original structure, in the grand tradition of Lewes and Sussex County, eventually found its way to its current location at the corner of Third and Mulberry streets, where it was eventually expanded. Now, centuries later, the structure serves as a private residence.

A tall, wood-sided structure with a unique upstairs sanctuary and towering steeple became the congregation’s second home in the early 1870s. Located at the corner of Mulberry and Church streets, that building served the growing congregation up until May 1911, when the congregation walked from its old home for a dedication of its new home barely two blocks away at the corner of Fourth and Chestnut.

Led by a zealous Bethel pastor named William Roland Mowbray, church members used all of their assets judiciously to purchase the current site from John T. Jones and construct the new stone structure for the phenomenal sum of $21,000. The Delaware Pilot newspaper reported that Dr. John Krantz of the New York Methodist Conference spoke at the dedication service for the new church and said he “couldn’t believe it possible that this magnificent and commodious structure only cost that amount; that in all of his fifteen years experience of assisting in dedicating churches this was the best church for the money that he had ever seen.”

Feeling a growing need for more Sunday school space and a gathering place for the congregation and the wider community, Bethel’s members purchased adjoining properties on Fourth and Market streets, and in 1957 the congregation dedicated its new educational building and fellowship hall. In the half century since, that hall has seen plays and concerts, basketball games, roller-skating events and hundreds of Boy Scout and Girl Scout programs. In 1997, use of the Sunday school rooms in the building leaped in intensity with the addition of the preschool classes of the Bethel Christian School.

In his introductory message to the commemorative booklet, Bethel’s current pastor the Rev. Fred Duncan wrote: “I can safely say that on days when I don’t feel particularly joyful, all I need to do is walk the halls of our preschool or sit among the children during the children’s sermon to be uplifted again.”