Riverside Church Research Paper

The Riverside Church is an interdenominational Christian Church located in the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York, New York. As an interdenominational congregation of Christian people who welcome people of all creeds, races, sexual orientations, walks of life, etc. to participate in it’s weekly services. Since October 1930, when the first Sunday service was held, The Riverside Church has emerged as a center for progressive ideology that fixates on serving God through both spiritual interaction and stewardship in social justice. However, despite interdenominational in nature, the Church is officially affiliated with both the American Baptist Churches, USA and the United Church of Christ and maintain them as guides for practicing the Christian

The Church was built by John D Rockefeller jr. and a Reverend Dr. Henry Fosdick the in the 1920s as a place to serve all followers of Christ. The congregation is diverse and attracts many different followers of Christ including people such as LGBTQ who are warmly welcomed into the church. A goal of the Church is to live out the Gospel of Christ through stewardship, and so for the church is very outspoken in their ministry. Historically they have taken a political stances and advocated for issues like same-sex marriage, immigration reform, Black Lives Matter, stewardship of the Earth, etc. Within the congregation they allow for Women to take leadership roles and become pastoral ministers. The current reverend, Rev. Amy Butler is the first women to serve as head of the Church, and many women serve as ministers underneath her. This progressive attitude of the Riverside Church gives the church gives it its own distivntive theological

As mentioned before, the national denominational organizations that the Riverside Church affiliates with are the American Baptist Churches USA and the United Church of Christ. Both of these groups are conglomerates made up of individual churches that first developed in America during the 17th Century, when religious groups such as the Pilgrims and the Puritans settled on the east coast. In 1639 a man by the name of Roger Williams founded the first Baptist Church in Providence, Rhode Island as church separate to the Puritan foundations in England. Likewise, some of these remaining colonial settlers unified into one Congressional Church while a community of Dutch settlers in Pennsylvania developed the Reformed Church. As the revivalist movement of the 1740’s, known as “The Great Awakening”, spread throughout the colonial Americas, increasingly more of these separatist churches with similar beliefs began to materialize. Soon after the growth of these churches, congregations, although wanting to keep regional piety, desired that leaders of similar denominations meet together to discuss similar practices. In May of 1814 the Triennial Convention became the first national organization of Baptists. Shorty after in