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Pastor's Note |
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Thank you for visiting the website of Scofield Church! We are a Bible church in the heart of Lake Highlands, Dallas, TX.
Our Communities of Bible Study begin at 9 AM and our worship service
begins at 10:40. We invite you to join us in worship this Sunday.
The people who call Scofield home seek to embrace a
multi-generational approach to life and ministry. Our worship service
is an intentional blend of musical expression. Our Communities of
Bible Study are active learning centers where one can learn to more
fully follow our Lord Jesus Christ through the study of His Word, the
Bible. Home Groups provide another avenue of community building whereby
you can get to really know a smaller group of people well.
"The Bible as it is, for people as they are."
Not just a slogan, but a challenge...
A challenge to learn the teachings of the Bible so that we may better know and follow Jesus.
A challenge to love all men and women since they are greatly loved by Jesus.
- Jonas Bundy, Interim Executive Pastor
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Newsflash |
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Welcome to Scofield's website! Be sure to check out our Calendar, as well as the many ministry pages listed under the Ministries tab. We're glad you're here!
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Page 1 of 11 How Scofield Was Started
In 1877, when the entire city of Dallas had less than 25,000 inhabitants, the Congregational denomination started a mission church, and called it the First Congregational Church of Dallas. The church struggled to get established, and for five years it was very unclear whether or not the young church would survive. However, 127 years later, it not only remains, but it also has an interesting story to tell. No one could have imagined the impact this small church would eventually have in its own community and many distant parts of the world.
 This is an attempt to tell parts of the history of the church that is now Scofield Memorial Church from a ministry perspective. The paper is the result of a work done during a special "visioning" project in 2000, where the original goal was to discover what has made Scofield as a church distinct through the years, to discover where we have excelled and where we may have failed, and to help us see how we have gotten to the place we now occupy. When the paper was finished, the story was so interesting that it was decided to revise it for a more general audience.
What is a Congregational Church?
The Puritans who settled in New England were the originators of the Congregational denomination. Famous preachers and theologians in this denomination were John Cotton (17th century), Jonathan Edwards (18th century), and Henry Ward Beecher (19th century). They were similar to Baptists in that they had a congregational church polity, unlike Methodists or Presbyterians. There were many colleges started by Congregationalists (Harvard and Yale were both originally started as Christian colleges for pastors), but the schools, like the majority of the denomination, eventually became very liberal. At the time of their creation, Congregational churches were distinct in that they were a "free" church that believed in local congregational autonomy. Local church affairs were not directed by any denomination. It would be accurate to say that the Congregational church in the 19th century would function much like an independent Bible church does today.
Congregationalists had a unique perspective on baptism. Where Baptists consider only believer's baptism by immersion to be scriptural, and Presbyterians consider the baptism of the infants of believers by sprinkling to be biblical -- Congregationalists considered any mode of baptism done in the name of the Trinity to be biblical. They would baptize infants of believers, and they would baptize the newly converted. Unlike Baptists they did not make baptism by immersion after a profession of faith a requirement for membership — in fact, they seemed very hesitant to re-baptize someone who had received a biblical baptism prior to conversion. The church still has the same policy concerning baptism that it had in the late 1800's, though today nearly all baptisms are of believers by immersion.
By the 1880's Darwinism and liberalism had begun to affect all mainstream denominations, and the more educated denominations were affected first. The mainline denominations no longer believed in miracles, or the virgin birth of Christ, nor the existence of the devil or hell. The Congregational denomination that had started First Congregational Church was heavily liberal by this time. By 1908, First Congregational Church left the denomination and became an independent church, but kept the same name.
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