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Pastor's Note |
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Hi and thank you for being here today! Thank you for visiting our website. We hope that you find it useful. At Scofield, our heart’s desire is to know God through the study of His special revelation to us - the Bible. We seek to worship Him, honor Him and to make His name known above all things! We believe that we are called to embrace the life of redemption and celebration that He has called us to through, and in, Jesus Christ. Please feel free to call or email.
Come, know, worship and celebrate Jesus Christ with us.
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Newsflash |
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Thanks for visiting our website. We want you to feel welcome and know that our door is always open to you. Many people every Sunday find Scofield to be a warm, dynamic group of people committed to following Jesus. We seek to follow Jesus by connecting with God and others, growing spiritually, and making an impact in our world through service in ministry.
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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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About Us 
