M.R. Georgevich Photo
Ewing beneath Davenport (in window).
Thanksgiving for the 1639 Puritan founders of New Haven’s first church, Center Church on the Green, wasn’t about turkeys. It was all about prayer, humility, and expressing gratitude, no frills attached.
From its founding, Center Church has served as a meeting house for the community and its civic as well as religious needs, said Acting Minister Kevin Ewing, who has taken over as pastor for almost a year now.
Although history reverberates below and above at the church — on special occasions Ewing drinks from a ceremonial cup that belonged to founding minister John Davenport — what moves him is the sense of thanksgiving that is at the heart of his faith. Every day of the year, not just on the last Thursday of November.
“No matter how much we struggle, no matter how miserable our lives may seem, there’s always something in there for which we can find grace, and gratitude,” he said.
Church Historian Michelle Georgevich recently looked through church paper ephemera going back to 1905 and noted that Thanksgiving was the occasion less for a church-specific event and more for the organization of ecumenical gatherings of churches and synagogues in New Haven.
In recent years, the centerpiece of Thanksgiving at Center Church has been the provision of hot Thanksgiving dinners to those who need them.
That is taking place this year at the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen (DESK), which operates out of the church’s parish house on Temple Street above Elm. (Originally established by the church, DESK has become its own independent not-forprofit.)
Asked what Biblical verses or thoughts about Thanksgiving he’ll utter for the blessings over the turkeys and 300 pounds of potatoes and stuffing and 30 gallons of gravy at the DESK meal, Ewing quipped, “I’m a Pentecostal. We wait on the spirit to move.”
Demeka Anderson’s spirit was moved by that special quality Center Church has, the aura of its deep and unique history.
Paul Bass Photo
For years before joining, she had lived downtown and always noticed the modest spire of New Haven’s very first church outside her window.
A history buff, she read up on the founding and the role the church has played in the city’s civic history; that includes its being the place where Yale College graduations were held until 1895.
Then Anderson joined the church. Anderson has been a deacon for two years ‚and last month her new baby was baptized, pretty close to the spot where John Davenport baptized those first New Haven-born infants.
Center Church is full of history and its material objects, including the crypt — a preserved cemetery complete with intact tombstones dating from 1687 all beneath today’s building.
Its plaques and pews and tour guides also tell how New Haven’s rigid Puritan theocracy established by well-to-do Englishmen in New Haven in 1639. That theocracy gradually gave way: In 1818, after surviving a second British attempt to retake the colonies, Center Church — and new state laws — permitted another denomination, those pesky Episcopalians of Trinity Church, to build their own house of worship on the Green itself.
Why? In part because those Puritan Congregationalists and the upstart Episcopalians were becoming, well, less Englishmen and more Americans, and increasingly partners in the expanding economic life of the now secure republic.
That local story of the separation of church and state is not only America’s story, but one that is also increasingly relevant today.
Ewing, Georgevich, Anderson, church clerk Nancy Mellone, and deacon Demeka Anderson spoke at length about what Thanksgiving — and thanksgiving —have meant at their congregation in a special holiday edition of WNHH’s “This Day In New Haven History,” as we traveled back to New Haven’s founding with Jason Bischoff-Wurstle of the New Haven Museum and recorded the discussion in the sanctuary of Center Church itself, at the heart of the Green, and of our community’s and country’s history.
Pull up a chair, and click on or download the above audio to listen to the full discussion for a holiday treat. And happy Thanksgiving!