Maricopa Community Church is golden

Maricopa Community Church celebrates is 50th anniversary today.

In three different buildings during the course of a half century, the church has seen Maricopa change from a small farm town to a city, and grown from three churches to more than 40.

“You have to understand what Maricopa was like back then to understand what it was like starting a church in that time,” Maricopa Community Church member Mary Lou Smith said.

“There were no paved roads, no bridges, and only two grocery stores in town. Most of the people living here were young families anxious for their children to have a Christian education so the community was calling out for something to meet that need.”

Smith helped start the Sunday school program with her own children attending.

Because Maricopa was so isolated from other places, people were very kind and liked to help each other out, she said. So when they needed a place to hold Sunday school the owners of Honey Cup Café, which was no longer in business, offered the church space.

In 1963, Smith said community members put curtains up in front of the kitchen and opened the café as a Sunday school just for children.

On the first day, 30 children show up and by a year later, there were 70, said Pastor Steve Adamson

Although the community members were glad to have a Sunday school for their children, Adamson said the adults wanted something that could feed them spiritually as well.

“It was too far to go to Phoenix, so people wanted something here in Maricopa,” Adamson said.

When the young church needed a bigger facility, it moved into one of the barns just south of the railroad tracks and split the space into two parts – Sunday school and church service.

Getting a pastor for the new church was a challenge.

Smith said community members had a contact in the Disciples of Christ program, which provided a pulpit supply of ministers who didn’t have a church or were retired and still wanted to preach once in a while.

“We started working with those people, and they would send pastors out to preach every week,” Smith said. “So pretty much every week we had a different pastor, and sometimes it would be the same a few weeks in a row, but not that often.”

Although the owners of the barn had been kind enough to lend them use the space for free, holding services and summer bible school in a barn with no air conditioning or heating wasn’t all that comfortable.

“It was very hot in the summer and very cold in the winter,” Smith said. “So after 12 years of having church in the barn, we decided it was time to buy our own property and build a church.”