First Christian Church of El Paso

🏛️The era

In the early 1880s El Paso was changing faster than almost any town in Texas. For generations it had been a crossing place on the Rio Grande, a meeting ground of Spanish, Mexican, Native, and Anglo peoples at the pass between mountains. Then the railroads arrived in 1881, and a sleepy adobe settlement became a noisy, crowded junction almost overnight.

Boomtowns like this drew merchants, rail workers, gamblers, and fortune seekers, and they were not known for their churches. Anyone who wanted a quieter, steadier kind of community had to build it by hand, and many of the people who did that work were ordinary laypeople rather than trained clergy.

Across the country, the late nineteenth century was an age of joining and organizing. Americans founded congregations, schools, lodges, and clubs at a remarkable rate, and in a far-flung place like El Paso those institutions gave newcomers something to belong to. The Disciples of Christ, a movement born on the American frontier earlier in the century, was well suited to that kind of grassroots growth.

👥People & events

The story starts with a blacksmith. Philip Miner, born in Pennsylvania, had come to Texas in 1849 and spent decades helping to start churches and public schools wherever he lived. When he moved to El Paso in 1883 with his wife and five children, he simply kept going. Two years later he gathered thirteen charter members into a new congregation.

Miner would not take a cent for his preaching. It is a detail worth lingering on: a man who worked with his hands for a living, giving his Sundays freely to a small, struggling flock. Not until 1890 did the church hire its first salaried pastor, the Rev. Francis Brunner.

For years the congregation moved from one borrowed space to another in south El Paso. Then, in 1895, a visiting minister named J. C. Mason, in town on vacation, spurred the members to build a sanctuary of their own on Myrtle Avenue. It says something about the congregation's energy that a vacationing preacher could set such a project in motion.

The church kept growing. In 1904 members laid the cornerstone of a new building at Oregon and Franklin Streets, under the Rev. E. M. Waits, who would go on to lead Texas Christian University for a quarter century, from 1916 to 1941. After World War II the congregation broke ground on yet another home on Arizona Avenue in 1950, and over the years it helped start other Disciples congregations as the city spread outward.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Philip Miner's life follows a pattern that shaped much of the American West. Formal institutions were slow to reach new towns, so churches and schools were often started by volunteers, people who saw a need and filled it. Miner's pairing of churches with public schools shows how closely faith and education were tied in that frontier work.

The Disciples of Christ grew out of a restoration movement that began in the early 1800s. It stressed simple, lay-led worship and independent congregations, which let it spread without a large central hierarchy. A blacksmith preaching for free to thirteen people is exactly the kind of beginning that movement made possible.

The line from this border congregation to the presidency of a major Texas university is a reminder of how these small churches produced leaders. Their influence reached well beyond the pews, into the colleges and civic life of a growing state.

🧭If you visit

Downtown El Paso rewards a slow walk. As you move between the historic core and the neighborhoods around it, you are covering the ground where this congregation met in rented rooms, built its first sanctuary, and later raised larger churches as the city grew.

Take in the setting while you are here: the mountains rising right against the city, the river, and the view toward Ciudad Juárez across the border. That landscape explains why El Paso mattered, as a crossing point and later a rail hub, and why people like Philip Miner found a place ready for new institutions.

El Paso fits easily into a far West Texas road trip. Pair a stop here with the city's missions, its downtown architecture, and the wide desert country to the east. As you go, think about the blacksmith who built a church in a boomtown without being paid to preach.