Our Heritage
Founded as the First Protestant Church in Price County, First Presbyterian Church has been a landmark
and cornerstone of the Phillips community for over 100 years. Early on, our Avon Avenue site was part
of a downtown thoroughfare, dotted with grocery stores, meeting halls, and small businesses. When
State Highway 13 became a corridor from Marshfield to Ashland, the church’s carillon of hymns could
still be heard daily at noon and 5:00 p.m., and the church bell, (dedicated with the second building after
the Great Fire of 1894), heralded the beginning of neighborhood worship on Sunday morning.
At right: This bell was part of our former church building and will be installed in the new church as
homage to our past.
Reaching Out to Touch Lives with the Love of Jesus Christ!
Our Pilgrimage
In 2010, living up to our mission statement required an honest assessment of our current resources and
a leap of faith regarding our future. In order to make worship and ministry safe and accessible for
members and visitors, we demolished our deteriorating, two-story structure in order to construct a
multi-functional, 1-level facility on the same site. Currently a church without a building, we rent office
space downtown and benefit weekly from the generous invitation of St. Therese Catholic Church to
worship in their new sanctuary. It has been a difficult road, but our church leadership has earned the
trust of an expectant, albeit smaller, congregation, and we believe God is sending us in this direction.
Our Future
Beyond worship and ministry space for our congregation, we hope to provide gathering space for
groups, businesses, and non-profits, subject only to calendar availability. Our "catering kitchen" will
encourage patronage of local eateries for funeral dinners, lunch takeout, and pizza delivery. Our
“acoustically-excellent” sanctuary will accommodate local music/drama/film productions and, with the
coffee always on, a downtown WiFi "hot spot" will be available without cover charge. Our decision to
rebuild, (using local contractors), is already having a significant impact in the ongoing economic
development discussion in our small town. The open design of our new facility will not only allow us to
continually adapt our ministry, it will also incubate growing partnerships between churches, community
service organizations, and local businesses. Our past heritage and our recent pilgrimage has moved our
congregation from planning for next year to implementing a strategy that will be flexible enough to
incorporate what it will mean for us to be the church 25 years from now.
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