Churches can have their start in many different ways. When the Albertson family moved from Indiana, to Kiowa County, Kansas in 1884, they were not looking for better farming conditions for the sandy soil in Kansas was not comparable to the rich soil of Indiana. Their purpose was to found a Quaker community. Four families from Rose Hill, Kansas, joined them and by 1886 a sizeable Friends community was active. Community was very important; it has remained so ever since.
Over 130 years later when Arnoldo and Delmy García moved to Houston, they also began gathering a community of Friends and family who had migrated from the Hispanic communities of Southern California. They spread the word that their gathering for worship was a place where like-minded Central American Friends and new believers could find a home.
For Haviland Friends, in addition to community, education was important as well. The very first spring the four founding families began a school for their children. This school became the first public school for the county and shortly an academy was begun. Later a Bible Training School was added which is today the Bible College, Barclay College. Ministry happened at the same time as the schools were developed. From as early as 1897 members of the Haviland community went to minister overseas and in the new lands still opening in the American West.
Haviland stands as a model of the multi-faceted approach to ministry and community life that was not uncommon among the many Friends groups that formed in the westward expansion of the United States. It is an example for churches like the North Houston Hispanic Friends Church of how to expand their ministry through discipleship and determined outreach.
What is now Haviland Friends Church grew out of the community as a Sunday School. Before the close of its hundredth year Haviland Friends Church was the mother church for some twenty-one younger meetings. It also became the unofficial center of the evangelistic emphasis in the Yearly Meeting a revival “sometimes called the Great Awakening among Friends” that had started in Indiana. That revival was active among Friends in Kansas from 1872 to 1900 and in Haviland continued on for another two decades.[1] An English minister, Henry Stanley Newman who visited Haviland stated, “Haviland is a peculiar meeting. It is in a state of chronic revival conversions often occurring in Sabbath morning services.”[2] Haviland Friends Church, like the early Friends movement has been characterized by community, education, and ministry from its beginning. Each is still a current focus.
Whatever the future may hold for the North Houston Hispanic Friends Church, the participants long for and are working towards that same kind of revival and multiplication of ministry as Haviland has experienced over these many years. Undaunted by the difficult start in these pandemic years, these Spanish-speaking Friends are confident that the one who began a good work in them will bring it to completion.
May the Lord give us all strength to fulfil our calling!
–By Glenn Leppert and David Byrne
[1] Sheldon Jackson, Lighthouse on the Prairies, Barclay College, 1992, p. 38. See also Sheldon Jackson, Quakers in Kansas 1833-1900, Thesis presented to the University of Kansas, June 1944. p. 67-68. Jackson details the beginnings of the revival in Indiana as early as 1854 and shows how many of the Friends migrating to Kansas brought it with them. Called the Great Revival it was especially active in Kansas from 1872 to 1900.
[2] Arthur Dewey Rush, The Community of Haviland, Thesis presented to Fort Hays State University, 1942. Rush takes his information from an unpublished manuscript by Mrs. Capitola Lanier.
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