Three Giant Oaks at Best Bottom Free Methodist Church

Built by William Harmon Holtwick, who returned here after an arduous move to Oregon, and was compelled to share the gospel with former neighbors, after finding new life in Christ

through Free Methodists in Oregon. Mr. Holtwick was appointed by the Missouri Conference of the Free Methodist

Church as the first pastor when the Church was officially organized in 1894. He was followed by twenty other pastors

in the more than sixty years the church functioned. This Church contributed leaders to the Free Methodist Church worldwide, including among others, Oswald T. Gregory, a

charter member who later served as pastor here and elsewhere, L.F. Autenrieth, a pastor in Missouri and Illinois,

Bishop Robert Andrews, who participated here when his father was pastor, Alma Gregory Willard, a missionary in Latin

America, and Enoch E, Holtwick, long-time professor at Greenville University and candidate for Vice-President and

President of the United States in 1952 and 1956 with the Prohibition Party.

 

"The Chapel" by R.S. Thomas

A little aside from the main road,

becalmed in the last-century greyness,

there is the chapel, ugly, without the appeal

to the tourist to stop his car

and visit it. The traffic goes by,

and the river goes by, and the quick shadows

of clouds, too, and the chapel settles

a little deeper into the grass.

But here once on an evening like this,

in the darkness that was about his hearers,

a preacher caught fire and burned steadily

before them with a strange light,

so that they saw the splendor of

the barren mountains about them

and sang their amens fiercely, narrow

but saved in a way that men are not now.

 

from a plaque placed on the Chapel wall by the

Free Methodist Church, Gateway Conference - 10/23/2021

 

 

Done