Grace Episcopal Church / Grace Episcopal Church Buildings

In August 1866 Manley Howard and Heber Walsh invited missionary Rev. Robert Wood to conduct an Episcopal service in Holland. Grace parish was organized the next year. The Rev. Joash Rice Taylor, its first rector, led the congregation into the Diocese of Michigan on June 10, 1868. It joined the new Diocese of Western Michigan in 1874. Struggling as a missionary parish in a community dominated by Dutch Reformed churches for sixty years, it lacked a rector for months at a time and faced limited resources, debt and fires. Grace became independent of missionary assistance and self-supporting in 1928. It stabilized and grew under the leadership of the Rev. William C. Warner, rector from 1943 to 1968. Grace was a leader in offering women leadership opportunities. Grace Episcopal Church Buildings The 1871 Holland fire destroyed Grace Episcopal’s first church, a former one-room school on 10th Street across from Centennial Park. Gordon W. Lloyd designed a carpenter gothic church for the congregation’s second location at 11th and Pine. Built in 1873, it burned in 1886. Grace’s third church, on 9th Street, used timbers and window frames from the previous building. It was dedicated on March 11, 1889. When the congregation outgrew that space, Roger Allen and Associates of Grand Rapids designed this building in the style of an English parish church. It was consecrated in 1954. Additions doubled the size of the church in 1985. The altar was moved to the new north end of the sanctuary, and the pews were reversed. In 2017 the church installed a Pasi organ.