Location: Fresno, Calif.

Presbytery: Pacific Coast

Organization: Oct. 1920

Membership: 48 communicant; 19 baptized

Pastor: Samuel Ketcham

Website: fresnorpchurch.org

Around the time the Sun-Maid raisin company opened its Fresno, Calif., facility 100 years ago, some local folks hoped to form a Reformed Presbyterian church. On June 6, 1919, Fresno became a mission station of the RPCNA under care of the Pacific Coast Presbytery. On Oct. 14, 1920, the church was organized with 27 charter members.

Also about 100 years ago, on June 8, 1918, Evelyn Webster was born in Fresno, eventually placed in the care of her grandparents, and then providentially drawn into her neighborhood’s RP church through one of its charter members, Mrs. Nora Dodds. According to Evelyn, Mrs. Dodds would “round up neighbor kids, read us Bible stories, and teach us. I wasn’t even 10 years old at the time, probably.” Evelyn joined the church when she was 12. “There were six of us kids who joined—Frances, Eileen…we were friends. I just had my grandmother. I had no brother or sister. The church was my second home. They took me under their wing.”

Today, Evelyn is our oldest member. Lois Copeland, seven years younger than Evelyn, came to Fresno with her family when she was 12 (we now have four generations of Copelands who worship here each week). Lois says that in early days “we often couldn’t even pay a pastor. Well, maybe five dollars.” She recalls that almost everyone at church was a neighbor within walking distance. Although a new freeway system has altered the area and removed that church building, we still worship within a half mile of that neighborhood where Evelyn was first introduced to the gospel. (We still have Sun-Maid growers among us, too—the Jason Paul family—who, along with others, share their produce from this agricultural region known as one of the most productive in the world.)

During the past 100 years, our church has been served in an official capacity by 20 ministers. Pastor Samuel Ketcham, an Alabama-born West Point graduate who served in Afghanistan and Iraq before being called to the ministry, moved to Fresno in July 2017 with his wife, Dorsey, and their four children. He was ordained and installed as our pastor on Feb. 2, 2018. (Our previous pastor of 29 years, Tim McCracken, continues as a member here, having been called as a missionary to the Central California prisons.) We have also recently benefitted from the care of an additional elder, Paul Hemphill, and from five weeks of preaching from Noah Shepherd, a student at Westminster Seminary and member at San Diego RP Church.

This past year, we have delighted in the addition of the Ketcham family, Daniel Rivera, Timothy Paul, Collin Lee, and newly local Dr. Deborah Gayle Copeland and her boys, Will and Jonathan, as Gayle returned to her hometown to begin as provost/senior vice president for academic affairs at Fresno Pacific University.

And God has blessed us with children! When Micah Hemphill was born seven years ago, he was our only child under 12. Now, with this year’s new infants—Spencer Burns, Cyprian Ortega, Gretl Cline, and the upcoming Parish baby—we have more than 20 children!

Please pray for us here—as we gather twice each Sunday for worship and twice each month for prayer and fellowship meals along with a monthly men’s prayer breakfast and women’s dinner—that God would increasingly cause us to be as fruitful as this region, overflowing in genuine love, walking as children of light, and ready to be folks’ second home as we boldly and joyfully hold forth the Word of life.

Consider coming here to share in our yearly 3,550 hours of sunshine in this Mediterranean climate (says Wikipedia). That’s sunshine 81 percent of the daytime!