Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 9, 1993 TAG: 9305100342
SECTION: DISCOVER PAGE: 76 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: FRANCES STEBBINS CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The many residents who move in and out of the valley's two universities mingle with longtime hill country folk to provide a mix both exciting and volatile.
In the three years I, for my newspaper column, have visited a different church each month in Montgomery, Pulaski, Giles and Floyd counties, this fact has become evident in houses of worship ranging from Floyd Primitive Bapvtists to Pembroke Latter-day Saints and Blacksburg Catholics.
Growth is occurring today - as national church publications show - in churches with a conservative slant to theology. For many this means people who take God, and usually church involvement, seriously enough to place them above "worldly" amusements and moral values.
In both towns and in some rural areas, interdenominational fellowships such as Christiansburg's Christian Growth Center typify this trend.
This large church with a motif of sowing the seeds of Christianity is atypical of most Western Virginia congregations in being racially integrated and a mecca for young mixed-race families.
But the mainstream Dublin United Methodist and Randolph Avenue United Methodist in Pulaski also attract worshipers of both races.
On the other hand, Roman Catholics have increasingly become part of the New River Valley landscape. At St. Jude Church in Radford, membership growth has outstripped the ability of the transient, youthful group to be able to afford a new building.
In recent years every county in the New River Valley has acquired a Catholic "presence," even if small.
There is more growth than money, too, in Blacksburg's Unitarian Universalist congregation, where funds have been accumulated for years toward a bigger structure on nearby lots.
Over the past two decades, growth among Latter-day Saints - Mormons to outsiders - has resulted in the building of a large house of worship on U.S. 460 in Giles County.
Symbolically, it is far more than just another plainly visible church. It marks the center of life for dozens of young families whose view of Christianity is different from that of the many Baptists who regard them as a cult.
Jews remain a tiny minority in the New River Valley, but growth of a Blacksburg group, which is attended by adherents from throughout the four counties, recently made possible the employment of a part-time rabbi.
Bonnie Margulis, ordained following her graduation from Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, lives in Staunton with her husband, Jonathan Biatch. Also a rabbi, he serves congregations there and in Harrisonburg.
It's a long commute, Margulis said, but she is excited about coming twice monthly to work with the Hillel student community on Friday nights and with the more permanent congregation for its Saturday morning worship and the social and educational events both enjoy.
The Jews use a center at Church and Roanoke streets in Blacksburg.
Quakers, also a minority in Western Virginia, have grown in the past few years to having three "meetings" within traveling distance.
Jenny Chapman, a Pennsylvania transplant now living on Bent Mountain, is a supporter of a Floyd group started more than a year ago. Its average of 30 people is enough to be planning a small house of worship near the town of Floyd, she said.
The group, a traditional "unprogrammed" fellowship, is worshipping each Sunday at 10 a.m. in the Floyd Library.
The New River Valley also is represented by a Korean Baptist congregation, which has used Blacksburg Presbyterian Church for several years for Sunday afternoon services. It, too, has plans to build.
An Islamic group is centered at Virginia Tech and includes both students and professors. A small body of Baha'i followers gathers in Blacksburg homes to study the writings of their 19th-century prophet and founder.
An attempt to establish a Muslim school near Interstate 81 in Christiansburg failed, but Life Bible College is now located there, and its sponsoring Foursquare Gospel denomination brought still another new congregation to the valley. Foursquares are a Pentecostal denomination founded by California evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson in the 1920s.
But Pentecostals are no novelty to the New River Valley. Depending on areas, these many branches of holiness Christianity exert a major influence. The Yellow Pages in the Pulaski phone book, for instance, list more congregations with Pentecostal tendencies than they do Baptist.
The 11 Churches of Christ the phone book lists in the four New River counties does not cover all the small New Testament Church fellowships, which are part of this conservative body.
In Floyd County, a resident may well belong to a Primitive Baptist congregation or a Church of the Brethren. Once related 300 years ago in Germany, they no longer bear any practical resemblance to each other.
Some Primitive Baptists still worship in meeting houses with stoves. They sing dirgelike hymns reminiscent of 18th century Appalachian folk songs.
But in Blacksburg's Good Shepherd Church of the Brethren, the needs of young parents were incorporated into a building occupied in the past five years.
With a woman pastor, it is used on Sundays for worship and during the week as a fully-licensed day care center.
Despite the gradually increasing influence of new groups, conservative Protestants - including Southern and Independent Baptists, Pentecostals and fundamentalist-leaning groups from mainstream churches - remain the bedrock of New River Valley church people.
by CNB