Our history
The congregation
In 1876 a group of young families, wishing to teach their children the tenets of the Lutheran Church in the English language, established a congregation they called the Grace English Lutheran Church. The first service was held August 22, 1876. Emanuel Greenwald Tressel accepted the call as the first pastor in May 1877. On March 8, 1878 the congregation was incorporated in the District of Columbia as “Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Unaltered Augsburg Confession.
After 50 years at its original location at 13th and Corcoran in Washington, DC, the congregation moved to its current location on 16th Street. The first service in the building designed by the firm of Corbusier and Lenski was held on Palm Sunday, March 31, 1928. The structure is on the National Historic Register.
From a small ethnically German congregation in 1876, Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church has become a multicultural, ethnically diverse congregation as a family sharing God’s love with each other and the world. This is a Reconciling in Christ congregation. The congregation is active serving God in community outreach, education and music.
The building
Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church was established in 1876, when American-born members of Trinity German Lutheran Church founded their own English-speaking congregation and shifted affiliation from the Missouri Synod to the Ohio Synod. Grace Church as an important mission church in this area. In 1924, the Ohio Synod endorsed the idea of a new edifice for Grace Church to serve as the denomination’s “representative” church in the national capital.
To that end, other congregations contributed money to the construction, which commenced in 1926. The building was designed by Rochester native J. W. C. Corbusier, a Beaux-Arts-trained church architect. Having worked in several states and even designed several buildings for the Ohio Synod, Corbusier had been influenced not only by his studies of cathedrals and churches in France, but by association with Henry Vaughan and Ralph Adams Cram, the foremost practitioners of the neo-Gothic in America at the turn of the twentieth century.
Erected in 1926-1928, the load-bearing stonemasonry, basilica form, and tower all testify to the importance of the sanctuary, intended to serve as the “representative” church of the Ohio Synod’s practice of Lutheranism. It was no accident that the building was sited along 16th Street, Washington’s “Avenue of Churches.”
In 2013 the church was designated as a historic landmark in the D.C. Inventory of Historic Sites. It is also on the National Register of Historic Places.
The windows
Among the greatest glories of the Gothic Cathedrals are their stained and painted windows, rich in religious significance and superlatively informative in effect. Their color harmonies, changing subtly from hour to hour with the passing of the shadows, contribute immeasurably to the inspiring effect of these great interiors.
At the turn of the twentieth century, American stained glass briefly became the world’s finest when Louis Comfort Tiffany took the art to new heights. American stained glass quality remained high during the thirties and forties with the emergence of such studios as Connick, Willet, Payne and Lamb. Our windows are from the studios of William Willett. He founded his studio in Philadelphia in 1898. Two other examples of Willett windows in the metropolitan Washington Area are the Old Post Chapel in Ft. Myer, Virginia and the Clarendon Presbyterian Church, Clarendon, Virginia. All of the 34 stained glass windows in Grace Church are memorials given by family and friends.
