NOTE: If you would prefer to listen, click here for an audio version of this blog post. When prompted, click the following: Photo 1 Photo 2 Photo 3 Photo 4 Photo 5 Photo 6 Photo 7 Photo 8
NOTE: Click here for Part 6: Home # 4 – 5251 S. Independence in Littleton; click here for Part 8: Ken Caryl Baptist Church.
Joanna and I didn’t attend church regularly for almost 2 years after we arrived in Denver. For our first six months there, I was working as an assistant manager at McDonald’s and usually worked the night shift on Saturdays. By the time I finished with paperwork and got home, it was almost 6 a.m. Sunday. So I slept until early afternoon. Honestly, we were still adjusting to married life, to Denver, and so forth, and just hadn’t gotten back into the habit of attending church.
By early 1979, though, we had talked about getting back to church, and I began looking at the classified ads for churches. Searching for “a thinking person’s church,” I found the name “University Hills Baptist Church” appealing – after all, anything that has the word “university” in it must be close to a university, be filled with students and learned professors, right? Wrong. It was across the street from University Hills shopping center, which was near a housing subdivision named, you guessed it, University Hills.
Whatever the reason for the name, we visited and liked it, so I joined. Joanna had not yet been baptized, so she attended with me as a visitor. We joined a young marrieds Sunday School class and made some good friends there. In fact, there were two couples, the Turks (John & Carol) and the Michaels (Don & Kathy), whom we especially enjoyed getting to know, and we would go out to movies with them. It was with these folks that we saw Steve Martin’s The Jerk at the theater. Here are pictures from a 1981 Sunday School class party at our second house (4565 S. Independence), identifying those I recognize: (1) Don Michael & me in the kitchen; (2) Kathy Michael on the left & Carol Turk to her right; and (3) John and Valorie Haverkamp are at the right.
I joined the choir, which was directed by Bill Rhoads, the church’s minister of music, and I occasionally sang solos in worship. (My degree from Oklahoma Baptist University is a Bachelor of Music Education, with a major in voice.) I also assisted with a children’s choir.
Our pastor was Davis Cooper, whose preaching was the kind of challenging preaching we appreciated.
In August 1981, Joanna walked the aisle, professing faith in Christ and asking to be baptized. Dave Cooper baptized her the following week. Joanna was around 6 months pregnant with Alison at the time; Dave joked that this was the first “infant baptism” that he had ever performed. Years later, Joanna said that, while she had been thinking about professing Christ for quite a while, her decision at that time, only months after the December 1980 murder of her brother, Jovan, was a result of the love and concern shown to her, in the aftermath, by my family and by friends at University Hills Baptist Church, including Davis Cooper, who visited us a day or two after we received the news.
So this church has a very important place in our hearts (my heart, now that Joanna’s gone). Sad to say, the church split about 20 years ago when one faction wanted to move to a new location and the others wanted to stay put. As it turned out, the one faction left to form a new church, and the small remnant that remained were unable to sustain the fellowship. So now the building is gone, and the church itself no longer exists – except in the memories of those who experienced special times there together.
I drove to the location on Saturday morning of my Denver nostalgia tour; it is now a block-long four-story apartment building. How sad. I don’t have a photo of University Hills Baptist Church from when Joanna and I were members there, but – for the sake of giving you an idea of what it looked like back then, here is a picture I found accompanying an Internet article about the church’s decline, showing it when it still housed a thriving church body.
We loved University Hills Baptist Church. However, by the time Alison was born, we had been living in southwest Denver for over a year, and it was a 20-minute drive to church every week. Having a baby to feed, dress, etc., made it even more challenging for these two new parents to get to church on time every week. So our attendance became sporadic. We started missing every other week and, eventually, even more. We stuck with it for 3 years, but we weren’t happy being part-time churchgoers. Two or three young couples from the church also lived southwest and had moved their membership to a newer church in Littleton, Ken Caryl Baptist Church. They invited Joanna and me to visit Ken Caryl, which we did in February 1985.
We liked it and felt welcome there. On our second or third visit, when the congregation stood for the “invitation” hymn, I looked at Joanna, and she looked at me. Not a word was said between us; we just took each other’s hand and started down the aisle to ask to join Ken Caryl Baptist Church as members. The Holy Spirit seemed to be speaking to both of us simultaneously, and we never looked back. God would bless our decision.
I should hasten to add that we had come to love University Hills Baptist Church and Dave Cooper, and it was with deep regret and sadness that we left. So, after we joined Ken Caryl, we invited Dave and Jean Cooper over for dinner at our house one evening, just to let them know how deeply we loved and appreciated them, and that we would miss them. We had a wonderful visit with them that evening and received a beautiful thank you card expressing their love for us.
In May 1987, more than 2 years after we had left, University Hills Baptist Church dedicated a new sanctuary – much larger than the old one – and educational facilities. We returned for the dedication service. Unfortunately, this new building became a point of contention in the years to come, as the church – rather than growing into the new space – struggled to fill it. A few years later, University Hills Shopping Center expanded. The church never had adequate parking on-site, but had an agreement with the shopping center for members to use its parking area directly across from the church. The expansion of the shopping center, however, resulted in the loss of most of that parking area. Without adequate parking, members began leaving University Hills Baptist Church, leading to the crisis that eventually ended the church’s fellowship and ministry altogether.