The roots of our present day church can be traced back to 1825 when Jesse Walker, a Methodist circuit rider, established the Fox River Mission for Indians in the Arlington Heights area. When the first non-native American settlers began to arrive from the East around 1834, a retired Methodist minister, Reverend Caleb Lamb, organizedthe first class of Methodist that would grow in time to become the present day First United Methodist Church of Arlington Heights.The date of 1838 is recognized as the founding of our church when John Nason, a Circuit Rider, became our first permanent preacher.
(To learn more, read, How Beautiful Upon the Prairie by Margery Frisbie, 1988. Copies are available in local libraries and from the First United Methodist Church of Arlington Heights.)
You are welcome to become part of the future of our historic congregation as we look forward to exploring new frontiers of service to the ever changing needs of the communities we serve.
The United Methodist Cross & Flame is a mark known the world over.
Did you know that the artist involved in the creation of the cross and flame was created by a member of the First United Methodist Church of Arlington Heights? His name was Edward J. Mikula. The logo was proposed in 1967 and adopted by the United Methodist Church in the spring of 1968 following the union of The Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren Church.
Rich in meaning and significance, the logo “…relates the church to God the Father by the way of the second and third persons of the Holy Trinity – God, the Son, symbolized by the cross, and God the Holy Spirit, symbolized by the flame.” (Source: Methodist Story-Spotlight, Nov. 1968, 2.) Others associate elements of the insignia with the founder of Methodism’s founder, John Wesley, when he sensed God’s presence and felt his heart “strangely warmed.”
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