A Brief History

In 2017, Fairview United Methodist Church envisioned and began to develop a new Wesley Living Learning Center and Student Residence for university students to share “life together” as they pursue their academic studies at Indiana University.  

Fairview United Methodist Church was begun in the late 1800’s by a small group of members of First Methodist Church in Bloomington.  New industries were moving into the Near West Side and the neighborhood was beginning to grow rapidly.  The new industries and the new neighborhood and the new church boomed!

Fairview Church’s membership grew to more than a thousand members with a city-wide ministry serving persons of all ages and ethnicities. Yet, like other mainline churches, its membership declined precipitously during the recent decades as the Church sought to understand and grapple with the “sea changes” in the city and larger society.  By 2016 the church had less than 60 active members. Moreover, the facility needed major repairs. 

In 2016, the congregation gathered to ask: “Is God saying to us that we’ve completed our mission as a congregation, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant?’ or is God calling us now to a new ministry to be a new kind of church for the 21st century?”  Through much prayer and conversation, reflection upon the scriptures, evaluation of its past ministry, and an assessment of the neighborhood, the larger society and emerging global changes, the congregation discerned that God, indeed, was calling them to a new ministry and to be a new kind of church for the century ahead.  Thus, the seeds of the Wesley Living-Learning Center and Student Residence were sown.

The Wesley Center was based upon the experience of John and Charles Wesley, the founders of “methodism.” In the 18th century, when they were students at Oxford University, they lived in a neighborhood among the working class.  Along with their academic studies, they, with a small group of other students, sought to put “their faith to work.”  As they engaged in a daily discipline of searching the scriptures and praying together, they experienced the “call” to establish a literacy program for the neighborhood children, a community food “pantry,” and even developed a “bank” to help keep working adults from going to “debtor’s prison.”  John Wesley even went on a mission trip to America and began new covenant groups called “classes” in England, his native country.

The new “dissenting” movement of John and Charles Wesley became a new expression of the Christian Church with worldwide outreach through new congregation, new Christian denominations, school, hospitals, community centers and missions.

Now, the former Christian Education wing of Fairview Church has been remodeled to include a university student residence.  2024, is the formal launch of the Wesley Center.  Volunteers and part-time staff are in place.  Alongside their academic studies, a small group of students will be invited to share “life together” deepening their discipleship, and to serve with and among the residents of the Near West Side neighborhoods.

Among the “sea changes” which are occurring in society and throughout the world, the Wesley Center is based upon five core values -- international, intercultural, interfaith, intentionality and invitational. The Center seeks to give new meaning to friendship-community-making a difference, particularly now when the issues of ethnic strife and national conflict, political upheaval and widespread corruption, terrorism and war, economic disparity and increasing poverty, pandemics of human illness and hunger, unprecedented immigration and a threatened biosphere, the destruction of cultural landscapes and the disappearance of the world’s languages, pose to conscience an urgency to create a future with hope for all Creation.