The history of Trinity Presbyterian is filled with stories of resilience.

The first church was built on the eve of the worst economic crash in Tacoma’s history. The Panic of 1893 took us from boom city to gloom city overnight. Only 4 of the 21 banks in Tacoma survived a year after the Panic. Wages were cut for the workers in the few jobs left. Parents gave their children up to orphanages. There were numerous suicides. Future Congressman Francis W. Cushman joked that Tacomans harvested so many clams off public beaches to stay fed that their stomachs rose and fell with the tides. Many people moved away from the city. While the gold rush in the late 1890s lifted Seattle, the effects here lasted decades.

Still, the church persisted. It even built the parsonage we call Trinity House in the early 1900s.

The congregation was always resourceful and determined to stay out of debt. At one time, our little lot held a women’s dormitory for nearby UPS (they were at the site now filled with Jason Lee Middle School until about the time our new church was built in 1922-1923). There was an auto repair garage. There was a music building. And of course, there was the church and the parsonage. All but the latter two were rented out as income for the church.

In the late teens, the little church was condemned. The US was at war in Europe and quite a few of our parishioners were gone. They are listed on a memorial panel in the stain glass in the balcony.

Still, they persisted. The congregation embarked on the design and construction of a church twice as big as the one that was condemned.

All too soon after the new church arose in 1923, there was another depression and then another war.

On April 13, 1949, an earthquake shook the South Sound. An 11 year old boy, Marvin Klegman, was killed by falling bricks at Lowell elementary. He was one of 8 deaths that day. Tacoma had much property damage. Our church was shaken so hard that the spires on the top of the church’s square tower toppled. They fell through the roof into the fellowship hall and on to the sidewalks.

Also, the wall that faces Sixth Avenue above the south entrance to the church split away from the structure and hung precariously over the street.

All this happened on a Wednesday. No one was injured. Within a few days the church was repaired and opened for services.

Now that is resilience.

Building codes changed as a result of the quake. Many buildings like ours were torn down and replaced over the next few years. But we stayed.

In the 1950s, due to a national merger of Presbyterian denominations, the church name changed from First United Presbyterian to Trinity United Presbyterian. (We dropped the United after another merger in the 1970s) The congregation grew. It didn’t hurt that President Eisenhower became a Presbyterian 12 days after being sworn in as President in 1953.

But the 1960s and 1970s were times when the number of churchgoers all over the US shrunk. As the mall replaced downtown businesses in Tacoma and residents fled to the suburbs, our church attendance shrank also. In the late 1960s we rented space in our basement to a program for children with disabilities. The congregation became very small in the 1980s.

But visionaries like Hazel Pflugmacher saw needs outside the church walls and established a tutoring program for neighborhood children. Other programs followed her lead. A free clinic opened in Trinity house in the early 1990s. The church attendance gradually picked up as people came to appreciate what a small resilient urban church could do. (Nationally, there are fewer than half the number of practicing Presbyterians now than there were when Hazel created TAP 30 years ago.)

That resilient spirit persists today. We are embarking on a long overdue, much needed renovation appropriately called the Here For Good campaign.

And next time, we will be better prepared for a quake.