Distance = 8.5 Miles; Elevation Change > 200 feet
Lo Elevation = 0; Hi Elevation = 215
After three of us slept in the same minivan together the night before, Ky found a place for us to stay within Antioch. With the help of a phone call from our Pastor Erick back home, the Community Presbyterian Church/First Congregational Church of Antioch came through with an offer to sleep on some comfy couches. We even got to watch a John Wayne movie with a few of their parishioners! Pastor Will McGarvey asked us to share our story after the movie ended. He then related the church’s own fascinating history.
They began as a church for miners in the nearby Black Diamond area. The current building they are in, the Stoneman Chapel, was an ecumenical meeting place where an altar could be rolled out for Catholic services and hidden away again for Jewish services. The current Church inhabiting the Stoneman Chapel went through two periods of consolidation to form the current CPC-FCCA, with an original member dating back to 1864.
More information about the CPC-FCCA’s laudable experiment with shared ministry can be found on their website: http://www.cpcpittsburg.org.
A podcast for days 007-009 is available on the Hiking Humanitarian facebook fan page: http://www.facebook.com/hikinghumanitarian
