Richmond is one of those cities that has always been shaped by the elements. It was by water that Christopher Newport and John Smith first came to Richmond in 1607. They had set sail with 120 men from the colony at Jamestown traveling up Powhatan’s River as far as Powhatan Hill and the waterfalls there that blocked their progress. They made a settlement between what is now the 14th street bridge and the Pony Pasture. A few years later Thomas Dale, the new governor of Jamestown, organized another expedition which established a small settlement just below the falls, building the first hospital there and caring for, among others, Pocahontas.

As time went on and tobacco increasingly became the stock in trade for Virginians, the Falls of the James became an important center for inspecting and grading tobacco. Again, the river was to play the central role in the area’s development. As William Byrd looked down at the way the river cut through the landscape he was reminded of his native London. ‘Richmond’ he called the place after Richmond-on-Thames. Later, George Washington’s Kanawha Canal brought ever increasing traffic on the James as the flour, iron and tobacco produced by the city was shipped on barges and steamboats to ports around the world. Water provided for Richmond’s growth in the way it had led to her founding.

Alongside water, there has been another element in Richmond’s history – fire.  When during the Revolutionary War, the state capital was hurriedly moved from Williamsburg to Richmond , Benedict Arnold unsuccessfully defended the city, seeing it captured by British troops and burned . In time Richmond soon recovered and by the Industrial Revolution was a full of factories and ironworks down by the river.  People would escape the fires of its furnaces and foundries of downtown, traveling for the weekend by train to a small, but popular resort for the wealthy a few miles upstream in the country for the ‘good air’ at Bon Air.

In 1811, the city was threatened by a fire in its theater district. But it was as the Civil War came to a crashing end that fire came to leave its mark on the city. Realizing that he must retreat from his capital in April 1865, Robert E. Lee left confederate soldiers to set fire to the city. The fire spread out of control. It was the image of Richmond burning which greeted Union troops when they approached from the north and Richmond in ruins that awaited, first, Lee returning from Appomattox, and then, Abraham Lincoln.

Both water and fire have in their time shaped Richmond – sometimes for growth, often for disaster. As we look at Greater Richmond today, we are faced with a city which bears the promises and the scars of water and fire. The waters of prosperity have not run equally downstream. The city is still a patchwork of marked disparity between its east end and its west. The fires which burned as the Civil War ended have, in another sense, continued to burn with the practical segregation of white and African American communities in the city. And not even a “city of churches” has been able or daring enough to address and heal old wounds between them.

In all of this, from the wealthy western and southwestern suburbs to the struggling and crime-ridden neighborhoods of the un-gentrified east end, we see great opportunities for the Gospel of Jesus. Surely, only the water of God’s grace can heal such deep divisions in our hopeful, but blighted city. Only the fire of the Holy Spirit can convict men and women of their need to serve, not simply themselves and their narrow self-interests, but Christ as Lord and their neighbors in His name.

Jesus once said “Is anyone thirsty? Is anyone thirsty? Let him come to me and drink.” It is our conviction that our mission must be to join with other Gospel churches in giving Greater Richmond the hope of Christ’s salvation, not simply in words, but in what we do: in justice, in evangelism, and in reconciliation. It is how we live and pray and hope in His mercy that will renew our city and make it whole again.