There is a building on Temple Street in Lithia Springs that has stood in one form or another since 1885. Its white steeple rises above the tree line, visible from across the railroad tracks — a landmark in a community that has grown and changed around it for a hundred and forty years. It is a place where people have gathered to worship, to grieve, to celebrate, and to serve, trusting that the God who called them together would provide for whatever came next.
Roots on Old Alabama Road
The story reaches back further than the church's own name. In 1845, a pioneering settler named Israel Causey established a non-denominational church near the intersection of Maxham Road and Old Alabama Road, a spiritual center for the families scattered across the young community. After Causey's death in 1880, that congregation splintered — but a group of the faithful, some of them his own descendants, held on.
In 1885, they founded the Salt Springs Methodist Episcopal Church, South — later Lithia Springs Methodist Church. Their first sanctuary was a single humble room that did double duty as a schoolhouse for the local children, plain and resourceful, exactly like the people who built it.
The cyclone, and the rebuilding
In 1887, a powerful cyclone tore through Lithia Springs and destroyed that first sanctuary, taking many of the church's earliest records with it. The congregation could have scattered. Instead, they came back to the same plot of ground and built again — a sturdier second sanctuary, warmed by a potbellied stove and lit by kerosene lamps until electricity finally reached the pews.
That second sanctuary served the church for nearly a century. By 1979, a growing congregation had outgrown it, and the current sanctuary — the third in the church's history — rose in its place.
It is a fitting symbol for this congregation: nothing wasted, nothing forgotten, every season of the church's life carried forward into the next. The people who worship beneath that cross today sit in the shadow of the ones who raised it.
Still gathering
A century and a half on, Lithia Springs Methodist Church remains what it has always been — a cornerstone of this community, and a church home. In recent years, as the congregation became part of the Global Methodist Church, it did not merely hold together; by God's grace, it found new life. New families arrived and were welcomed one by one. New voices joined the choir, new children filled the nursery, and new hands showed up on Saturday mornings to do the quiet work that keeps a church running.
The road has never been easy, and the church has never pretended otherwise. But the same faith that raised a sanctuary out of a cyclone's wreckage still gathers this congregation every Sunday at eleven. Whoever you are, wherever you are on the journey — there's a seat for you here, in a story that's still being written.