Say a Prayer in Memphis Trivia Quiz

Answer: St Mary's Episcopal Cathedral

What is now St Mary's Episcopal Cathedral was founded in 1858 as a mission chapel and then consecrated as a parish church. In 1871 it was also consecrated as a cathedral or 'bishop's church' in what was then the Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee, becoming the first Episcopal cathedral in the south of the USA. Since 1982 it has been the cathedral church of the Episcopal Diocese of West Tennessee. The first church building was a small wooden one, but a large white stone replacement in the shape of a Latin cross was built in the Gothic Revival style between 1898 and 1926. This cathedral, which was only consecrated in 1951, has a large main area with many stained-glass windows. In 2023 work was started to restore parts of the by then century-old building, including the bell tower and the air conditioning system.

Led by Sister Constance, four nuns from the order of the Sisters of St Mary's came to Memphis to nurse those ill with yellow fever during an epidemic in 1878 and sadly all of them died from the disease, as did two priests. The Sisters Chapel was constructed to honour them in 1887 and 'Constance and Her Companions' were accorded a feast day in the Episcopal Church's Lesser Feasts and Fasts in 1981 to commemorate their deeds. In 1968 the Baptist minister and campaigner for racial equality Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated about two miles from the church and he was added to the Episcopal Church's Calendar of Saints.

There are several saints named Mary and it is not clear which of these, if any particular one, the Cathedral is dedicated to. The mother of Jesus was named Mary and some, but not all, churches recognise her as a saint.

Answer: Lindenwood Christian Church

In about 1837 a congregation began meeting at the home of its minister and so started what is now Lindenwood Christian Church, the sixth church to be founded in Memphis. In 1843 the Church was more formally established and services were conducted in a school building in Linden Street. A purpose-built brick church was constructed on the same site in 1859 and towers were added in the late nineteenth century. It was first called Linden Street Christian Church but later Linden Street was renamed Linden Avenue and its name was correspondingly changed to Linden Avenue Christian Church. The church building was used to quarter union soldiers during the American Civil War and as a hospital both during the Civil War and during outbreaks of yellow fever during the1870s.

The Church's congregation grew over the decades so another, larger site containing wooded ground was purchased in 1948 and a new church and other buildings were erected. When these opened in 1953 the Church was renamed Lindenwood Christian Church. In 1962 a new recreational building was completed, while a new sanctuary with a modern design was opened in 1966 and a multi-faith childcare centre for pre-schoolers was added later.

Linden trees originated in the world's northern hemisphere and can also be known as basswood trees in North America and lime trees in Europe. Large English gardens in previous centuries apparently used to contain avenues of these trees while the American linden was used for constructing such items as furniture. It is not known, but seems at least possible, that the Linden Street mentioned above contained a number of these trees.

Answer: Historic Mason Temple

At the turn of the twentieth century the Reverend, later Bishop, Charles Harrison Mason and the Reverend Charles Jones founded the Pentecostal group Church of God in Christ (COGIC) in Arkansas. By 1906 the group had grown to include a hundred churches, which were located across several southern states, but, after differences over teaching, the two men separated in 1907 and Mason won the legal entitlement to the COGIC name. He then moved to Memphis and there founded the Historic Mason Temple, whose building was designated as the world headquarters of COGIC. The group continued to expand and by the early twenty-first century had churches in many countries in several continents and well over six million members in total.

The original Historic Mason Temple building burned down in 1936, but a new place of worship was begun in 1940 and dedicated in 1945. It can seat five thousand people in the main auditorium as well as some two thousand more each in the balcony and in the assembly room and is believed to be the largest Pentecostal church building in the USA. The site it is on contains a number of other buildings, including a music department, a nursery, medical facilities and a post office. The Temple church was the place where Martin Luther King gave his last speech, entitled 'I've Been to the Mountaintop', on 3rd April, 1968, and he was killed the next day.

Charles Harrison Mason was born in 1864 near Memphis and became a licensed minister when he was 27 years old. When he died in 1961 he was buried in a marble crypt under the entrance area of the Temple church and his personal prayer room there is still in existence.

Answer: St Peter Catholic Church

St Peter Catholic Church was founded in 1840 and first held services in a private house until a small brick church was constructed between 1842 and 1843. St Peter Catholic Church was the first Roman Catholic parish in West Tennessee and became part of the Dominican Order a few years later in 1846. Between 1852 and 1855 a larger church was built around the first one, parts of which were then dismantled and taken away, and this new building was dedicated in 1858. The church has some Gothic features as well as high stained-glass windows telling of events in the lives of Christ and of some saints. Restoration work was carried out on the church building between 1985 and 1991 and it has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Church's buildings have been added to several times over the years with, among other additions, a rectory being built in 1873 and a large building with classrooms, choir rooms and other facilities being added in 2001. Also in 2001 the chapel which houses the Martin de Porres National Shrine and Institute, which was begun in 1936 in Columbia, South Carolina, then moved temporarily to New Orleans in 1996, was installed in the Church grounds. Martin de Porres (1579-1639) was a Peruvian Dominican monk who helped many people and was known as the 'Apostle of Charity'. Among other exceptional people connected with St Peter Catholic Church were eleven nuns and eight priests who died in the 1870s from the yellow fever they caught from the patients they cared for during three outbreaks of the disease.

A number of people named Peter have been canonised over the centuries but the best known is the Saint Peter who was one of the first disciples of Jesus. He subsequently became the first Bishop of Rome and these Bishops later became known as Popes.

Answer: Idlewild Presbyterian Church

Idlewild Presbyterian Church was founded in 1891 in the Memphis suburb of Idlewild, but the number of its worshippers increased so a move into a larger church building in central Memphis became necessary. Its congregation continued to grow and consequently a new and even larger church was constructed between 1926 and 1928 in Union Avenue, by which time Idlewild Presbyterian Church had become one of Memphis' most prominent churches. The new church building was designed in the Gothic Revival style by George Awsumb. More recently his sons designed a building dedicated to education and recreation which was built in the 1960s, while a chapel, the Trippeer Chapel, was built and consecrated in 1961.

Other construction work took place later as a bell tower to house a carillon of 48 bells began to be built in 1982 and was completed in 1999, the only such one in the Mid-South. In 2009 the church building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places and the Idlewild Presbyterian Church is a member of the Presbyterian Church (USA), which is the largest Presbyterian denomination in the USA. It was one of the first places of worship in Memphis to conduct racially integrated services and began ordaining women deacons in 1968 and women ministers in 1974.

Idlewild was the first, well-known, name of an airport constructed to serve New York and the developers named it after the golf course area on which it was built. Later it was formally named the New York International Airport, although it was still referred to as Idlewild, and in 1963 it was re-named in honour of the late President John F Kennedy.

Answer: First Baptist Beale Street Church

The First Baptist Beale Street Church was founded by and for black people during the 1840s and to start with services were held in an ordinary dwelling. Later the congregation worshipped in a church previously used by a different religious denomination but this building was destroyed during the American Civil War and the congregation then moved between different temporary quarters. The foundation stone for a permanent church building was laid in 1869 in Beale Street and this large brick edifice, which shows a gothic influence, was mainly constucted between 1871 and 1885. The First Baptist Beale Street Church was the first one of its type in Memphis and is often referred to as the Mother Church of the black Baptist Churches in the area. The Church can also be referred to by other names, including Beale Street Baptist Church and First Baptist Beale Street.

The church building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1971 and in 2018 the City of Memphis included it on the Memphis Heritage Trail. However, by the early twenty-first century the building was not in a very good condition and in 2022 Shelby County gave a grant of $150,000 towards the restoration of the church. Among other episodes in the Church's history, General and former President Ulysses S. Grant was once a guest speaker and it was also visited by President Theodore Roosevelt. The office of 'The Memphis Free Speech' newspaper, edited by the civil rights journalist Ida B Wells, was housed inside the church building for a time from the 1880s.

Beale Street runs for about two miles along downtown Memphis. A stretch of it several hundred yards long contains numerous bars and restaurants specialising in blues music and is an area much visited by tourists. A section of the street between its junctions with Main and Fourth Streets was declared a National Historic Landmark in May 1966 and in December 1977 Beale Street was officially declared the "Home of the Blues" by an act of Congress.

Answer: Calvary Episcopal Church

Calvary Episcopal Church was founded in Memphis in August 1832 by the Reverend Thomas Wright and began with ten parishoners. A few years later in 1838 a church building started to be constructed and by the time the first bishop of Tennesse consecrated its nave in 1844 there were some one hundred worshippers. The church is the oldest public building in Memphis in continuous use and it was the first Episcopal church to be built in Shelby County. Over the years there have been several additions to the original Gothic-style building, including a tower in 1848 and a chancel in 1881, while in the mid-nineteenth century a Bride's Walk was also added.

The Church congregation continued to grow and more buildings were constructed to accommodate their needs during the twentieth century. Among other additions, a parish hall was built in 1903 for the by then over five hundred church members while in 1992 an education building was erected and included space for a childcare facility for the children of working parents. The church building itself has been renovated and redecorated over the years and in 1982 it was added to the National Register of Historic Places as 'Calvary Episcopal Church and Parish House'. By the early twenty-first century the congregation had risen to over a thousand people and this 'mother parish of Shelby County' had five 'daughter' places of worship.

Calvary, also sometimes known as Golgotha or place of the skulls, was a rocky and hilly area close to the city of Jerusalem and the place where crucifixions were carried out in the time of Jesus. Jerusalem was later destroyed and rebuilt and it is not completely certain where Calvary was in relation to the current and larger Jerusalem but all the Gospels agree that it was where Jesus was crucified.

Answer: Beth Sholom Synagogue

The Beth Sholom Synagogue was the first Conservative synagogue to be established in Memphis and it received a Charter of Incorporation from the State of Tennessee in January 1955. To start with it had no permanent location and the first services were conducted in a building that now houses the Memphis Jewish Home & Rehab then the Synagogue used different venues for services for some months. However, a permanent two-storey place of worship, which began to be used in May 1956, was then built on a large tract of land in South Mendenhall Street while a ten-room Religious School building was added to the site in 1961. The congregation grew rapidly and, as a result, a new and larger synagogue was built on the same piece of land and dedicated in March 1967; other facilities, such as a chapel and a social hall, were gradually added to the site.

The Synagogue also acquired a five-acre tract of land within the Eastlawn Cemetery Grounds and there established Beth Sholom Memorial Gardens, which were consecrated in March 1966. A larger building for the still-growing congregation was needed again a few decades later and in 2000 Beth Sholom Synagogue moved into a new place of worship on a Jewish campus containing educational facilities on Humphreys Boulevard. In 1995 the Synagogue adopted Temple Israel in Blytheville, Arkansas and in 2000 the latter gave its stained-glass windows to Beth Sholom Synagogue for the octagonal chapel. After Temple Israel closed in 2003, it gave its remaining Judaica, including a Holocaust Torah, to Beth Sholom Synagogue, which also has the only Conservative mikvah (area containing a bath used for ritual immersion) within 200 miles.

'Beth Sholom' is a variation of 'Beth Shalom' with 'Beth' meaning 'house (of)' and 'sholom/shalom', which can also be used as a greeting and farewell, meaning 'peace' in this context. The name is used by other synagogues too, such as Beth Sholom in Philadelphia and Beth Shalom near Laxton in England. Other establishments containing the word 'Beth' include a 799-bed teaching hospital in Manhattan named Mount Sinai Beth Israel.

Answer: Hope Church

Hope Church is a member of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, founded in 1988 by Pastor Craig Strickland with the intention of actively reaching out to people who believed but did not already attend other churches. When services began, they were first held in a private living room in Germantown, a suburb of Memphis, and then in various rented premises as the congregation quickly grew in number. In 1992 Hope Church was able to buy a site at Walnut Grove in the Memphis suburb of Cordova and on this land they built their own church to worship in, which was opened and dedicated in January 1996.

The Church membership continued to grow over the next decade and accordingly a larger church that can seat five thousand people was built, while the earlier one became Hope's Student Ministry. A fair number of other buildings have gradually been erected on the site to provide children's and nursery areas, kitchen and leisure areas, a wedding chapel and a recording studio, among other facilities.

The Church has tried to cater for the population of the neighbourhood it is in and when they moved to Cordoba it was a mainly white suburb. Over the next ten to fifteen years, though, this demographic changed and the area became a multi-ethnic one, so Hope Church accordingly changed the style of their services and in 2010 appointed a new senior pastor. In this way it managed to appeal successfully to the changing population so that by the early 2020s the composition of the congregation had changed from mainly white to multi-ethnic. Hope Church has established outreaches in other parts of the USA, for instance in the Bronx in New York, as well as in different countries, such as Belize.

Answer: Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church

Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church (BLVD), founded in 1921 by eleven people led by Doctor Joseph Walker, follows the teachings of the Disciples of Christ (DOC). Its first church was built on Mississippi Boulevard in South Memphis, hence its name, and during the next hundred or so years the congregation grew steadily so that the Church needed to have larger premises a few times. For instance, in 1938 the original building was upgraded and also augmented by a choir room, baptistry and pastor's study, while in 1958 some new air conditioning was installed.

Unfortunately, in October 1979 a fire destroyed a few parts of the church and, while they were rebuilt and enlarged, more space was soon needed and in 1984 BVLD moved to larger premises in the Whitehaven area. The church there seated many more worshippers but again the Church soon needed even larger premises so moved back into inner Memphis in 1992 to a campus with fifteen buildings. By the early twenty first century the congregation had risen to some two thousand people and a second arm of the mother Church, known as 'The BLVD East', was created in 2009. The BLVD has also helped to establish new churches in other locations in Memphis, including the Community of Faith Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in 1995 and the New Direction Christian Church in 2001.

The Mississippi River is over two thousand miles long and is one of the longest rivers in North America. It begins in Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota then travels mainly southwards into the Gulf of Mexico through a vast delta southeast of New Orleans. The Mississippi is joined by tributaries and also by other major rivers, such as the Missouri River and the Ohio River, which both flow into the Mississippi about halfway along its journey.