Our Mission

We exist to LOVE BOLDLY, casting the LIGHT of JESUS into the world.

Jesus called us to love our enemies, wash each other's feet, and carry a cross. He told us to love our neighbors as ourselves. When someone asked who counts as a neighbor, he told a story about a man who crossed every social boundary to help a stranger bleeding in a ditch.

A bold love will always cost us something.

We believe that Fairhope UMC exists not primarily for the people already inside our walls, but for the city around us and the world beyond it. About 70% of our facility hours are scheduled for missions, community outreach, and ministries that don't primarily benefit our own church activities. We exist to cast the light of Jesus into every corner of darkness we can reach.

Our Vision for 2026

Every year, our Board of Stewards listens, prays, and seeks God's call for this season. For 2026, we felt a calling to grow as an intergenerational church for others. Our vision, which we call Grow the Promise, is organized around six commitments:

  • Install new wayfinding signs and commission a master plan to ensure our campus is accessible and hospitable to all.
  • Restructure our children's Sunday school so that parents can be full participants in adult discipleship alongside their children.
  • Project Zechariah will unite our oldest, newest, youngest, and most-tenured members in teams that serve together twice a year — ensuring every new member immediately has a place where they belong.
  • Launch a capital campaign to retire the remaining debt on our Christian Life Center — freeing over $200,000 a year to reinvest in mission and ministry.
  • Form our first Committee on Church and Society, focused on affordable housing and relieving homelessness in Baldwin County.
  • Pray for a different local church by name in our worship every month, and build genuine partnerships with our neighboring congregations.

Five Practices

Every member of Fairhope UMC commits to a way of life shaped by five spiritual practices. "Practice" is a good word — none of these is a substitute for the relationship God wants with us. They are the ways we open room in our lives for what only God can do.

Prayers. Prayer is our daily bread. We don't pray to inform God or to prove our devotion. We pray because prayer is the place where God already knows us — where we cannot be misunderstood, and we have nothing to prove. Everything else we do together begins in prayer, and brings us back to it.

Presence. You cannot be a Christian in isolation. The church is the body of Christ, and a body whose parts are cut off from one another isn't much of a body. At the end of his last conversation with his disciples, Jesus prayed for one thing above all: that his church would be one. When we are present with each other, God is present to the world.

Gifts. Generosity is how we practice being made in the image of a generous God. Money is powerful enough to possess us — to quietly become the thing we trust most. The habit of giving is the practice that breaks that power. We give not because God needs our money, but because every act of generosity declares that we trust God more than what we can hold onto.

Service. Our word humility comes from the Latin root for dirt — the same root that gives us humus, the rich soil that nourishes young plants. To serve is to get low to the ground, to put our hands in the dirt of someone else's need. Jesus promised that when we serve others, we are serving him.

Witness. Witness is living so differently that people can't help but ask why — and then telling them. It's not an argument. It's a life. When we worship together, give away what we could have kept, and show up for each other across every generation, we are casting light into a world that is very good at producing darkness.

Fairhope UMC has been part of this community for over a century — rebuilt after hurricanes, grown through generations, and always oriented toward the city around it.

1909
A group of Fairhopers interested in having a Methodist congregation in town began meeting in the home of Captain Jack Lowell, located near where Greeno Road and Gayfer Avenue intersect today.
1910
The church was chartered in December with twelve charter members. For three years, the congregation met in the "Bell Building" at the Organic School.
1913
The church built its first sanctuary across the street from our current location, where Redeemer Lutheran Church now stands.
1916 & 1923
Hurricanes destroyed the church's buildings on two separate occasions. Each time, the congregation rebuilt.
1946
The church moved to its present location on South Section Street, occupying the old Sadler home that stood on the property.
1949–50
The present sanctuary was built. It remains the heart of our worship life today.
1960–84
The education building was constructed in phases — the south end in 1960, the north end and fellowship hall completed in 1984.
2002
Our education annex was completed in May, adding further space for ministry and discipleship.
2007
Construction was completed on the Christian Life Center — a facility used not only by our congregation but open to the broader community for recreation, events, and outreach.
Today
Our membership is over two thousand and growing. We remain a church on the move — committed to building facilities, deepening fellowship, and strengthening ministry for a growing congregation and a city we love.

Fairhope UMC belongs to the United Methodist Church — a global communion of Christians rooted in the 18th-century revival movement begun by John and Charles Wesley at Oxford University. The Wesleys believed that God's grace is available to every person, that genuine faith transforms character, and that personal holiness and social holiness are inseparable. You cannot love God, Wesley argued, without also loving your neighbor — and that conviction is woven into everything Fairhope UMC does.

As United Methodists, we hold together convictions that are sometimes pulled apart elsewhere. We hold Scripture as the primary authority for Christian faith and practice, while also honoring the role of tradition, reason, and experience in understanding it — what Methodists call the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. We baptize both infants and adults, celebrating that God's grace precedes our response. We practice open communion, welcoming all who seek Christ to the Lord's Table. And we belong to a connectional church — meaning our congregation is not an island, but part of the Alabama-West Florida Annual Conference and the broader global UMC, sharing resources, missionaries, and ministry far beyond what any single congregation could sustain alone.

If you'd like to learn more about what United Methodists believe, the UMC offers accessible resources on our core beliefs, our social principles, and the Wesleyan heritage that continues to shape our common life.