Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

St. Phillip's Memorial Episcopal Church [Defunct]

Denomination: Episcopal

Organ: Pipe Organ (Unknown Make)

Last Service:  ---

Presider: Rev. Fr. Ludwig Gooding

Historic Picture when the building was Memorial Chapel

The phone rang. It was the Rev. Ludwig Gooding. "Zachery, you will come and be our organist." ... it wasn't an ask, it wasn't a demand, it was a statement of fact. Fr. Gooding was a tall, large man. A very imposing presence. He was known to stand outside the church doors on Sunday morning in his black cassock. Before the service began young people would walk by the church carrying basketballs headed to the local courts. He would stop them and tell them that they were going to be alter servers. No matter that these youth had never served on an alter before. No matter that these youth had never been in an Episcopal church before. Fr. Gooding stated fact and everyone followed. Its the way that he built his church. Eventually, he had dozens of young people showing up to serve (he also served breakfast before the service in the parish hall - but even though they said they came for breakfast, these young people would get into near physical fights to determine who would be serving on the alter with Fr. Gooding. And then the families of the youth started to come to church.

Ludwig Gooding was from the Carribean Islands and had gone to school in Oxford England. The congregation of St. Phillip's Episcopal Church was also heavily from the islands. St. Phillips performed a very high Anglican service - much higher than any other church I had ever worked for or since. They had taken out the Allen Gyrophonic and had installed a small tracker organ of unknown make from their old building. The organ room that had once housed towers of radio tubes now housed pipes and the mechanism that controlled them. A rule that Fr. Gooding had: anytime anyone was in the building the doors of the church were to be opened - not just unlocked but open. We'd have choir rehearsals with the church doors open and people would come into the church as if we were having a concert.

Just like everyone else, I couldn't say 'no' to Fr. Gooding. I was back in the building at 27th and Wharton that I had spent so many years, but with a different instrument and a different congregation. It was an interesting place to work and learn.

In the end, I moved to connecticut. Fr. Gooding began to lose his facilities and retired from the priesthood. All the youth that had fought to serve on the alter no longer felt any loyalty because Fr Gooding wasn't there any longer. His mistake was that he had never built the loyalty to be directed to the church but the loyalty was toward him. The diocese could find no one to engender the loyal with the neighborhood like Fr. Gooding and so St. Phillip's is no longer.