Welcome
This site has been established by the Glen Iris Road Uniting Church, supported in part by a Local History grant from the Department for Victorian Communities, State Government Victoria. We hope it is of interest to local residents, researchers and family historians.
The 1865 Wesleyan Chapel was the first place of Christian worship, the first public school and the first community meeting place in Glen Iris.
Within this site we provide the history of this building, its location and the story of the pioneers who worshipped here and helped to develop early Glen Iris. Our aim is to add to the social history aspect of the site.
If you would like more information or if you have photographs, sketches or accounts of the district from the nineteenth and early twentieth century, please contact us. We would be most interested to hear from you. Please visit us at 200 Glen Iris Road, Glen Iris or contact us via the Contact Us page.
Thursday, 9th August 2007
Goodbye, Little Church - A Poem
Goodbye, little church!
You have kept your happy vigil on this hill
Till now - a hundred years or more;
The prayers of bygone saints are with you still,
Close locked within those grey and silent walls,
And love drifts gently through your open door.
Goodbye, dear church!
The echo of young voices raised in song
Quivers in the window’s mullioned frame
And fills the air with praise the whole day long;
Here, lovers knelt, with holy marriage vows;
Here, troubled hearts have called upon His Name.
Goodbye, my church!
Where pioneers with sturdy faith have trod,
Four generations passed your peaceful way,
And raised their hands, to touch the hand of God.
Loved faces all, grown old, or gone from sight
Stand here beside me on this final day.
Goodbye, sweet church!
Though you are merely mellowed brick and stone,
Some portion of ourselves with stay with you,
Our joys and sorrows bound up in your own -
The lovely things in which we had a part –
The precious, human dreams and plans we knew.
Goodbye, little church!
While now you keep a lonely vigil on this hill,
The sound of distant drums falls on our ears;
Perforce to leave you, yet you’re with us still,
Our eyes fixed on the shining cross ahead –
A rainbowed sky which heralds future years –
One era’s closing - another to begin;
Our memories are here, but God’s church lies within.
Beloved spot - hallowed in God’s Name - Goodbye -
Goodbye, little church.
On the closing of the Glen Iris Methodist Church (1862 - 1978)
Joyce Kissick
From The Hands of God
Published 1983