A 190-Year-Old Mission to a City That Keeps Changing
Third Church gathers at 600 Forest Avenue on the edge of Henrico County, just across the river from downtown Richmond, Virginia. The building sits in a residential neighborhood a short distance from Tuckahoe Elementary and a string of Lakewood-area streets, and the people who walk through its doors on Sunday mornings come from eight geographic Parish Areas that fan out across the metro area. The congregation numbers about 1,400 members and traces its origins to 1834, when it began as a mission to dockworkers along the Richmond wharves. A year later, sixteen charter members formally founded Third Presbyterian Church of Richmond. Worship in those first years was held along the docks and in a tobacco factory, and the story of the place has been, ever since, one of crossing boundaries: between classes and neighborhoods, between the building and the city, and between the local congregation and a worldwide network of mission partners.
That posture of being sent still drives Third Church today. The congregation belongs to ECO: A Covenant Order of Presbyterians, an affiliation it joined in 2013 after leaving the PC(USA) and at the same time dropping "Presbyterian" from its public name. It commits 25 percent of its annual income to local and global missions, organizes itself around a Parish Life model that sends disciples out into their actual neighborhoods, and is presently working through a 2026-2030 strategic plan built around three pillars: Parish Life, Parish Places, and a Multiplying Culture of new leaders and new churches.
From the Wharves to Forest Avenue
Third's first permanent home was a plain brick building in the heart of Church Hill, where the congregation met beginning in 1850. In 1873, members built a new sanctuary a block away at 2515 E. Broad Street, and that Church Hill location served the congregation for the next eight decades. In 1956, the church sold its Church Hill property and moved west to its present site on Forest Avenue. A new sanctuary was completed in 1968, and through the late twentieth century Third continued to expand its facilities while widening its footprint beyond the building. The congregation launched and nurtured a string of new churches - Montrose Presbyterian (1910), Christ Church (1980), Hope Church, Swift Creek Presbyterian, Eternity Church (2003), East End Fellowship (2005), and Community West Church (2009) - and supported the development of ministries that continue in Richmond today, including Strategies to Elevate People (STEP), Needle's Eye, CrossOver Health Clinics, Churchill Activities and Tutoring, Church Hill Academy, Urban Hope, Blue Sky, and the Richmond Christian Leadership Institute.
In 2015, Corey Widmer became Lead Pastor, and the congregation merged its previously separate traditional and contemporary services into a single, blended worshiping community. The same season brought the launch of the Parish Life initiative, which reorganized the church around geographic Parish Areas and began placing Parish Elders in each area. More recently, the congregation pledged and raised a major capital gift known as the Renew Campaign to renovate its nearly seventy-year-old Forest Avenue building; in 2022, Third moved into a temporary home at Regency Mall for the duration of construction, and the renovated building is the church's present gathering place.
What Sunday Morning Looks Like
Three identical-style services meet in the Sanctuary at 8:15, 9:30, and 11:00 a.m. The 9:30 and 11:00 services are also streamed into the Fellowship Hall, which offers a more flexible seating environment for anyone who would like a less formal space, with couches and open chairs alongside the screens. Worship at Third is intentionally blended. Each service draws on the liturgical resources of the Reformed tradition - a worship order that moves through gathering, confession, assurance, proclamation, response, and sending - and weaves those patterns together with contemporary congregational music. Musically, a typical Sunday mixes hymns and modern praise songs, with instruments that range across organ, guitar, mandolin, cello, accordion, piano, and a rhythm section.
The musical backbone of that worship is the Churchestra, a worship orchestra of strings, brass, and winds that performs three or four times a year; the Sanctuary Choir, which gathers around special services and seasons; and a weekly Worship Team that rehearses Wednesday evenings at 7:00 p.m. and leads from the platform each Sunday. The Worship Team's flexibility and range, from contemporary to more traditional songs, is what allows the same worship language to span three morning services. The committee regularly organizes special choir Sundays, including a Fall Choir Sunday led by a guest director and supported by part-singing workshops for newer choral singers.
Communion is celebrated on the first Sunday of each month, and all who acknowledge their need for the grace of Christ are welcome to participate. Baptisms are scheduled on the second Sunday of the month at both the 9:30 and 11:00 services; the church practices both infant baptism, for which parents must be active Covenant Partners, and adult or older-child baptism by profession of faith. Parents preparing for an infant baptism take part in a class held during the 9:30 Sunday school hour.
Visiting for the First Time
First-time visitors are pointed to Lot B, the parking lot behind the building off Silverspring Drive, which is closest to the main entrance and the playground. Several other lots ring the property: Lot A off Forest Avenue across from Tuckahoe Elementary, Lot C in the middle of the campus off Forest Avenue across from Lakewood Drive, and the church office lot at 500 Forest Avenue, which also serves as the mailing address for the church. During worship hours, the Tuckahoe Elementary lots are also open. The church asks visitors not to park at the Tuckahoe Shopping Center.
Once parked, the main doors lead into the Gathering Space, with coffee available nearby throughout the morning. The Sanctuary is to the right; everything else - the children's floors, the library, classrooms, the Fellowship Hall - is to the left. Visitors are welcome to wear whatever is most comfortable. Some attenders wear jackets and ties or dresses, and others wear jeans and casual clothes, and the church means it when they say either is fine.
Children are welcomed into every part of worship. During the 8:15 and 11:00 services, childcare is provided for infants through kindergarten, with the youngest children in rooms off a secure hallway on the first floor and Pre-K through Kindergarten in rooms off a secure hallway on the second floor. The rest of the morning, the church asks families to bring children into the Sanctuary. Coloring pages, small instruments, and crayons are available to help younger ones stay engaged, and the church frames intergenerational presence in the pews as part of how children learn what worship is. There are changing tables in both men's and women's restrooms on each floor.
The 9:30 Hour: Sunday School for Every Age
The middle Sunday service has become the hinge of the congregation's formation. During the school year, the entire 9:30 hour is given over to Sunday School. Children from age two through high school meet in age-specific classrooms; adults gather in topical classes; and a dedicated Prayer Room in the second-floor Library is staffed by volunteers who will pray with anyone who drops in for intercession for the church, the city, the world, or their own concerns.
Children's Sunday School runs in carefully defined age groups. Infants and toddlers through age two meet on the first floor; the Little Lambs (twos), Little Lions (threes), Little Eagles (fours and Pre-K), and Kindergarten through fourth grade meet in second-floor rooms, with fourth grade in the main hallway and Club 56, the fifth- and sixth-grade ministry, in the basement. Student Ministry for seventh through twelfth graders meets in the Student Ministry Room on the second floor. New and visiting families register children on paper at the door; existing families check in at iPad stations.
Adult offerings change with the seasons but typically include a multi-week topical study, a book-based class, and a Bible book study. Recent examples have included a class exploring evolution and the gospel, a book study using Chuck DeGroat's "Healing What's Within," and a verse-by-verse walk through Acts. The 9:30 hour is also when baptism classes for first-time and returning parents meet.
Parish Life: A Church Organized by Neighborhood
Parish Life is the model that defines how Third Church organizes its people. The congregation has divided metro Richmond into eight geographic Parish Areas - Chesterfield, City North, City South, Gayton, Grove, Patterson, Short Pump, and Tuckahoe - and each area has its own Parish Elders and Deacons whose job is to know, care for, and connect the people who live there. Parish Groups are the small communities that actually live this out: intergenerational, neighborhood-based, and open to newcomers. They meet weekly in homes, coffee shops, restaurants, and online; some are dinner groups, some are Bible studies, some are men's or women's groups, and some are intergenerational communities of mixed ages and stages. Parish Groups are how the church "grows small" inside a 1,400-member body, and the map on the Parish Life page matches home addresses to the right Parish Area so anyone can find the group closest to them.
Parish Places are a parallel layer of the same vision. Where Parish Groups are communities of believers who already belong, Parish Places are informal, lay-led gathering spaces in the wider community - a porch, a coffee shop, a porch, a park pavilion, a back yard - where members of the church meet neighbors who do not. The strategic plan calls for at least one active Parish Place in each of the eight Parish Areas by January 2030, with the explicit aim of crossing spiritual, cultural, and social boundaries for the sake of gospel renewal.
Discipleship: Up, In, and Out
The Parish Life framework is rooted in a simple three-part discipleship framework that runs through every ministry at Third: Up, In, and Out. Up is life with God through Sunday worship, a daily practice of listening and prayer, Scripture reading, meditation, and rhythms like the daily examen and solitude. In is life with the brothers and sisters of the church through Parish Groups, Bible studies, deep friendships marked by confession and accountability, family-to-family encouragement, regular giving, and serving. Out is life for the world through knowing actual neighbors, being attuned to the needs of one's Parish Area, sharing the good news of Jesus, working for unity among the churches of Richmond, investing in racial healing, and engaging with a global mission partner.
This Up-In-Out framework shapes the rhythms the church commends rather than the programs it requires. The church describes these as an invitation into a way of life as a community rather than a checklist of tasks, and the corpus of resources on the Discipleship page walks through each practice in detail.
Children and Students at Third
Children's Ministry at Third is led by Blair Bigelow as Director of Children's Ministries, with Susan Barr as Associate Director of the Nursery and Robin Bedinger as Associate Director of Club 56, the ministry for fifth and sixth graders. The nursery and Sunday School programs run August through May each year, with classes for infants, toddlers, twos, threes, Pre-K, Kindergarten, and grades one through four, plus the fifth- and sixth-grade Club 56 in the basement and Student Ministry for grades seven through twelve on the second floor. Every volunteer and paid childcare worker is background checked, and security procedures are in place around the building during all Sunday morning programming.
Children's Choir is offered for second through fourth graders each fall, with six Wednesday-evening rehearsals culminating in a Sunday performance during the 9:30 and 11:00 services.
Student Ministry, led by Andrea Woie as Director and Marcellus Wright as Associate Director, gathers seventh through twelfth graders on Sunday mornings during the 9:30 hour, splitting into three breakout groups - middle school girls, middle school guys, and high school students - led by adult volunteers. Sunday evenings from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m. bring the same students back together in the Fellowship Hall for a game, announcements, a time of worship, a message from a speaker, and grade- and gender-specific small groups for the second half of the evening.
Men's and Women's Ministry
The Men's Ministry, overseen by Rick Hutton, focuses on helping men grow together as disciples at work, at home, and in their neighborhoods. A network of small groups meets weekly across the city: Tuesday-morning and Friday-morning groups in City North, a Thursday-morning men's Bible study on Zoom for City South, two Thursday-morning Patterson groups, a Friday-morning Short Pump Bible study, a Monday-morning young men's group in Tuckahoe, and a multi-church Friday-morning group off Ridgeway Road. The men's ministry also runs a fly-fishing fellowship called F3 and an annual golf outing, Third Golfers in Fellowship, held each June to raise money for a mission partner.
The Women's Ministry, led by Meg Walker alongside her communications role, organizes around three commitments: connecting to God through worship, daily devotions, and Bible study; connecting to one another through intergenerational Bible studies, interest groups, an annual conference, a summer book study, and a Christmas dinner; and connecting to the community through parish-based service projects and visits among members. A directory of women's groups, meeting on different days and studying different texts, is kept up to date on the women's ministry page.
Worship Arts
The Worship Arts ministry at Third includes the Sanctuary Choir, the Churchestra orchestra, and the weekly Worship Team, all of which combine to support the church's blended approach to congregational singing. The choir is described as a dynamic, multi-talented community that gathers around specific seasons and events; the Churchestra performs three or four times a year after a short rehearsal cycle; and the Worship Team rehearses Wednesday evenings at 7:00 p.m. to lead on Sunday mornings. Children's Choir for second through fourth graders rehearses Wednesday evenings each fall and sings in Sunday worship in November. The worship values the church has published describe what these musicians aim for: gospel-centered worship that keeps Christ and his saving grace at the center, ancient and future worship that draws on the early church and the Reformed heritage alongside contemporary songs, global worship that honors the diversity of God's people, integral worship that unites the body across generations, and missional worship that keeps non-Christians in view and calls for conversion winsomely.
Immigrant and Refugee Tutoring
One of the most distinctive local ministries at Third is the Immigrant and Refugee Tutoring Program, coordinated by Maribelle Via. The program welcomes immigrants and refugees in metro Richmond for tutoring, and it is staffed by church members and friends who give their time week after week. Volunteers work one-on-one with students who are working on English, school subjects, and the longer arc of life in a new country. The program is part of the church's commitment to comprehensive outreach to immigrants and refugees in metro Richmond and is supported alongside partner organizations including Oasis Christian Fellowship and the Christian Arabic Church.
Missions: 25 Percent of the Budget, Local and Global
Third's missions commitment is structural, not optional. Twenty-five percent of the church's annual budget goes to local and global outreach, and the church organizes that commitment through a Missions team led by Becky Bowers (Director of Missions and Commissioned Lay Pastor), Elisabeth Hayes as Pastor for Parish Life and Mission, and Richard Haney as Theologian and Missiologist in Residence. Rebecca Hatton serves as Mission Administrative Assistant.
The global network of mission partners is unusually wide. It includes Al Massira, a film-based Bible-study curriculum for Arab and Muslim-background participants that has been translated into more than thirty-five languages; Andrew and Jessie Foster, who serve with Assemblies of God World Missions in Granada, Spain, planting a church among secular Spanish university students; Jonathan and Mika Hicks with Pioneers in Fukuoka, Japan, working through Gospel Houses and Bible studies with the Japanese; Jonas Kinda with World Horizons' Project Javelin, a church planter in Burkina Faso whose church in the outskirts of Ouagadougou now has more than five hundred weekly attendees; Lauren Montenegro with the French Baptist Federation in southwest France; New Life Associates, the Kishore family's evangelical and social-service organization in Hyderabad, India; and SAT-7, which broadcasts Christian programming by satellite across the Middle East and North Africa in Arabic, Farsi, and Turkish. Additional partners serve in Christian leadership development (Stephanie Black with Serge, Karen Carr with Barnabas International, the El Sharabia Evangelical Church in Cairo, Frontier Fellowship, Andrew Fuller with World Horizons, Haiti Outreach Ministry, International Cooperating Ministry, the Lehn family in Croatia, Linda Lemon in France, Donald Marsden with Frontier Fellowship, the Outreach Foundation, Scripture Union in Uganda and East Africa, the Word is Out, Lyle Thomas in Russia, and Steve Quackenbush with SIL), and indigenous-led mercy ministries around the world (Myrna McLaughlin in Zimbabwe, Carolyn Rennie in Romania, Shelter of Love in Cambodia, the Sydnor family in France, and Together for Tanzania).
Locally, Third partners with CARITAS, CrossOver Healthcare Ministry, Elijah House Academy, the Pregnancy Resource Center, RISE Academy, STEP, Urban Hope, the Youth Life Foundation of Richmond, Arrabon, Scott Armistead with CMDA, the Barnabas Center, the Center for Christian Counseling, Don Coleman, Alan DeCerff, For Richmond, Needle's Eye, Richmond City Young Life, the Withrow family, and Young Lives of Metro Richmond. Mission-team leaders and contact information for each of these partnerships are listed on the Missions page, and a monthly prayer gathering for mission partners meets on the second Sunday of each month at 9:30 a.m.
Strategic Plan: 2026-2030
The current strategic plan, called "Choosing depth over size, presence over platform, and neighbors over numbers," runs through 2030 and is built around three vision focuses. The first, Parish Life, renews discipleship and congregational life through the Parish Area structure, with a goal that 75 percent of the congregation will be able to explain the Parish Life vision from personal experience by 2030. The second, Parish Places, extends that work outside the building into lay-led community spaces that cross spiritual, cultural, and social boundaries, with a goal that every Parish Area will have at least one active Parish Place by January 2030. The third, Multiplying Culture, continues Third's legacy of church planting by identifying a church-planting pastor, launching a two-year pastoral residency in the model of a teaching hospital, and planting at least one new congregation in metro Richmond by 2030. The strategic plan is described not as a complete inventory of everything the church does but as the focused areas God is calling the congregation to work on in this season of its life.
What Third Believes
Third Church embraces biblical and historic Christianity as expressed in the Old and New Testaments and summarized in the Nicene and Apostles' Creeds. As a member congregation of ECO, it affirms ECO's Essential Tenets as a brief summary of its doctrinal commitments and worships in the patterns of the Reformed heritage. The church frames its mission in four movements: Called - by the grace of God in Jesus Christ, from darkness to light; Together - as an authentic spiritual family crossing generational, cultural, and vocational lines; For the Renewal of All Things - serving as agents of renewal in neighborhoods, workplaces, city, and world; and Through Jesus Christ - in him and through him, in the reformed tradition, as a member of ECO.
Five values shape how the church lives this out: Biblical Faithfulness - rooted in Scripture and living within its story; Gospel Community - bound together in difference through the gospel; Intentional Discipleship - growing as Christ-followers and being transformed into his likeness; Missional Orientation - sent out in the Holy Spirit to proclaim the good news and join in God's restoration; and Catalytic Culture - partnerships that focus on the growth of God's Kingdom rather than the growth of Third Church.
Pastoral and Program Leadership
The pastoral team is led by Corey Widmer, who holds an M.Div from Princeton Theological Seminary and a PhD from the Free University of Amsterdam and has served as Lead Pastor since 2015. Ed Satterfield serves as Pastor of Ministries, overseeing ministries alongside Elisabeth and Rick and providing pastoral care, teaching, and mentoring. Elisabeth Hayes is Pastor for Parish Life and Mission, leading the strategic direction of Parish Life and providing pastoral oversight for the Missions ministry. Richard Haney serves as Theologian and Missiologist in Residence, and Fakhri Yacoub pastors the Christian Arabic Church, a partner congregation that meets at Third.
The ministry leadership team includes Andrea Woie (Director of Student Ministry, grades 5-12), Becky Bowers (Director of Missions and Commissioned Lay Pastor), Beth Sprinkle (Associate Director of Parish Life), Blair Bigelow (Director of Children's Ministries), Brooke Wright (Director for Music and Worship), Chris Porter (Creative Director), Kim Benson (Care Coordinator), Kim Taulbee (Associate Worship Director), Marcellus Wright (Associate Director of Student Ministry), Meg Walker (Communications Manager and Women's Ministry Director), Nick Henretty (Production Director), Robin Bedinger (Associate Director of Club 56), Susan Barr (Associate Director, Nursery), and Maribelle Via (Immigrant and Refugee Tutoring Program Coordinator). Bryce Lyle serves as Executive Assistant to the Senior Pastor and Connections Coordinator, and is the first point of contact for newcomers.
Lay leadership is provided by a Session of Governing Elders, elected from the congregation for three-year terms; Parish Elders who lead in each Parish Area; Deacons who lead the church in service and love; and Trustees who care for the facilities and grounds. Officers beginning their service in 2026 are listed on the current officers page.
Care, Prayer, and Getting Married or Baptized
Care and Prayer ministries are coordinated by Kim Benson, the church's Care Coordinator, with the office available Monday through Thursday from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Anyone can share a prayer request through the Care & Prayer page, and a weekly prayer list is available by emailing Sterling Lloyd. People who are interested in being married at Third or in having a child baptized can find the relevant forms and information under the church's Baptism and Contact pages.
Listening to Third
Sermons are recorded each Sunday and made available as a podcast called Third Church Sermons on SoundCloud, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts, with selected services also available as video. A library of recordings, including multi-part series on biblical justice, gospel-centered parenting, and following Jesus in uncertain times, is kept on the Sermons and Recordings sections of the church's online home. A weekly email from Lead Pastor Corey Widmer called Third Online is one of the simplest ways to follow along with the congregation's life from week to week.
Worship services are livestreamed online, giving is available online as well as by text, and the church's sermons and worship services can be watched and listened to from anywhere in the world.