National City Christian Church
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National City Christian Church
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| Location | 5 Thomas Circle, NW Washington, D.C. |
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| Area | Greater Fourteenth Street Historic District |
| Built | 1930 |
| Architect | John Russell Pope |
| Architectural style | Neoclassical |
| Part of | Greater Fourteenth Street Historic District (#94000992) |
| Added to NRHP | November 9, 1994 |
National City Christian Church, located on Thomas Circle in Washington, D.C., is the national church of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) (often abbreviated as the "Disciples of Christ" or "Christian Church"). The denomination grew out of the Stone-Campbell Movement founded by Thomas Campbell and Alexander Campbell of Pennsylvania and West Virginia (then Virginia) and Barton W. Stone of Kentucky.
The congregation that eventually became the National City Christian Church was organized in 1843. James Turner Barclay (1807-1874), a physician and pioneering Stone-Campbell Movement missionary, helped to organize the congregation.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the church had a congregation of some 800 regular Sunday worshipers. Attendance declined over time, however; in 2011, Sunday attendance was about 125, with mostly older congregants.
In 2004, the church's senior pastor, the Rev. Alvin O. Jackson, resigned following a heated acrimonious dispute. The ouster of Jackson followed the resignation or firings of some two dozen church staffers, and the development of a deep intra-congregational dispute. Jackson was replaced as senior pastor by the Rev. Stephen Gentle, "a soft-spoken pastor of a Florida church."
Subsequently, the church's chief financial officer, Jason Todd Reynolds, was discovered to have embezzled $850,000 in church funds from 2003 to 2008. In 2011, Reynolds was convicted of 12 fraud-related charges. He was sentenced to eight years in prison. The losses from Reynolds' embezzlement scheme caused serious damage to the church's financial health.
The 2011 Virginia earthquake caused structural damage to the church building, causing financial troubles for the church.
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