Guild House (Ann Arbor, Mich.)

The roots of Guild House go back to 1893 when the Christian Women's Board of Missions of the Disciples Church established the Ann Arbor Bible Chair at the University of Michigan. Through the years other denominations have joined the Disciples in their aim to provide a setting for Bible study and the "Christian education" of university students. The Guild House became an ecumenical "United Campus Ministry" with local churches sponsoring their activities. These included Memorial Christian Church, the Bethlehem United Church of Christ, the First Congregational Church, the Church of the Good Shepherd, and the First Unitarian Universalist Church.

The historical development of the modern Guild House has many strains. One of these certainly was the Disciples' missionary outreach to the university community. Also significant was the appointment in 1934 of H. L. Pickerill as director of student work for the Michigan Christian Foundation (Disciples of Christ). In this capacity, Pickerill subsequently organized the Disciples Guild, which was the immediate forerunner of the modern Guild House. During the war, there was a move to bring together some of the other denominational groups sharing similar goals respecting the university student community. In 1942, the Disciples of Christ and the Congregational Church agreed to cooperate in this ministry, forming the Congregational and Disciples Guild. Then in 1958, following the merger of the Congregational Church and the Evangelical and Reformed Church into the United Church of Christ, the local groups formally incorporated as the Congregational and Christian Parish House, or Guild House as it came to be called. In 1969, a decade later, the name of the organization was officially changed to Guild House to reflect its character an ecumenical organization with the inclusion of additional denominational sponsorship.

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