The Worthington Adventist Church

The Worthington Seventh-day Adventist church first met on July 17, 1920 at Harding Hospital, with 26 in attendance. Since then the church has grown to more than 700 members. In 1951 the growing congregation constructed the original church building at the end of Griswold Street. The first church school was organized in 1926, though it wasn’t until 1938 that a separate school building was built. Additions through the years have increased the size of the school building, and in 1962 we added a gymnasium-auditorium, the Adventist Activity Center, to our church campus.
In 2005-06, we began a new phase of the school, by building a new facility on the same campus to house our K-8 grades, making the old school available for the Church run daycare program.
The Worthington Seventh-day Adventist Church owes much to two community institutions: Harding Hospital and Worthington Foods.
Dr. George Harding II, a dedicated Seventh-day Adventist and a brother of President Warren Harding, studied at Battle Creek College and later became a psychiatrist. It was Harding’s dream to open a psychiatric hospital built on the Battle Creek Sanitarium model. In 1921 Harding sited his hospital at its present location in Worthington, where it continues today as a campus of the Ohio State University Medical Center.
Worthington Foods began in 1939 to fill the demand for meat-alternative food products among vegetarian Seventh-day Adventists. The company has gone through several changes in its 60 years of existence; today it is owned by the W.K. Kellogg company, and is the largest manufacturer of meat-analog products in the world.
As the Columbus metro area continues to grow, so has our church. We now worship in a new, larger church building at 385 E. Granville Rd. Our former church now serves as the chapel to our school, Worthington Adventist Academy and is available for Sunday rental. Surely “we have nothing to fear for the future except as we forget how God has led in the past.”