Why 13 Dayton Baptist Churches Have Stood Together for 80 Years

In the summer of 1945, a group of Baptist pastors in Dayton, Ohio sat down together and made a decision that would outlast all of them. They were ministers from different congregations, different neighborhoods, different traditions within the Baptist faith. Some of their churches were old. Some were new. Some would close before the decade was over. But in that moment, they agreed on one thing: what they could build together was bigger than anything they could build alone.

That decision became the Dayton Baptist Pastors & Ministers Union — the DBPMU. Eighty years later, the union is still meeting, still fellowshipping, and still doing what it was founded to do: uniting the Black Baptist voice across the greater Dayton area.

This is the story of how that happened. And why it still matters.

From the West Side to Trotwood

Dayton’s Black Baptist churches didn’t emerge from a central institution. They grew neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, often out of the specific needs and personalities of the communities that built them. Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church was formally organized on July 5, 1928, in what locals called the “Hog Bottom” district of Dayton — near where Dunbar High School now sits on Richley Avenue. The congregation didn’t have a professional architect. They purchased a lot for one hundred dollars on Hanover Street and built the first church themselves, with their own hands.

That church grew through the Depression years, through the Second World War, and into the postwar era. By 1961, the congregation had grown so large they needed more space. They procured the current property at 27 North Gettysburg Avenue for eighty thousand dollars. On the second Sunday of February 1962, more than three hundred people formed a motorcade and drove from Hanover Street to Gettysburg Avenue — a procession the neighborhood still remembers.

“Some people called this a move to the downtown location even though the church was not located in downtown Dayton. This was a big day in the history of Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church.” — Macedonia Church History

Meanwhile, Mt. Calvary Missionary Baptist Church was tracing its own arc across the West Side. Founded in an earlier era and eventually settling at 3375 West Siebenthaler Avenue (now renamed Pastor S.N. Winston Way), Mt. Calvary has been led since 2004 by Rev. Dr. Samuel N. Winston Jr. — who began his ministry career not in the pulpit but as a musician, building a youth choir that eventually traveled the country and grew to more than sixty members.

These are two of the thirteen congregations that currently make up the DBPMU. Each has its own history. Each has its own neighborhood, its own voice, its own pastoral lineage. The union is not a merger — it never tried to make these churches the same. What it did was insist that their differences didn’t have to mean division.

What the Union Actually Does

It would be easy to describe the DBPMU as a networking organization for pastors. That would be accurate but insufficient. The more precise description is this: the union is what makes it possible for Dayton’s Black Baptist community to act collectively when collective action is required.

When Freedom Faith Missionary Baptist Church on North Main Street ran a weekly food distribution during the COVID-19 pandemic — drive-through, trunk open, pull forward — they were doing it as a single congregation. But that congregation is part of a union. The relationships, the trust, the shared network that made coordination possible across the city’s Black church community: those were built in DBPMU meetings.

When Pleasant Green Missionary Baptist Church in Trotwood entered a partnership with Matthew 25 Ministries in 2019 — a partnership that has since delivered vital resources to church families and the broader Trotwood community — they were operating as a single church with forty acres of land and a sanctuary that seats a thousand. But their ability to carry weight in that partnership was shaped, in part, by belonging to a union with reach across the city.

When Rev. Dr. Herman Walker — a retired Department of Defense engineer with a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from the University of Dayton — founded the Mt. Moriah Community Development Corporation in 2010, he was doing something rare: bringing economic development infrastructure into a West Dayton church as a ministry, not just a mission statement. He did it within a tradition that had been building those kinds of institutions since 1945.

The People Who Lead It

The current president of the DBPMU is Rev. Dr. Marcettes L. Cunningham, senior pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church on Fairbanks Avenue. Dr. Cunningham has preached on three continents. He served as President of the General Missionary Baptist Association of Ohio before being called to Shiloh in 2017. He came to the union presidency having already led at the state level, which means he understands something important: the DBPMU is not just a Dayton institution. It exists within a larger ecosystem of Black Baptist organizational life in Ohio — and increasingly, the rest of the country.

That ecosystem includes the Northwestern Ohio Missionary Baptist Association, the Ohio Baptist General Convention (currently led by Mt. Calvary’s own Rev. Dr. Samuel N. Winston Jr.), and the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc. Several DBPMU members hold or have held leadership positions in these organizations simultaneously. The union, in other words, is not a local curiosity. It is a node in a national network that traces its lineage back to the founding of Black Baptist institutional life in America.

What Comes Next

In March 2026, the DBPMU will host its Holy Week Citywide Revival at Pleasant Green Missionary Baptist Church in Trotwood — three nights of preaching, March 31 through April 2, with a kick-off concert on March 29 and a Good Friday service on April 3 at noon. The guest evangelist is Rev. Dr. Selwyn Q. Bachus of Middle Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee. The theme is The Seven Last Sayings of Christ.

Choir rehearsals have already been meeting for months, directed by Justin Luster. The Youth Choir will perform on Wednesday, April 1. All events are free. All are welcome.

But the revival is a single event within something much larger. The DBPMU is in the process of building a digital presence that matches the scope of its actual work — a home online for the Dayton-area Black Baptist community, and the beginning of a statewide Ohio Baptist directory that will eventually connect congregations from Cincinnati to Columbus, Lima to Toledo.

The union that thirteen pastors built in 1945 is still being built. Eighty years on, the work continues.