The Mount Vernon Church was founded in 1842 by a group of enthusiastic lay men and women who felt the need of a church in Boston which would lead in the fight against indifference and Unitarianism. They invited the Rev. Edward Norris Kirk, a famous evangelist, to be their pastor. He spent thirty two years in charge of the church, from 1842 until his death in 1874. Unfortunately, most of the records of his pastorate perished in a fire in 1879. He was succeeded by Samuel Edward Herrick, pastor until his death in 1904. He too was a famous preacher. These two men, whose pastorates spanned more than sixty years, were innovators in sponsoring voluntary societies which appealed to the young unmarried teenagers who flocked to Boston form the countryside in the second half of the nineteenth century. They were not college graduates. Most of them such as Dwight L. Moody, the famous evangelist, went from the farm to retailing at the age of sixteen. They were initially attracted by Kirk and Herrick's preaching, but stayed because of the Christian fellowship and opportunity for self - education, which such groups as the Mount Vernon Association of Young Men provided. In the twentieth century, after the Church moved to the Back Bay, it turned its attention to male college students, especially those attending M.I.T., and to female office workers. The church, whose minister from 1933 to 1948, Carl Heath Kopf, took to the radio to spread the gospel, prospered until after World War II. Then it lost all its families, when the suburbs opened up and families with children left the Back Bay. For a while it was part of the Protestant chaplaincy at M.I.T., but when that failed, the remaining members, many of whom no longer lived in the Back Bay, voted to merge with Old South.