The Richardson Seventh-day Adventist Church was chartered in April 1962 as a church plant of the Dallas First Seventh-day Adventist Church, with 49 charter members who first gathered in the home of Ruth Brown. The bulletin from that very first Sabbath in her living room notes that the congregation's branch Sabbath Schools were already three weeks into meeting on Sabbath afternoons — a fitting start for a church planted on connection and community. Those early years are full of roller skating socials, picnics, and sunshine bands. As the young congregation outgrew the house, it moved into the rented fellowship hall of Richardson Heights Baptist Church at Floyd and Beltline Road.

Richardson in those days was mostly country, and when the Texas Conference purchased three acres for the young congregation, the property sat well outside of town. Ground was broken in 1966, and the fellowship hall opened in 1967 — the building still stands today and serves as our children's wing. Those early decades were marked by a congregation that reached outward: five-day stop-smoking programs hosted at Richland College drew as many as 200 people a month from all over the community, evangelist George Vandeman preached in that first fellowship hall, and for years Richardson served as a training church for ministerial students from Southwestern Adventist University — a number of whom went on to long ministries across the denomination.
By the late 1970s a congregation of roughly 200 members set out to build a proper sanctuary, a project that required raising $250,000 before construction could begin. They did it with characteristic good humor and a great deal of hospitality — dinners hosted in members' homes, auctions, and a three-day Christmas bazaar under a borrowed tent.
 
Completed in 1983, the sanctuary seats close to 400, double the membership at the time and a statement of faith in what God intended to do here. That faith has been answered many times over: more than sixty years after that small group began meeting in a home, Richardson is a church of over 1,100 members representing more than 50 nations, gathering together from many walks of life, supporting one another as we grow in faith and continuing to show God's kingdom in North Dallas.