sentences:  This history is based on "Past and Present", a booklet published by the church for the opening of a new building in 1981.Above Bar Church was established in 1876 by Henry Samuel Earl, a missionary with the Foreign Christian Missionary Society of the Disciples of Christ (then synonymous with the Churches of Christ; the two became formally separate in 1906).Earl started preaching in the Philharmonic Rooms on Above Bar Street (on the site of what later became the Odeon cinema and is now shops) in February 1876, with a local choir to lead the singing and the widow of a Congregational minister playing the organ.