The first reported worship service for settlers around Lake Jesup took place in 1869 under a brush arbor, with interdenominational services for Methodists and Baptists held for months. By 1873, the Methodists were holding separate services under their own brush arbor, and that year the Florida Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church South appointed circuit rider James G. Tyson to serve the Lake Jesup area. In 1878, the forty-four-person congregation began building a church on land belonging to John R. and Henryetta Mitchell. Many furnishings came from Dr. Henry and Mary Foster of Clifton Springs, New York, who had been wintering in the Lake Charm area since 1874 and provided a pulpit, altar rail, pews, an Estey reed organ, and stained-glass windows, while also frequently giving financial support despite not being members. In gratitude, the congregation named the building Foster Chapel. The Rev. Robert H. Barnett preached its dedication sermon in 1879. In 1882, the congregation bought the five-acre lot from the Mitchells, and in 1887 decided to move the chapel to a more suitable and convenient location after Henryetta Mitchell gave the church a lot at the northwest corner of King Street and Lake Jessup Avenue. Two teams of oxen pulled the church on logs down a path through the woods, while congregants later recalled Captain Meredith Brock playing the organ and children singing as the building rolled along. The original site became a cemetery, where burial plots were leased for 999 years rather than sold. In 1889, a high-wind fire swept through the cemetery, burning oak trees and some wooden grave enclosures, but the chapel escaped because it had been moved earlier. The chapel later gained a belfry and a new bell, and the congregation grew to around 150 members by the 1920s. After years of fundraising, construction began in 1955 on a new church building just west of Foster Chapel, which remained in use until the new sanctuary held its first service in 1956.