The Moonta Mines church was the largest Methodist Church outside of Adelaide in the nineteenth century. One thousand people attended the opening service in 1865. The church also had the largest Sunday School outside of the city. Lipson Hancock, son of the mine manager, Captain HR Hancock, developed a graded system of Sunday School teaching at the Moonta Mines church which became a model for other churches throughout Australia, and was even taken up in America and England.

The Bible Christians were the first to hold services in the district, in a sawpit shed at the mines in 1862. A revival in the district that year saw a leap in church membership across the three branches of Methodism - Bible Christian, Primitive Methodist and Wesleyan Methodist. So with some confidence the Wesleyan Methodists built this large church on Victoria Square at Moonta Mines soon afterwards.

In 1865 the fiery American revivalist preacher 'California' Taylor visited South Australia and a crowd of 1,000 gathered to hear him at the new Wesleyan Church. (Kadina and Wallaroo Times, 2 December 1865, p. 2) A second Methodist Church was built at Moonta in 1874, at a time when another series of revivals were experienced in the copper triangle, with 1,250 people said to have been converted in a matter of months. Church records show that there were at least 500 new members across the three church groups in this period. Interestingly this revival was in part fuelled by the deaths in early 1875 of Hugh Datson and a young girl named Kate Morcombe, when funeral sermons were preached exhorting the hearers to turn to God.

Hancock, H. Lipson (Henry Lipson), 1867-1935

Hancock, Henry Richard, 1836-1919

Hunt, Arnold. This side of heaven : a history of Methodism in South Australia, Adelaide, S. Aust.: Lutheran Publishing House, 1985

'Moonta Methodist Church jubilee celebrations,' Yorkes Peninsula advertiser, 27 November 1914, p. 3

'Moonta Methodist Church jubilee: history of the church,' People's weekly, 21 February, 1925, p. 4

'Mr H. Lipson Hancock's retirement,' Yorkes Peninsula advertiser, 14 July 1922, p. 2

Pryor, Oswald. Australia's little Cornwall, Adelaide, S. Aust.: Rigby, 1962

South Australian Bible Christian magazine, Adelaide, S. Aust.: Bible Christian Bookroom, 1867-1892