At the Rolling Hills Baptist Church in Fayetteville, the pastor is trying to sell the building from under his congregation.
“Our motive should not be to fill these seats, but to empty these seats,” the Rev. Frank Mercer decided last year.
Amen, said the congregation, which is $150,000 away from paying off $1.4 million worth of land and buildings.
In a metro area known for megachurches, prosperity preachers and church-owned sports fields, Rolling Hills, which has 100 congregants, has joined a national movement that is challenging the very idea of what makes a church.
In this time of economic famine, Rolling Hills wants to lose the mortgage, air-conditioning bills and insurance costs and move members off the pews so they could do more work in their community, in downtown Atlanta, and in Mexico and Honduras.
Across the country, churches are experimenting with changing their services and looking for ways to attract a new generation of members as they adjust to a society where church is no longer a universally accepted institution.
In Decatur, for instance, the Navo Church, which the United Methodists started last year, meets in a 1950s-era grocery store and sponsors dance classes, a recording studio and African drum line practice during the week.
And in Massillon, Ohio, congregants of the Rivertree Christian Church were meeting in space rented from a school. Even though the church built up a multimillion-dollar building fund, the leaders decided to continue renting and use the money to help others.
“When the decision was announced, the congregation cheered wildly,” Warren Bird, the director of research for Leadership Network, a Christian interdenominational consulting group, wrote in an e-mail.
In Fayetteville, it is an exciting and frightening move for Mercer, who came here five years ago from a Charlotte megachurch with a staff of 20 pastors.
His hope was to build Rolling Hills into a similar institution, but his ideas — and those of his congregation — began to change last year, when they visited a church in New York City.
That church rented space, but was thinking about buying a building— a pricey consideration. One member of that congregation wondered if the church could afford to continue programs, such as feeding the hungry, if it bought a building.
He spoke a phrase that became a mantra for his church: “I’m afraid if we become a church of bricks and mortar, we’ll cease to be a church of flesh and blood.”
Dave Lebby, a Rolling Hills member, said, “A light bulb went off in my head about how freeing it would be” to not own property.
Members could spend that money helping the less fortunate. They could once again send members to a house-building project in the slums of Juarez, Mexico, which had been suspended because of budget constraints.
“We spend over 50 percent of our budget on a building that we are in less than 10 percent of the time,” Mercer said.
Lebby, Mercer and others began talking about changing that.
“If we are going to survive in the future, we are going to understand how people do church in this generation,” said Bryan Fowler, the pastor of the Navo Church in Decatur.
Kurt Fredrickson, an assistant professor at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., known for its church-growth program, noted part of the movement among evangelicals is a growing social consciousness.
Many are engaging in programs such as tutoring children or repairing homes for the poor.
More than 800 churches nationally participate in “Faith in Action” Sunday during October, when members fan out in their communities doing good rather than going to services.
“It’s easy to do a ‘don’t go to church’ day. But to sell your buildings and change the way you worship is a pretty radical step for a church,” Fredrickson said.
After that trip to New York, Mercer returned home and began preaching a series on why the church exists — to serve others.
Members became more active, serving in a homeless shelter, working with children at the Baptist Children’s Home and performing community service projects on Mondays.
They also began seriously pondering the idea of selling the church property.
“We all had some reservations,” said Mike Stout, a member of the church. “People, in general, don’t like change.”
But last October, in a 95-to-5 vote, the church agreed to sell the property, which is on the market.
Once the building is sold, the church may look for a general-purpose building to rent, where congregants can meet for services, store clothes to be given to their foreign-missions projects or use for community programs.
“I came out of a megachurch in Charlotte with the idea that this church was broken and needed to be fixed,” Mercer said. “I have not saved this little church. It has saved me.
“I guess I am the one that needed to be fixed.”
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