T. A. Bryant Jr. still attends Flat Rock Church, where he’s been a member since 1929. He can’t remember a year that’s been so devastating for the old church.
Located seven miles southwest of Lithonia, Flat Rock likely is DeKalb County's oldest African-American church, whose origins date to at least 1860. On a Friday morning last month, a member arrived early to find the locks changed on all five doors.
The church's five-year-old building, including a 300-seat sanctuary, had been foreclosed by Sun Trust Bank. Members were stunned, unaware the church was vulnerable financially.
During a mid-December Sunday service, people in the congregation, many well over 60, were still numb. Early in her sermon, Binita Miles, promoted to senior pastor in November, told her congregation lyrically that “2010 handed us a whole lot of mess. In 2011, we’ll be blessed in the middle our mess.”
Miles presented a courageous front, but no one knows the immediate fate of Flat Rock. Once the church opened its new sanctuary in 2005, nothing has gone right. It was overextended.
“Up until then our church was OK,” he said. “But it didn’t make a lot of sense to build a church with a 300-something capacity. We didn’t need anything that big. In my lifetime, the church has never even reached 200.”
By last summer, the church had a $6,000 monthly mortgage and still owed $750,000 on the building, said Jamie Jenkins, an official for the North Georgia Conference of the of the United Methodist Church.
Those figures were astonishing, considering the church currently has “$1,500 and change in our savings,” according to Daphne Wood, a sixth-generation member.
“We have explored several options," Jenkins said. "We found another church building for them to move into, but they weren’t interested. Then we found another congregation to merge with them, but they didn’t like that either. Finally, the bank gave them a 90-day extension. Frankly, I think the bank did everything they could to keep this from happening. No bank in the world wants to foreclose on a church.”
Since 2005, membership has declined from 160 to 34. Aging is one reason. Mistrust of the two pastors who preceded Miles was another.
People also left because of increasing disillusionment with the North Georgia Conference. Flat Rock was a Methodist Church from its inception. On Nov. 2, however, and only days before learning about the foreclosure, the congregation voted 24-3 to leave the North Georgia Conference.
By Thanksgiving, Flat Rock had no land, buildingor denomination. Since Dec. 6 the remaining members have crammed inside a weather-beaten wooden house. Built in 1917, it’s a residence that Bryant, the longtime member, is overly familiar.
“My daddy, who at one time owned 90 acres, built this place and I grew up here,” Bryant said of his 1922 birthplace.
There’s more than symbolism involved. During the 1930s, the man's father, T.A. Bryant Sr., began selling parcels of land, in an effort to keep church members from migrating north. "He knew if people moved, the church would die," Bryant said.
More than 70 years later, this dwindling yet tight-knit congregation is faced with a similar situation. Flat Rock recently filed for bankruptcy, temporarily stalling foreclosure.
“We want to get back in our building,” said Johnny Waits, another six-generation member and the church historian. “At the very least we want to retrieve our property. When we built it, members bought 288 chairs dedicated to their loved ones."
The property, and Flat Rock Church's survival, remains in limbo.
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