Decatur’s venerable Thankful Missionary Baptist Church is facing some resistance in its plans to turn a portion of its property into a small mixed-use development.
The city’s Planning Commission held a hearing on the proposal earlier this month before an unusually large crowd that included representatives from Thankful — the second-oldest black church in DeKalb County — as well as about 20 opponents, mostly residents of the two streets that border the church.
Eunice Rogers, who joined Thankful in 1970, told the audience the church needed money largely for maintenance on its circa-1920s building, which faces College Avenue. She closed by saying that while Thankful’s membership has declined in recent years, “We are not going away.”
There was some defiance there. Founded in 1882, Thankful has faced innumerable challenges throughout the generations. They include rising and falling membership, massive urban renewal from the 1940s through 1960s, and the burning of its original sanctuary only months after Ms. Rogers joined.
While the church has been steadfast, much of adjoining Oakhurst in southwest Decatur is as new as fresh paint. Demographic changes have been dramatic. In 1990, Oakhurst was 82 percent black with an African-American population of about 4,000. By 2010 that had dropped to 1,400, and the area was 63 percent white.
A.L. Rogers, a deacon at Thankful and a member for 69 years, says he doesn’t believe the opponents of the development plan have a problem with the church.
“I think the people you see at meetings are concerned with the type of development, with what’s going to get built,” Rogers said. “But I don’t think they have qualms about the church.”
Weslee Knapp, the president of Decatur-based Keller Knapp Realty and a consultant to the church, agrees.
“I think the main thing (residents) are against is change in the neighborhood,” Knapp said. “We’re not getting protests from any other parts of the city, it’s just the people who live right near the church.”
Knapp’s sketches show that that the church would slice off 1.15 of its 3.745 acres along its eastern boundary for construction of 16 town homes at 2,200 square feet, each with two-car garages. Four would face College Avenue and 12 would line Mead Road. The College side would also house what Knapp described as several “low-use commercial” spaces.
For many living anywhere within the city’s 4.2 square miles, there’s a palpable battle fatigue with the incessant clamor of daily development.
From 2001 to 20016, Decatur Building Official Mark Ethun said, 1,202 new-house permits have been issued for single-family dwellings and town homes. Almost all are built on the sites of older, usually much-smaller homes that have been demolished or vastly reconfigured. Considering there are about 9,000 Decatur homes, roughly 13 percent of the city’s residences were “redeveloped” in the past decade and a half.
Further, in the past 10 years and on into 2019, 232 condominiums and 1,621 apartments have been or will be built.
Meanwhile, Thankful needs to downsize. The church hit a high-water mark of attendance during the era of the Rev. James H. Morton, Thankful’s pastor from 1984 to 1992. In those days, A.L. Rogers said, there were two Sunday services, both packing the sanctuary that seats about 700, with a choir of about 80.
But Morton left, and in 1993 he started the New Beginning Full Gospel Baptist Church in unincorporated DeKalb, where he remains to this day. According to several longtime Oakhurst observers, he took many of Thankful’s younger families with him.
In the quarter-century since, the church has gone through seven pastors and only one stayed for an appreciable duration. Rogers said the church now has about 250 on the rolls. But a mid-October Sunday service drew 50 worshippers, most well over 60 years old.
Knapp isn’t saying how much the church is asking for its parking lot, but there’s no question it’s prime real estate in an area where similar tracts have sold for roughly $1.5 million per acre. There is no timetable for development. Knapp will go back before the Planning Commission in December, and he said the project has to be approved both by that body and the City Commission before a developer can buy it.
Outside of “deferred maintenance,” the church is vague about how proceeds for the property will be spent. But several members said they’re determined to attract new members and remain in their building.
Johnny Waits, a sixth-generation member of Flat Rock Methodist Church near Lithonia — DeKalb’s oldest black church — says Thankful has a tough road ahead.
“Many of our churches, Baptist and Methodist, are dying out,” said Waits, who described his own church as now down to “40 or 50 members. “People are going to mega churches because they don’t have to do anything — just show up and go home. Thankful Baptist has been such an important church in this county for a long time, it would be a terrible thing to see them disappear.”
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