(Editor's note: This story is a republished version of one of four content items, originally posted on ABPnews.com on Sept. 16, that were lost due to a hacker attack on our website later that evening.)
GREENVILLE, S.C. (ABP) — Any congregation’s facilities reveal the body’s values and priorities — and the folks at First Baptist Church of Greenville, S.C., took both their values of community openness and creation care into account when constructing a recent addition on the back side of its campus.
Matt Rollins, director of the new Activities and Youth Ministry Center at First Baptist Church in Greenville, S.C., stands on the Jeanne Lenhardt bridge, which links the church's campus to an African-American neighborhood. The new facility is pictured in the background. (PHOTO/Paula Clayton Dempsey)
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The year-old Activities and Youth Ministry Center (AYMC), with its open areas and high ratio of window to wall space, is a visual reminder of the soon-to-be 180-year-old congregation’s views on environmental sustainability and outreach to its neighborhood.
The commitment to outreach in the community is evidenced in the large number and diversity of people the new recreational facility is reaching. By hosting church-league sports, Greenville Technical College’s intramural games and adult pick-up basketball games for the community at large, the facility has drawn people from the area to, and into relationship with, First Baptist.
Matt Rollins, the church’s activities minister and AYMC director, said interaction between the community and the congregation has grown exponentially since the building opened.
“If you come through that door, you are greeted by someone from behind this desk. And that’s an opportunity we’ve previously had on Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings,” he said. “When this building opened, we’ve [now] got that opportunity every day of the week.”
Perhaps the most striking symbol of the project’s outreach to the community is the new bridge that crosses the Reedy River and links the AYMC to the predominantly African-American Nicholtown neighborhood just to the east of the First Baptist campus. For a church featured, in a giant photo at the nearby Upcountry History Museum, turning away would-be African-American worshipers in the 1960s, the bridge speaks volumes.
The Jeanne Lenhardt Bridge links the campus of First Baptist Church in Greenville, S.C., to the predominantly African-American neighborhood of Nicholtown. Lenhardt, a civil rights activist and granddaughter of a Nicholtown pastor, began attending the historically white First Baptist Church — which once turned black worshipers away — later in life. (PHOTO/Paula Clayton Dempsey)
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The bridge, constructed by the city of Greenville, bears the name of Jeanne Lenhardt, an African-American educator, civil rights activist and Spelman College alumna whose grandfather was a long-serving pastor in Nicholtown. She started attending First Baptist during the last years of her life. At Lenhardt’s funeral, First Baptist Senior Pastor Jeff Rogers said the bridge, then under construction, should be named after the activist — because she had crossed the literal and metaphorical river that separated black and white Greenville long before the bridge was built.
Now, because of Lenhardt’s legacy and the vision of the crafters of the AYMC, that river is being crossed more and more frequently. Additional efforts to interact with the Nicholtown community are being made possible through a program designed to prepare preschoolers for reading readiness, launched this summer with seed funding from the church.
First Baptist also decided that environmentally friendly construction was important enough to the congregation’s identity to spend extra time and money on building the annex, according to Rogers.
“Coming to see that if we were going to expand our facility, we were going to have to do it responsibly … became a congregational commitment that cost it money — that cost it trouble — but that says this is a part of our Christian identity,” he said. “That commitment was cultivated, considered, grew and came into being in the course of the planning, the thinking, the praying, the funding as we considered what this building needed to be, to do, to say.”
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Paula Clayton Dempsey is the Alliance of Baptists’ minister for partnership relations. This story is adapted from one that originally appeared on the Alliance’s Blog Sept. 13.