'Finding a new identity': Roswell Street Baptist Church mulls future amid shrinking congregation

Feb. 21—MARIETTA — A house of worship for the "outsiders" who came to staff the city's Bell Bomber plant during World War II, Roswell Street Baptist Church by the 1970s had become one of the largest megachurches east of the Mississippi, according to Pastor Michael Lewis.

At the time, some 2,000 people would flood the church for Sunday services. Now, swept up in forces that have whittled church membership across the United States, that number has dropped below 500.

"I believe we're on the threshold of an event that is more important than anything done before," Alex Owen, a lay leader and member since 1974, told the congregation Sunday morning.

Roswell Street Baptist Church must decide what to do with its excess property. The church owns 11 acres and its buildings total 250,000 square feet, according to Lewis. Only 15% of that space is being used on a regular basis.

"It's like somebody who's lost a lot of weight and they still are wearing the same big clothes," he said.

Marietta developer Walton Properties has floated building a mixed-use residential and retail development on church property, Owen told the congregation Sunday.

No formal offer or proposal has been made, Owen stressed, "only an inquiry about discussing possibilities."

Much of the church's excess property is in need of repair. The church estimates it would cost $25 million to "get the campus in full-functioning operation," Lewis said.

Roswell Street Baptist Church isn't going anywhere.

"We believe firmly that we need to be right where we're at in Marietta," Lewis said, citing the "great location" near Marietta Square and Interstate 75.

It currently sits on the same property it occupied when it was first founded 80 years ago, facing a part of Roswell Street that hadn't been paved yet. Lay leaders talk about setting their church on a path to another 80 years of success. But that means reimagining the church, they say — not just what its campus looks like, but what its mission is.

"The church has really been, you know, just finding a new identity," Lewis, who took over as lead pastor six years ago, said in an interview. "My calling is to revitalize the church and to help reimagine what the future will be like."

The decline

Roswell Street Baptist now has about 450 people who regularly attend English-language Sunday service, though the church also sports a total of "six different worship gatherings" Sunday mornings, including services in Spanish, Portuguese and Laotian.

Decline in its numbers began in the 1990s and then sped up after the turn of the century, Lewis said. There was another steep decline during the pandemic — a third of the congregants who were attending before the coronavirus never came back.

"It's not because of safety protocols, or it's not because we don't have room for people to spread out. You know, I joke with our congregation that our building was built for COVID," he said with a laugh. "I think Roswell Street, and if you look at most churches in Marietta too, it is a microcosm of a bigger challenge that all churches in every community are facing."

Pew Research Center reports have confirmed this country-wide decline in church attendance.

"Over the last decade, the share of Americans who say they attend religious services at least once or twice a month dropped by 7 percentage points, while the share who say they attend religious services less often (if at all) has risen by the same degree," a 2019 report reads. "More Americans now say they attend religious services a few times a year or less (54%) than say they attend at least monthly (45%)."

In December, Pew shared the results of a new survey, which found only 31% of adults attend religious services at least once or twice a month, though it cautioned against comparing the figures to those from years past, due to a change in how the data was gathered.

"It's not just been a Baptist church, or a Methodist church (issue). It's across the board that that has happened," Lewis said. "I think the culture has definitely changed a lot from being more of a Judeo/Christian worldview, to more of a secular (worldview). The greatest number that rises every year on the polls are the 'nones'" — those who claim no religious affiliation.

'Mission drift'

But Lewis believes the church is not without fault, and said "mission drift" has contributed to the decline in the number of churchgoers.

"We just got really busy doing good things inside the buildings and doing good things for ourselves," he said. "The mission is that we're to love God and love people. If we can take that love of God into the community and love people as Jesus has loved us, it revolutionizes the whole purpose of the church."

In practice, that means "trying to minister to needs that are so relevant in our community," he continued.

Roswell Street Baptist offers financial courses, and Lewis says it has helped Marietta families erase some $800,000 in debt. The church offers counseling to couples and families in distress, as well as premarital counseling. It offers the city's foreign-born population English lessons and helps guide them on their path to citizenship.

Ministering to the community's needs also means reaching out to the isolated, whether at home or in school, helping those who have found themselves lonely and adrift during the pandemic.

All told, Lewis hopes the efforts will result in a congregation that is younger, that looks "more like our community."

Ministry, not maintenance

Whether those efforts will bear fruit remains to be seen. In the meantime, the church must figure out what to do with its unused property.

Regarding Walton's development proposal, "I said, 'Wow, that's out of the box,'" Lewis said. "That's when I had an aha! moment. We do a lot of things which are inside of the box. I looked at my friend (at Walton) and I said, 'What if we throw the box away,' and we began to talk, and there have been several discussions since that day."

Lewis tapped more than a dozen longtime members of the church to join a "future vision team" that recently concluded a 40-day prayer challenge, seeking guidance on how to proceed. On Sunday, church leaders called on the rest of the congregation to join another 40-day prayer challenge and reach a consensus on how to move forward.

"One of the main things I've learned with this is, us getting on board with God, on what he wants to do with this facility and what he wants to do moving forward," Sandra Sommerman, a member of the future vision team, said. "It's not telling him what we want, it's allowing him to tell us, and we want the church to be part of that."

Selling the excess property is not just about unburdening the church of unused space it must pay to maintain. Lewis believes the sale will aid in the church's revitalization.

"There's just so much that we could do locally ... if we didn't have this financial burden," he said. "Rather than spending money on maintenance, we could spend money on ministry."

Just before Sunday service began, Owen said he believes the decision is one that will affect the church years down the road.

"What we think is what's normal — it's not coming back," he said. "What we're feeling is, the church needs to see the landscape like it is. ... We don't want to one day look and say, 'Gosh, we should have done, we could have done.'"