Two Longtime East Nashville Churches Ask: Is It Time To Leave The Neighborhood?

On a recent Sunday, Pastor Morris Tipton greets his congregation with sturdy handshakes and big hugs. Tipton is the pastor at First Baptist Church East Nashville, a church nearly as old as the city itself.

It’s a small congregation, maybe 100 people. They worship in a century-old red brick Classical Revival-style building on the corner of Main and North 6
^th
streets. First Baptist is one of Nashville’s most historic congregations, growing out of a slave contraband camp 150 years ago.

“Not much has changed with this sanctuary, probably as long as I’ve been living and I’m fifty-two,” Tipton says, looking around at the worn wooden pews, the threadbare green carpet and the church’s magnificent pipe organ, original to the building.  

Indeed, little has changed inside the church. But outside, the neighborhood has transformed. Luxury apartments sprouted up next door, a fancy hot yoga studio opened down the street. White professionals are moving in as land prices soar. But for the better part of a century, this neighborhood has been a community of color. And as development takes hold, the churches that for generations rooted the neighborhood, are being pushed out.

It seems almost weekly that Tipton hears about another church contemplating their future in the neighborhood. Should they stay or should they go? Too often, he says, they decide on the latter. Selling their buildings to developers and following their congregants out to the edges of town and beyond. It’s a trend that doesn’t sit well with Tipton.   

“I don’t want to use as strong a word as troubling,” Tipton says. “But for lack of a better word that may be the most appropriate one I can find.”

Tipton, though, says he’s determined that First Baptist will stay put. At least for now. But the developers have started calling, asking if he’s willing to sell.  

“I told the realtor, ‘I don’t even want to know what you’re willing to offer because I believe God has us here,'” Tipton says, recalling a call he received just days earlier.

Three miles away, on the other side of the neighborhood, is another church contemplating its future in East Nashville.

Pastor Glenda Sutton has led Family Affair Ministries since the mid-90s, when she started preaching out of her apartment in the James Cayce housing projects.

Clenching her lectern with one hand and her gold-edged Bible with the other, she’s stands in the church’s colorful sanctuary filled with artificial plants and banners embroidered with Bible passages. As kids and adults stream in for a weekly Bible study, she greets them with her favorite refrains: “Hello! Praise the Lord! Blessings! Angels all around you!”

When Sutton and her husband bought the property on the corner of Porter Road and Riverside Drive, it was a neighborhood with a lot of problems. A neighborhood they knew needed a place like Family Affair.

“When we came in in 2001 people didn’t talk to each other,” Sutton says. “There was just a lot of violence a lot of anger. It was a very, very dark place.”

In fact, it had a nickname: Little Hell Hole. But working here fit with the mission of the church, which offered support services to low-income families. Sutton had brought Family Affair into South Inglewood to work in the Berkshire Apartments, a low-income housing complex where the church opened a family center with their ministry’s non-profit arm.  

“We walked these streets for years and we prayed,” Sutton says. “We had standoffs with drug dealers. Saw drug busts.”

And slowly, the neighborhood got better. Kids started coming outside to attend her Sidewalk Sunday School on the concrete quad in the middle of the apartment complex. The violence subsided. Dollar General opened so mothers with infants finally had a place nearby to purchase baby formula.

Family Affair’s hard work was paying off.

And then the neighborhood started changing in a different way. Older homes were being torn down, new homes went up in their place. The low-income housing started to disappear. And with it, so did the families the church serves.

“A lot of families are displaced. A lot of families are gone,” Sutton says.

Today the blocks surrounding the church are packed with new homes or ones in the process of going up. But Sutton has noticed that her new neighbors aren’t that interested in what Family Affair is doing.

“The Good Neighbor policy, it’s been more like: Can you move? Can you leave? We want the neighborhood,” Sutton says.

Sutton would love to stay right here, she says. But her attempts to connect with her new neighbors haven’t been that successful. It started when a neighbor complained that a section of the church’s fence was on his property. It wasn’t. But before Sutton could prove it, he’d built his own. Sutton saw it as a clear message.  

“You erect a fence. That says: I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to be near you. I don’t want you near me,” Sutton says. “It was an insult. And then [I] just began to see all the fences that began to go up. People coming into the community but not wanting to be a part of the community.”

And so, in November, after some tears and much prayer, Sutton decided to put the church property up for sale. Listing it for $3.5 million, seven times more than they bought it for in 2001. Now, she has to decide: Where do they go? She has no idea.

At First Baptist, Pastor Tipton has very different ideas about where his church goes from here. He wants to bring new members in—white members.

“I want to be intentional about being a multi-racial congregation,” Tipton says. “I think that scares black churches a lot. If we begin to really reach out and they start coming, we won’t be what we’ve always been. I don’t think that has to be the case.”

Tipton knows his goals of staying put and integrating his church are ambitious, but he feels compelled to try.

And that’s what Tipton and Sutton have in common, despite going in two very different directions. They have a belief that something bigger is driving them, calling them — telling one to stay and the other to go.