Thirty-year-old Brad Robertson was always the kind of guy who thought we didn’t need anymore churches, we just needed to fix the ones we had.
Coming out of seminary, that’s what the Ashland native had on his mind as he started making the rounds.
“I would go to these churches, preach a trial sermon and go through the interview process,” Robertson said. “They would show me a nice parsonage with four bedrooms.”
But “it just didn’t feel right at all. I ended up turning four churches down.”
A little while later, he caught the itch. Robertson, a husband and father of two, found himself thinking like a church planter.
“I was always more of a church revitalization guy until God just put this on my heart,” he said. “It was almost like there was nothing else I could do.”
‘Go home. Go home.’
The question was where.
Robertson heard all the reports.
“North Atlanta’s getting huge.”
“There are some parts of Florida that are just exploding.”
Eventually he stopped looking at population charts and started listening to his heart.
And what Robertson finally heard surprised him.
“I really just started praying and seeking God,” he said. “I kept hearing, ‘Go home. Go home.’ I figured, ‘No, that’s just what I want to do.’ I fought it two or three months.”
Robertson surrendered to that call after he went back to Ashland for a visit and realized the Christianity he presumed to be so prevalent in his native pocket of the Bible Belt was often more cultural than spiritual.
“I was talking with some folks about Jesus and church and religion,” Robertson said. “I’d ask, ‘Are you a Christian?’ And so many people would say, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m a Christian.’ I’d ask, ‘When was the last time you went to church?’ and they’d tell me, ‘Twenty years.’ It was like ‘I’m a Christian because my uncle used to be a deacon,’ or ‘My daddy used to go there.’ Finally I was like, ‘That’s it. I really think this is what God is calling us to do.’”
After moving his family back to Ashland, praying, making connections and growing Bible studies to five, 10 and even 20 people, “this” turned into Clay Community Church, which plans to petition Carey Baptist Association for membership and met for its first official Sunday service on Easter.
The 60 people who showed up walked past the “Coming Soon” posters, through the doors, past the stills of old movies and past the popcorn machine before folding down their seats and placing their Bibles — those who had one — on the cupholders. That’s because Robertson planted his church in a theater. The historic Ashland Theatre, to be exact: newly renovated, right smack downtown and perfectly suited to Robertson’s vision.
“The vision for the church really came about in the fact that we wanted to reach out in the community,” said Alan Ogles, Clay Community’s “music guy” and a local family practitioner. “The whole point is to reach a group of folks that wouldn’t necessarily feel comfortable in an established church setting, folks that may not own anything more than blue jeans and may have had some substance-abuse problem and might have a bad taste in their mouth about organized religion.”
Holding services in the theater was Ogles’ idea.
“About all of our new churches in Alabama come from the initiative of people looking for a different way to reach people than what our established churches are doing,” said Otis Corbitt, an associate in the office of associational missions and church planting for the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions. “We want to always keep in mind that our existing churches do a good job of evangelizing people and we want to always be good stewards of that, but there are people who the culture of our established churches doesn’t help us to reach. That’s not the churches’ fault. That’s just the way things are sometimes.”
Ogles agrees.
“We just wanted something a little different to do our best to take away excuses about coming to church and developing relationships,” he said. “We thought, ‘What a great place to have a worship service.’”
Ogles hesitated to use the term “postmodern” but noted the theater is kind of dark and has great video and sound capabilities.
“It’s just an ideal place to have a church. It doesn’t look churchy,” he said.
Robertson met Ogles, 39, in the typical small-town manner of mutual acquaintance — Ogles knew Robertson’s father, and Robertson’s roommate at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary happened to know Ogles. The two men have an interesting relationship. Robertson works for Ogles during the week as a substance-abuse counselor. Come Sundays, Ogles defers to Robertson, who serves as the church’s pastor.
“It’s unique,” Ogles said, laughing. “We both have to be respectful and serve each other at different times, and the cool thing is that there’s not been a whole lot of ego involved. We just both roll up our sleeves and do what we have to do to get it done.”
Robertson agreed. “I want to sow into the groundwork of the church that it’s not about me,” he said. “I want church to happen when I’m not there. I don’t want it to be about me. That’s the whole point.”
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