North Clay Baptist Church, Clay, knows a feeling few churches experience — what it’s like to be bursting at the seams from day one.
The church, formed when two congregations joined together in 2010, had its first service in its new building Jan. 27. Members called it a “great day.”
And to fit everyone in — all 200 plus — they had to bring in three extra rows of chairs.
“This is the start of something great,” Pastor Tim Evans said, referring to the church’s new location and future ministry.
Before North Clay Baptist was formed, Evans was pastor of Centercrest Baptist Church, Center Point. As the community around Centercrest began to change, a large majority of its members started to move to Clay and surrounding areas.
Church leadership began to pray about where the congregation could be most effective in reaching the lost. That’s when Barry Wood, pastor of Eagle Ridge Baptist Church, Clay, called Evans and started talking with him about merging the two congregations to reach the Clay area together.
At the time, Eagle Ridge, a church plant, was meeting in two mobile units provided by the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions (SBOM).
Both pastors sensed God leading them to come together and recognized they had “similar goals and mutual interests,” Evans said.
In 2010, Eagle Ridge Baptist and Centercrest joined to form North Clay Baptist with Evans as pastor and Wood as associate pastor. They met at Centercrest’s facility while looking for a place to meet in Clay.
A planning team chaired by Joey Breighner, a Centercrest member for more than 30 years, decided that selling Centercrest’s building was the first thing to do.
The way the details strategically fell in place was “a God thing,” Breighner said.
A new and partially unfinished building previously used by Bridgepoint Baptist Church, Clay, became available for purchase in early 2012. The North Clay Baptist congregation set its sights on it as a possibility.
Then early this January, an African-American church, Tabernacle of Praise Apostolic Church, purchased the former Centercrest building, allowing North Clay to move forward with purchasing the Bridgepoint facility.
“We did not meet much resistance (from the North Clay congregation) when we decided we wanted to move (and purchase the new building),” Evans said.
Members were poised and ready to reach a new area and start fresh in a new building, he said. The church’s new facility has a lobby, small sanctuary and at least 10 Sunday School rooms already completed. It has a large sanctuary that will seat about 700 people, an upstairs area and several classrooms that are partially unfinished. Evans estimated the building will be completed by 2014, but he said the church wants to focus first on settling into the community.
He shared from Joshua 1:1–19 at the Jan. 27 service and urged church members to “be strong and courageous” in the midst of change.
Evans and Wood agree that North Clay is now in a good location to best reach its community with the gospel.
“We want to stay on task and stay simple,” Evans said. “We’re about more and better disciples and want people’s roots to sink more deeply into Scripture.”
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