Churchgoing: Bellevue Baptist Church near Memphis - Memphis, Tennessee

Christian Century, May 5, 1993 by Randall Balmer

Within a couple of hours of arriving in Memphis I learned that there are really two cities here along the Mississippi. In East Memphis, smooth macadam roads bearing names like Shady Grove and Cherry Lane wind through suburban neighborhoods lined with brick, ersatz colonial homes. On a warm summer evening the smell of lighter fluid and burning charcoal mixes pleasantly with the sound of cicadas.

Just a few miles away inner-city Memphis struggles to survive, and the contortions of that struggle are all too obvious. Desegregation prompted white flight to the suburbs in the 1960s and '70s, leaving unemployment and a patchwork of decaying neighborhoods. The center of the city succumbed to the Nixonian theory of urban renewal: raze everything in sight and start over. Though it followed the first part of that formula, Memphis apparently lost interest in the second. The result is a sea of vast, open spaces interrupted occasionally by islands of buildings. Even the legendary Beale Street, birthplace of the blues, has an unreal feeling of Disneyland about it, lost among the urban fields and utterly out of context.

In 1950, when it was designated one of the Christian Century's "great churches," Bellevue Baptist Church was located near downtown Memphis. Today it sits on a 376-acre campus carved out of the woods east of Memphis in a town called Cordova. That singular fact may not tell you everything you need to know about the church, but it goes a long way toward framing the metamorphosis of Bellevue Baptist over the past four decades.

Bellevue Baptist's new building, completed in 1989 at a cost of $34 million, sits at the end of a long, winding, four-lane drive several miles off Interstate 40. The huge rectangular structure, which itself covers six and a half acres, has a glass facade and an oversized porte-cochere which is held up by seven fiberglass columns and bears the third verse from Psalm 43: "SEND OUT THY LIGHT AND THY TRUTH."

But to point out that something at Bellevue Baptist is oversized would be redundant. The people of Bellevue are very proud of the building and its overwhelming scale. Members were constantly pointing out features of the building for my edification and, I suppose, wonderment. "I just get chills when I think about this place," Louise Gill, a member since 1977, told me. Here are some random statistics about the building from a fact sheet distributed to church docents:

Gallons of paint             10,000
Number of doors                1,285
Square feet of Sheetrock   1,000,000
Public telephones                 87
Kitchens                          20
Restrooms                         40
Private restrooms                 10

The "worship center" seats 7,000, with an additional 310 seats for the choir and 100 for members of the orchestra. Outside are 31 acres of asphalt, eight miles of curb, and parking places for 3,500 cars, with more spaces being added.

As you walk through the doors and into the grand foyer, you sink into an ocean of plush, teal-blue carpeting (10.3 acres of it, all told) beneath a large chandelier (valued today at $250,000) that was moved from the church's former building in the city. A grand, curving staircase leads to the second- and third-floor balconies, as well as to several hundred classrooms.

The interior design of Bellevue Baptist - a kind of high-tech, faux colonialism - may be unimaginative, but it is better than that of most megachurches. Bellevue Baptist steers clear of the ostentation that characterizes the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California; the shabbiness of New Hope Community Church in Portland, Oregon; or the tensile austerity of Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois. The colors are warm. The wood paneling tends to diminish somewhat the cavernous feel of the worship center. The church is filled with trees, ferns and plants, so densely in some places as to look like a veritable rain forest. On close inspection, however, the plants prove to be synthetic.

The most amusing feature of the building is the baptistry. Located behind the choir and high above the stage, the large baptismal tank (which holds 15,000 gallons of water) has a window cutout that extends perhaps a foot below the water line. At all three Sunday services - 9:30 and 11 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. - after the prelude one of the pastors waded into the tank and proceeded to baptize a stream of new converts, all in full view (above and below the water line) of the congregation. Presumably, anything less than full immersion would not pass unnoticed.

The Sunday morning service opened with a rousing rendition of "Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus" by the sanctuary choir and orchestra, followed by a congregational hymn, "Victory in Jesus," and a chorus called "Mighty Warrior" (lyrics by Debbye Graafsma):

Mighty Warrior, dressed for battle Holy Lord of all is He. Commander-in-Chief, bring us to attention, Lead us into battle to crush the enemy.

If anyone felt a bit squeamish about the militarism of the music, senior pastor Adrian Rogers quickly dismissed such silliness. In his greeting to the congregation and to the television audience Rogers noted disparagingly that Bellevue Baptist had been criticized for singing "Onward, Christian Soldiers" and that some liberal churches had even taken it out of their hymnals. "If you hate war," he declared, "you'd better love the Mighty Warrior." The congregation murmured its assent. "Father, we thank you for our commander-in-chief," Rogers prayed, "our Lord Jesus Christ."