As Easter was celebrated at Johnson Ferry Baptist Church in April, a 40-day period of fasting and prayer came to an end for other reasons.
Members of the 4,700-member congregation were being asked do so as church leaders ponder the future of the church, which is one of the most influential institutions in East Cobb as well as the Southern Baptist Convention.
A special exploratory committee has been collecting feedback for several months about a proposal to build a singular worship facility to address capacity issues.
The main sanctuary that fronts Johnson Ferry Road and that opened in 1983 holds around 1,200 people, and has one traditional worship service on Sunday mornings.
At the same time, the church’s sprawling gymnasium in a special activities center along Woodlawn Drive is conducting three services on Sunday, in a modern worship format, with many families with young children in attendance.
That space can hold 1,600 folding chairs that are laid out every Saturday, then removed on Sunday afternoons. But there aren’t many chairs that are empty.
It’s a good problem to have, Johnson Ferry Baptist executive pastor Shane Bruce acknowledged in an interview this week with East Cobb News.
The church is not just running out of room to hold services. It’s also trying to adapt to the way younger generations not only choose to worship, but how they practice their faith in general.
“How are we going forward?” Bruce said while speaking at Johnson Ferry’s Provision Cafe, located in the activities center adjacent to the gym.
“Who do we want to be in 10, 15, 20 years?”
Church elders are taking the feedback under advisement and are deciding this summer about whether to build a new worship center.
The roots of ‘Vision 2025’
What Johnson Ferry Baptist leaders are calling “Vision 2025” sprung out of a mission statement in 2022 by Rev. Clay Smith, the church’s senior pastor since 2019, that called for church-planting in two other locations in metro Atlanta.
But Bruce, who is the church’s official in charge of operations, said as discussions continued, the topic swung around to how Johnson Ferry can appeal to a younger generation of people to “find truth, belonging and purpose in Jesus” while honoring long-time members, many of them who helped start the church in the early 1980s.
“Vision 2025” also states a goal of becoming a “multi-general, multi-ethnic congregation.” With that, the focus became about how to cultivate that church community on the sprawling 37-acre campus in East Cobb.
Bruce said many older members tend to go to the traditional service in the sanctuary “but it isn’t connected to anything.”
The activities center has become the real hub of Johnson Ferry, with the cafe, Johnson Ferry Christian Academy and the gymnasium all under a single roof, with people milling about most every day of the week.
The issues, Bruce said, aren’t just about the physical limitations of the worship space, but bringing together a large congregation that at times can feel fragmented.
“They don’t always have community together,” Bruce said. “You can’t pass your faith down if you’re not sitting in the same room.”
The question for the church elders is this, according to Bruce: “Are we ready to build a new worship center?”
‘It’s been a blessing’
He said such a building would have a capacity of 2,500, with multiple services on Sundays. The site options include the north parking lot, closer to Little Willeo Road, or the south lot, closer to the athletic fields.
Johnson Ferry has hired an architect to work up renderings for both possibilities, should the decision go ahead, but Bruce admitted that “I think we’re going to max this campus out” in the next year or so.
Those trends were apparent even before the COVID-19 pandemic. “In the last 8-10 years, we’ve seen a big shift” in where and how church members worship, Bruce said.
In 2009, 33 percent of Johnson Ferry’s Sunday attendance was in the gym for modern services, according to figures presented to church members as part of “Vision 2025.”
Now, it’s up to 74 percent, with an average weekly figure of around 2,000 there, compared to 800 in the sanctuary.
“The experience in there isn’t ideal,” Bruce said of the gym. “But it’s been a blessing.”
In addition, most of the baptisms take place in the gym, and this past December all of the Christmas Eve services took place there as well.
It reflects a younger generation of Johnson Ferry families that’s the sign of a healthy faith community.
The 2024 figures indicate that 900 or so students are part of the weekly worship average, up from 500 in 2022.
Johnson Ferry, Bruce said, has one of the largest student gatherings in the Southern Baptist Convention—the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S.
And soon a group of 125 of them will go on a summer trip to Poland.
Maintaining traditional ties
But church leaders say they are mindful of the connections to Johnson Ferry’s past as they plot what’s to come.
Some of the feedback includes questions about how the mix of services might look in a single worship space. TJ King, Johnson Ferry’s director of communications, noted that the services in the gym includes traditional worship elements.
“Two weeks ago, we sang ‘How Great Thou Art,’ and it was phenomenal,” he said.
He said that “while we’ve done strategic things to bring everyone together, we can’t do that on Sunday mornings.”
During the exploratory process, there has been plenty of behind-the-scenes work to gauge the feasibility and affordability of a new worship center. King didn’t cite a specific figure when asked how much such a building would cost, but said that “we’ve been doing our due diligence.”
He also acknowledged that “not everyone has loved the idea” of the possible changes being explored, “but they’ve seen the need.”
The elders—who include Bruce and Smith—are taking all of those factors into consideration, and the congregation is expected to be notified by the fall.
“We’ve seen God in more people’s hearts, and we’ve asked if God would give us clarity,” King said.
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