The Church That Used To Be A Car Dealership
A decade ago, a congregation in Taylorsville took over a space that was once used for fixing up and selling Fords. Now its pastor is pondering the nature of a church in a post pandemic world.
Last month, I was in Taylorsville because my daughter had a dance competition at the high school there. Afterward, we drove around town looking for a non-chain restaurant. The first was closed, despite the hours posted on its own website. The second, a brewery, was empty. A hand-written sign on the door explained they were having issues with alcohol but were “working on it.” We ended up driving a few miles out of town to Apple City Barbecue, which had the dual advantages of being 1.) delicious and 2.) open.
On the way out there, though, I passed something on Highway 16 that stuck with me. It was a car dealership. Or, at least it was. It had, at some point, become the First United Methodist Church.
I know this is going to sound like profiling, but if you’ve seen one car dealership, you’ve seen them all. They’re big, boxy, and full of glass. Old dealerships used to be more ornate, but now they’re all large and fairly featureless. “The better to make an impression on someone passing at 65mph,” Sarah C. Rich writes in a re:form story on dealership architecture. “Back when cars moved more slowly, dealership architects could justify decorative flourishes and elaborate detail, but not so any more.”
To be fair, a lot of churches have a standardized look as well. Stained glass. Steeples of varying heights. Pews. Pulpits. So yes, when you see a large cross in a space that ostensibly was once home to a Ford logo, it’s a bit jarring. Sort of like an old Pizza Hut that’s been repurposed into something else.
This is uncommon, but not unheard of. Former dealerships in Ohio, Virginia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Nebraska have all been made into houses of worship. This, though, seems to be North Carolina’s first conversion, and I had to know more. So this week, I called up the pastor, Joel Simpson, to ask him if it seemed as unusual as it looked. What I got was a conversation about the nature of worship, our changing attitudes about place, and a lesson about how one real estate deal led to a chain reaction that’s had an effect on the whole community. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
RABBIT HOLE: Can you tell me how this came to be?
JOEL SIMPSON, PASTOR: I’ve been here for six years now, so this happened before my time. But the dream for the congregation was to move out of their downtown space, which they had just grown out of. The space was just difficult to navigate. It wasn't very accessible for people with mobility issues. It felt disconnected in a lot of ways because people were in totally different ends of the building.
The pastor at the time had kind of laid out this vision for moving out of the space. They began thinking they were gonna build a new building. And when the time came for them to make a move, a church member was eating breakfast at this restaurant called Scotty's. And he was looking at this old car dealership across the street and said: That'd be a great spot for a church. Why don't we just use what's already there? So he brought that idea back to the church and they ended up purchasing it [in 2014] and renovating it.
It’s so much more accessible because it's all one level. And it’s a really big space. We could expand if we need to, but we’ve really tried to prioritize community functions. In the back we have some storage areas. The local Rotary Club keeps food items back there. They have a backpack program where they'll pack bags of food for kids over the weekend. We host different kinds of community events or lunches for different groups. The early college is gonna come over here and have their graduation breakfast. On top of that, when we bought this building, another building came with it. We were renting that space to a Hispanic congregation. And they decided they'd love to buy it. So we helped negotiate a sale so that they could purchase that building because we didn't need it. So we've got kind of like a partner church in the same parking lot that's loving that space.
And then the downtown space? We moved in a mobile food truck. They call it the Mobile Café. And it would bring food to the people who are going to food pantries around the Alexander County. They moved into the fellowship hall where worship was happening. There's a kitchen there and that's become their main hub. So they cook food and people can come in and eat free meals Monday through Friday. It's the only soup kitchen in the county. There's a nonprofit music school that's moved into the upstairs space and they teach music lessons to kids. We've got a domestic violence group that is in the old pastor's office. That's across from the courthouse, so it’s easy for them to get there. We recently moved in Integrated Care of Greater Hickory, which works with people who are struggling with addiction and homelessness and helps them find transitional housing and support in that process. So it's really become a community hub in a lot of ways where you can go to one place and find a lot of resources, which has been a great gift. It was walkable for people who are in town, especially if you're in court and needed some support with something. We have a shuttle we have that goes through here called the Greenway. So yeah, it's been more than just the church moving. It became something that was a gift for the community in all kinds of ways.
RABBIT HOLE: If you look at the original church, within a second of seeing it, you know it was a church. Same with the dealership. Visually, does all of this take a little bit of getting used to?
SIMPSON: Yeah, I think there has been some of that. There would be people coming by saying: I used to work here. Can I come see what it looks like? And we’d walk into the sanctuary and they're like: Yeah, this is where we changed the oil. That has kind of phased out. But for a while there, a bunch of people came by to see what we did with this building. Sometimes I’ll help people find it by saying, oh yeah, we're in the old Ford dealership and people are like, I know where that is.
RABBIT HOLE: Is there an expectation of what the service will be like—contemporary or traditional—based on the building or the set up itself?
SIMPSON: Yeah, absolutely. There's one sanctuary space in this building. One half of the stage has the band stuff, and the other half has the choir stuff. And when I showed up, they had two services, a contemporary service and a traditional service. Two of those stained glass windows that in the new sanctuary are from the original church building. We replicated two of them. So we're trying to keep some of the tradition and the history and bring it into this new space.
When COVID happened, our friends at Taylorsville Presbyterian reached out and they said, hey, we don't have any live stream capabilities. Could we worship together in your space? And so me and the pastor led online worship together for, I don't know, eight months or a year. In that process, we blended the contemporary and traditional together. So now we have the choir also with the band, and they’re doing all these pieces in one worship service. So when you come by, you might assume it's gonna be a little more contemporary because of the feel and the layout. People don't really dress up. I don't wear a robe anymore. Now we've just kind of adjusted into this new normal post-COVID.
The church itself has always been—I don't know if the word is edgy—but they're gonna do whatever they think is the right thing to connect with people in the community. They were one of the first, if not the first church in the county to have a contemporary service. And the story goes, as told to me by the pastor at the time, that even McDonald's put on their sign: “God does not like contemporary worship.” But this is what we think we need to do to connect with people who worship differently or like different kinds of music. We've got all kinds of, I guess, “secular music.” Like, we'll have stuff from The Beatles that people will play, or Bob Marley or whatever, because that's just part of the nature of this congregation.
We're known as the church that loves everybody. That was told to a church member as an insult. And they've taken that and just kind of flipped it and said: Oh yeah, that is who we are, that's who we wanna be. So we'll be the church that loves everybody, even people we disagree with. So a lot of work has been done trying to live that out. To say, oh, yeah, this is what we're supposed to be doing and even if other people think it's crazy or disagree or are upset about it, that's okay. We can keep being faithful to kind of the vision we have and how we connect with other people in the community.
RABBIT HOLE: So it sounds like this idea that a church might move into a car dealership might seem a little bit farfetched, but it's not that farfetched for this church, given its history.
SIMPSON: Right. I think it works fits perfectly.
RABBIT HOLE: I'm watching what's happening in Charlotte this week with the church’s general conference. The United Methodist Church is splitting. And maybe the nature of church has shifted. And so I'm wondering: What does it mean to go to church in 2024? Beyond, you know, just moving into an interesting building.
SIMPSON: I say this a lot: I think what COVID did for church life was to fast forward it 10 years into the future. The culture feels different now. People have learned to maybe value their time a little more and prioritize things because they learned to do that during COVID. What are the things I don't wanna put back in my life now? Some of that has been: I want to slow down, or I want to go travel a little more, and see people a little more. So in some ways people have felt maybe more disconnected in life and maybe even in church.
But then on the flip side, I've seen people more connected. We've got more people worshiping online, joining in Zoom meetings and conversations and book discussions from outside the county. We've got people who come from an hour away to worship in person. I think all that's kind of a mixture.
What we're exploring now is: What does connection look like when people don't come to a building space? We got comfortable not doing that. That's not necessarily a bad thing. So rather than requiring people to show up in one space to meet, what does it look like to meet people in their daily lives? How do you connect and do church and life and faith together wherever those spaces are? Whether it's a school or a play or a bar or a playground or hiking. It could be a sporting event. That's some of what we've been exploring post-COVID.
Everyone connects the most in small settings. We just did a little visioning on this two weeks ago. And the congregation listed all these small group things. Not necessarily in worship. Not that worship isn't very valuable or good or wonderful. But where they're feeling the most connected, the most transformed, the most hope and healing and goodness? It’s by being connected in small groups.
RABBIT HOLE: It's interesting just to hear the journey because it sounds like at some point, maybe like 10 years ago, this church was like: We're outgrowing our building. We need a bigger building. And now after COVID, now you’re thinking: How do we get outside the building?
SIMPSON: Right. And it's just my assessment, not necessarily of this congregation, but just in general that church infrastructure has been such a priority. The buildings and the spaces. Not that they aren't important, it's just they've maybe become more important than they should be. That said, one of the reasons I appreciate this building is that there's a vision, right? It's here to be a community space and for people to use it. Like, we've got a little coffee bar in here. Could we turn the coffee bar into a coffee shop where high school students could come and do homework here or the early college students could come hang out after they get out or during lunch break? Those kinds of things are exciting because we're looking at the full use of our resources. It doesn’t have to be just a church worship space. It can be something much more than that.
In my small town with one stoplight we have two churches that have been repurposed into homes! ⛪️ 🏠
That's my church! So cool! I was friends with Johnny Bruce, the man who envisioned the space being repurposed for our church. We still have the old church building too, and it serves non-profits so well right there in downtown. We also have a relationship with our next door neighbor church, La Puerta. The pastor and his wife are friends of mine, and we love having joint celebrations in our community!