As leaders at First Baptist Cleveland know, the best-laid plans can go awry. That means going back to the drawing board — sometimes, with even better results.
By RaeAnn Slaybaugh
Senior Pastor Jordan Easley was called to First Baptist Cleveland while leading a church of 3,000 (and growing). “I thought I’d be there for a really long time,” he recalls.
One day in 2018, First Cleveland Senior Associate Pastor Lovingood called Easley — a friend and ministry peer — and asked if he would preach for one Sunday that summer as the long-standing pastor battled significant health issues.
“I said, ‘Man, absolutely,’” Easley recalls. “When you hear that a pastor is struggling physically, of course you’re going to help.”
He and his family treated the trip like a vacation, enjoying all the outdoor fun Chattanooga has to offer. Though Easley fell in love with the church and the area that Sunday, he returned to his own church and, as he puts it, “never looked back” … until a few weeks later. That’s when the chairman of the pastoral search committee at First Cleveland called him.
Initially, Easley declined to consider the opportunity; he was content where he was.
A few weeks later, he got another call from the chairman asking Easley and his family to at least pray about it. Easley agreed.
“As soon as we started doing that, the Lord started making it clear to us that we’d be transitioning,” he remembers.
What followed was a season of explosive growth at the church.
“We’re grateful and we’re humbled, but honestly, God gets all the credit and the glory for what He’s done here,” Easley points out. “He’s given us a great staff team.”
This includes Executive Pastor Bart Walker, who came onboard a few years later, in 2019. Without much success, Easley was looking across the country for someone to fill the XP role — someone who felt like the right fit. He and Lovingood were on vacation together with their families and invited Bart Walker, a young deacon, to join them.
Walker was a 22-year veteran of a large, privately held healthcare company at the time, working as a senior operations leader. At the time of the trip, he and his wife were praying about what was next on their journey.
“On the beach that day, [Easley] asked me what I did for a living. When I told him, he said, ‘Wouldn’t it be crazy if we ever served together?’” Walker recalls. Although the idea of joining the First Cleveland team was compelling, Walker was, as he calls it, “a healthcare guy.” Even so, Easley asked him to pray about it — just as he was asked to do years before.
Ultimately, Walker accepted the role
“Looking back, I didn’t understand why I was being called to this work,” he recalls. “Now, almost six years later, it’s just so neat how the Lord has used a skill set that I learned and developed in a healthcare administrative role that has been very useful in a large church in southeast Tennessee.”
Today, Easley says he, Lovingood and Walker approach every leadership challenge and opportunity at the church as a team. “It’s never just me; it’s always us,” he says.
This all-in mentality was critical when they inherited a decades-old master plan that was starting to look less and less suited to the church’s trajectory. Whereas most church building projects are led by a single point person on the executive leadership team, Easley, Lovingood and Walker opted for a team approach. In keeping with the unique and effective synergy for which they’re known, all three have been at the helm from the very beginning.
The results speak for themselves. But first, let’s go back to the challenge at hand for these gentlemen.
Time to re-dream
Back in the late 2000s, when the master plan for First Baptist Cleveland was devised, the intent was to perform phase 1 of the project (a worship center), quickly followed by phase 2 (an education building). Little did anyone know it would be a decade before the project would even begin to come to fruition — and in a very different direction than originally intended.
Along the way, church leaders navigated a pastoral transition. And then, of course, COVID struck, bringing with it drastically escalated building costs every month. The price of steel for the proposed master plan quadrupled.
Collectively, the three leaders knew they weren’t aligned with the original master plan but didn’t know where to start over either. They talked to the general contractor, who pointed them in the direction of HH Architects. It turned out to be a pivotal recommendation.
“We interviewed several firms and felt a tremendous peace with HH,” Walker remembers. “In [President & CEO] Bruce Woody and his team, it was very apparent, very quickly, that we had found the people who could re-dream with us.”
The worship center as step #1 was out; having spent much of their careers in student ministry, Easley and Lovingood wanted to focus, instead, on the education building. They challenged HH Architects to design an education building “like nothing they’ve designed before.”
Growing up as a preacher’s kid, Easley wanted a one-of-a-kind design that clearly spoke to the site, the setting, and the ministries that make First Cleveland unique.
With the church located in the beautiful Appalachian Mountains, he wanted people to feel as if they were outside — among the mountains, streams, rocks and grass that surround the campus.
Bruce Woody and his team accepted the challenge, and several collaborative work sessions ensued.
“That’s the main reason I wanted to work with them: because they didn’t just show us their portfolio and say, ‘These are your options,’” Easley points out. “Instead, we were all at a big, round table, dreaming it together.
“We’re a whiteboard culture here,” he adds. “We don’t have all the answers, but we’re going to pray through it, we’re going to pursue it, and we’re going to ask the Lord to give us vision.”
The elements of effective design
To be unique, the building first needed to be prominent, demonstrating its importance. True to form, it’s positioned front-and-center and is, for the most part, transparent. A 20-foot-high curtain wall traverses the second floor. Bringing the outside in, stylized trees are creatively incorporated into the design here and throughout the building.
“When you’re walking down the preschool hallway, it’s a curve, back and forth,” Easley explains. “Even the carpet makes it feel like you’re walking down the middle of a river. The colors change along the way. Everything flows together.”
For the classrooms’ design, Lovingood drew upon research from Harvard. In each, lessons begin with a stage presentation for distinct groups of children based on their age: Kindergarten + 1st grade; 2nd grade + 3rd grade; 4th grade + 5th grade; and preteens.
Then, students break into small groups.
“We do that to match how they learn, and we have very interactive leaders around tables to teach kids what the lesson is,” Lovingood explains. “There’s a lot of intentionality to it.”
Teacher-to-studio ratios are optimized to, as Lovingood says, “ensure that every kid feels like we know them, we love them, and we miss them when they’re not there.”
Design-wise, it’s mission: accomplished
“In this community, you can drive a hundred miles in any direction and not find something that looks like this building,” Easley says.
More importantly, it has delivered quantifiable ministry results.
In 2015, there were fewer than 280 people on campus under the age of 18 on a typical Sunday morning. Today, that number is 1,500.
In fact, the new education building at First Cleveland has proven so appealing that it will soon offer full daycare services, driven by popular demand among the surrounding neighborhoods.
“With this facility, we thought, Let’s make sure all generations are taken care of. Let’s try to get everybody under the same roof. Let’s trust that the Lord will use that to bring families,” Easley says. “And He has. Focusing on the next generation has been the growth engine of our church.”
Sacrificing now for long-term gain
For First Baptist Cleveland, starting with the education building — and completing the entire project in phases, versus all at once — proved to be the right approach. It ensures the church isn’t forced to compromise on its vision.
But it hasn’t been totally without “costs” — primarily, on people.
Because the new, 2,500-seat worship center hasn’t been built yet, the current sanctuary is undersized. This has necessitated a fourth Sunday service, despite First Cleveland launching another campus.
“While I hope I don’t need to preach a fifth service, I told our team something important a long time ago,” Easley says. “I said that I would rather sacrifice and preach more and more if it means more kids can be in our building, and more families can come, and more Bible studies can take place.”
This refusal to take shortcuts is inherent to the church’s leadership DNA.
“Pastor Jordan always calls us to excellence in all things,” Walker says. “We knew that compromising what we were going to build wouldn’t meet the expectations and needs of our community.”
QUICK FACT ABOUT FIRST BAPTIST CLEVELAND
Year established: 1857
Number of locations: 2
Number of staff: 62
Combined weekly attendance: 4,500
Weighing the dividends
Among church projects, Easley, Livingood and Walker say they’re aware that their building approach is against the grain. Even so, it makes the most sense for them.
Drawing on his corporate background, Walker draws a parallel: compound interest versus simple interest.
“If each seat represents a person, pursuing ‘simple interest’ means we’d build a worship center, and that’s what we’d grow to,” he begins. “But if I build a preschool building, a children’s building or a youth building, then, over time, that preschooler becomes a child, then becomes a student, then becomes an adult, and then has kids of his or her own. And those children have parents and grandparents. So, by starting with building this facility, we generate ‘compound interest.’
“It also reflects the great commission of reaching people for Christ,” Walker adds. “We’re baptizing them, making them disciples, and getting them on mission with the Lord. And if we can, we want to start that discipleship sooner versus later.”
Making the case for faith in building
As Easley thinks back on the winding path First Cleveland has taken to its campus expansion, he has some guidance for other church leaders in his position: to make sure that anything they do is a faith step — and to be willing to take that step.
“For a person who reads this article and thinks it’s just about a big church doing big things, I’d say that God has given you a faith step to take,” Easley says. “Whether you run a church with 100 people or 10,000, every church leader is called to a next step. It’s easy to get comfortable with where we’re at; but without vision, people perish.
“If our church hadn’t taken this step when we did, I don’t think God would be blessing our church like He is,” he adds.
