A Thursday morning fire destroyed the meeting place of the Scott Avenue Church of Christ in Nashville, Tenn. — just hours after a new Christian was born again in its baptistery.
Fire department officials did not immediately determine the cause of the blaze, which seems to have started in the front of the building, though they did not suspect arson, according to Scott Avenue minister Raymond Bass.
Scott Avenue church building. Photos courtesy of Ted Parks
Bass was headed to his day job as a science teacher at Stratford High School when he got a call from church elder James Gipson just before 6 a.m. “Hey man, the church is on fire,” Bass recalled Gipson saying. The elder received an alert from the church’s alarm system about 20 minutes before and called police.
As Bass got closer to the church building, just a few blocks from his school, he saw a plume of smoke. “I knew then that was us,” he told The Christian Chronicle. Pulling up, he saw several fire trucks and dozens of firefighters.
“I walked up, and I watched,” he said. “I’m watching the church just burning and watching the firefighters trying to put the fire out.”
Eventually, part of the building’s roof collapsed. “At that moment, I was just like, wow,” said Bass, who’s preached for Scott Avenue for a decade. “I just couldn’t believe it.”
The brunt of the damage affected the building’s auditorium, baptistery, audiovisual equipment area, three offices and a classroom, while the fellowship hall in the back of the structure remains intact.
“When I walked in, the pulpit was melted,” Bass said. “All the pews are just gone. … There’s barely any evidence that there was anything here.”
Several of the church’s 220 members live in the neighborhood and stood watching as well. Others drove in when they heard the news. Bass tried to console them.
“There was a little bit of counseling going on … and then just praying and telling them, ‘Hey, everything’s going to be alright,’” the minister recalled.
“There’s barely any evidence that there was anything here,” minister Raymond Bass said of the Scott Avenue church building. “We had to let reality kind of set in and kick in,” he added. “And so now we’re just, at this point … trying to see what’s the next stage.”
As Bass spoke to a Chronicle reporter over the phone Friday, church members continued visiting the razed building, surveying the damage and expressing their feelings to their preacher. The Scott Avenue Church of Christ’s building held a lifetime of memories for members before a fire destroyed it.
“Our members are heartbroken,” Bass said.
The Scott Avenue church’s sign encourages passers-by to “watch, pray and give hope.”
“The journey” is a phrase Scott Avenue members have repeated as they mourn the end of a chapter of their congregation’s 61-year history, Bass said. It was the title of the preacher’s sermon last Sunday, which drew on Ecclesiastes 7:8: “The end of a matter is better than its beginning, and patience is better than pride.”
The preacher said the church plans to rebuild and expects insurance to cover a portion of the cost, though it is still in the early stages of the claims process. Meanwhile, church leaders are searching for a temporary meeting place.
