Religion Rocks In Buckhead

The first time you walk inside the Buckhead Church, you know you’re not in a traditional Protestant Christian church: no stained-glass windows, no plush carpeted walkways leading to polished-wood pews and no traditional religious symbols found in a typical church.

It’s really much more like a movie theater or a venue for a music concert. Two large high-definition video screens project the “previews” for the upcoming service to a dimly lit sanctuary full of 20-, 30- and 40-something attendees, many of whom are dressed casually in jeans, denim jackets and T-shirts. With four services each Sunday – 9 and 11 a.m., 1 and 6 p.m. – some show up with children in tow or Starbucks in hand.

Onstage are several microphones, electric guitars, a computerized keyboard and a drum kit, plugged in and ready for the service that’s about to begin. The opening chords aren’t from centuries-old hymns; they’re the opening guitar riffs to the Beatles’ classic “Can’t Buy Me Love.”

“That’s not an accident,” explained David McDaniel, director of North Point Ministries in Alpharetta, of which the Buckhead Church is a satellite campus. With churches competing with golf, Sunday brunch, reading the Sunday paper or gardening, McDaniel said, “We think about what it would take to present something that’s enjoyable, appealing and engaging.”

According to its Web site, the church’s mission is “to lead people into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ... by creating environments where people are encouraged and equipped to develop intimacy with God, community with insiders and influence with those outside the faith.”

There are actually three levels of commitment, McDaniel explained, analogous to “irresistable environments”:

• The foyer or entry: Sunday morning services, the first place to be introduced and welcomed.

• The living room: smaller more interactive, bi-monthly events.

• The kitchen: weekly meetings of six to eight individuals or five to six couples for Bible study and prayer.

“Each environment has a little less anonymity and more intimacy,” McDaniel said, “and we let people go through in their own pace. The goal is that everyone would end up in a small group.”

Brooke Shepard, a 27-year-old Accenture consultant who grew up attending a mainline Methodist church in Augusta, and has been a Buckhead Church attendee for about two years, said the church reaches people in their 20s and 30s who are often bored with traditional Sunday services.

“You go to a traditional church and [you think] that’s some story I don’t care about, or it doesn’t relate to me today,” she said. “Even though all this was written 2,000 years ago, [at Buckhead Church] they make it relate to you today.”

They do it by adopting many of today’s high-tech communications tools, with video presentations that approach the quality of MTV and CNN. “Having a quality experience is important,” said Associate Pastor Bill Willits.

It also helps to have a youthful, energetic pastor, Andy Stanley, who keeps up with the changing culture. The North Point church, started in 1995, had been drawing several hundred attendees from Buckhead, and in 2001 a group of them approached North Point Pastor Stanley about setting up their own satellite campus.

Stanley, 47, is the dynamic son of Charles Stanley, the long-time pastor of First Baptist Church of Atlanta. He dresses casually – open collar, no tie or jacket – and his sermons, more like conversations heavily peppered with references to Jesus Christ, are delivered in a laid-back, sometimes humorous style. Even though he’s on the big screen (originally used to link video presentations to overflow crowds who could not fit in the main auditorium), the connection is one of closeness and friendship.

“It was not anything hugely strategic,” said Willets. “It’s just that our auditorium in Alpharetta was so full. Somebody came up to Andy and said, you know, this works so well here, this will work anywhere.”

The church established a satellite location at Buckhead Baptist Church. Greeters were on hand, musicians were added and Stanley’s sermons were beamed in. The numbers grew quickly; crowds outgrew the move to the ballroom at Tower Doubletree Hotel and are now bused from satellite parking lots to the current facility, a 3,000-seat converted Harris Teeter supermarket on Roswell Road, just inside I-285.

Today, about 4,000 residents from around Buckhead attend one of four weekly Sunday services, while the Fusion singles workshops draw about 800 area 20- and 30-somethings each week. At North Point more than 10,000 adults hear the church’s message weekly.

“We are filling that auditorium at Buckhead four times every Sunday and turning people away,” McDaniel added.

The growth of the large groups attending the Buckhead campus is responsible for the construction of the church’s new home – a 190,000-square-foot facility in Tower Place that is expected to be completed in April 2007. While the size of the new building’s auditorium will be about the same – 3,000 seats – its parking capacity will greatly expand, to more than 1,400 spaces from only a few hundred today.

So far, McDaniel said, the church’s capital campaign has raised about $30 million of its $37 million goal. The church is also drawing interest outside the Perimeter. The 2,000-seat Browns Bridge Community Church is now under construction in Cumming and is expected to be completed in May.

“Churches, for whatever reason, have gravitated toward the abstract rather than the helpful and the engaging,” Willits said. “But if the teaching is not helpful, at the end of the day, then why did I just spend an hour and a half going? Nobody’s getting points for being in church on a beautiful Sunday morning inside a building.

“What we’re real committed to doing is taking the issues that people deal with and just allowing them to see, hey, the Scripture is really practical about these things, and do it in a process that is engaging and helpful.”