Baptist

At Antioch Baptist Church in Jamaica, Queens, Mayor Eric Adams outlined zoning changes to help faith groups convert unused buildings, sell air rights and build homes on their campuses, as part of a 100,000-home plan.

A Sunday Gleaner history recalled how George Liele acquired three acres in east Kingston in 1789 and opened Jamaica’s first Baptist church led by a Black minister, as land purchases by preachers spread the movement across the island.

In Nebraska, where dozens of churches have closed, former churches are becoming homes, six-unit apartment buildings, offices and museums, with one buyer saying his building could not be built today for under $4 million.

Washington, DC has lost about a third of its houses of worship since 2008, as congregations sell to developers and follow members to the suburbs. Mount Bethel Baptist Church sold for $5.7 million and moved to Forestville.

Housing Justice Cymru has helped deliver 75 social homes across Wales, often on redundant church land, and Cardiff’s Albany Baptist Church is becoming a mixed-use building with 12 affordable homes.

Preaching at the Bustamante Hospital for Children’s 60th anniversary, Rev Devon Dick said poorer Jamaicans deserve the same health care as the well-off, contrasting bank bailouts and corporate waivers with resistance to spending on the poor.

Clarksonville Baptist Church in St Ann marked 185 years in 2023. It began as a free village when Rev John Clarke used abolitionist Joseph Sturge’s money to buy a coffee estate and sell plots to the formerly enslaved.

Mount Ephraim Baptist Church has sold about 6.5 acres near Atlanta’s Westside BeltLine trail, where developers plan 300 apartments, including 46 affordable units, and 53 townhomes, while the church plans to relocate.

Rev Dr Devon Dick told his Boulevard Baptist congregation he had counselled a former Stocks and Securities Limited wealth adviser who confessed to fraud, in a scheme that cost Usain Bolt US$12.7 million, and asked whether noble motives can excuse wrongdoing.

The 30th National Prayer Vigil, hosted at Annotto Bay Baptist Church in St Mary, planned to use its donations to refurbish the computer lab and resource centre at Baxter’s Mountain Primary School and present new computers.

First Baptist Church of LaPlace sued Church Mutual Insurance, alleging slow and inadequate payment for damage from an April 2021 windstorm and Hurricane Ida, which left its 38,000-square-foot building badly damaged.

First Baptist Church of Columbus, Mississippi, on its downtown site since 1832, approved a new sale offer after an earlier deal collapsed, having cut the asking price from $1.5 million to $450,000 over six years.

New Bethel Baptist Church built Foster House in Shaw to house families displaced by riots. Now DC is suing over mould and rodents, tenants call the church a slumlord, and the pastor says the city is trying to push the church out.

When COVID-19 made its $30 million meeting room impractical, St Elizabeth’s municipal corporation moved its meetings into a Black River Baptist church, a sign of how large church buildings serve as civic space.

A shuttered Anchorage strip club, closed after a wage lawsuit and liquor licence problems, has been renovated into Open Door Baptist Church, with its main stage turned into a pulpit.