After about 15 years without owning one, The Well has purchased its first-ever building property -- marking a new phase for a church planted to bring a neighborly ethic into Chattanooga's urban core.
The Seventh-day Adventist congregation currently meets at the Bethlehem Center on West 38th Street. But its roots trace through Chattanooga's Southside. On Monday it closed a deal in that area for a mostly unfinished warehouse, just west of the Sculpture Fields at Montague Park.
The property, which the congregation of more than 100 will likely move to mid-2023 when basic renovations are complete, is set to become the long-term home for a church whose developmental stages have reflected the distinct spaces where it has convened.
For charter members Lisa Clark Diller and her husband, Tommy, this history dates to the early 2000s, when -- new in the area and yearning for aspects of their pedestrian former Chicago lifestyle -- the couple bought a home in Glenwood, within walking distance of Tommy's work.
White people in a mostly Black area, they sought community at neighborhood association meetings where, according to Lisa Clark Diller, the senior ladies taught them about how to be good neighbors.
Lisa Clark Diller worked as a history professor at Southern Adventist University, and the couple commuted out to its large Collegedale Seventh-day Adventist Church. But the couple increasingly found church commitments took up scarce time, and they wished they overlapped more with their desire to be forces for good around Glenwood.
By early 2008, Mike Fulbright, more than seven years into a pastoring job at the Dillers' church, was itching to build a Seventh-day Adventist congregation outside the network of relationships that orbited the university, a strong gravitational center.
He discussed planting a church in Chattanooga with the Dillers, who felt the other Adventist churches closer to home were at the time too conservative to make a good personal fit.
They considered planting a church in the fast-developing Southside neighborhood -- one of the few in Chattanooga that facilitated a non-car-centric lifestyle.
"We don't live there," Lisa Clark Diller said, "but we can jog there from Glenwood."
Not insular
On a series of afternoons in early 2008, Fulbright and other founding members gathered in the Diller's Glenwood living room, among other places, to form a plan.
Averse to the often suburban charity style where church volunteers travel for a day to another area to help people they don't personally know, Lisa Clark Diller wanted members of the new congregation to live and volunteer where they worshiped.
As true neighbors, she said, people get to know each other in more meaningful ways -- and work shoulder-to-shoulder, rather than top-down.
"At least it feels more likely that it's going to happen that way," Lisa Clark Diller said.
So went her vision. Others had their own. What would it look like to be a full-fledged church member? What about someone who isn't involved in community service? What, in the Adventist tradition, does it mean to be a welcoming place? To gay people? To families? Should the church have a children's ministry?
One basic idea they settled on: The church would not be insular; it would have tentacles in the community, Fulbright said. If it disappeared one day, people living in the vicinity should notice that it was gone.
Golden ages
Known in part for its Saturday sabbath, its members' vegetarian inclinations and particular emphasis on the second coming of Jesus, the Seventh-day Adventist Church is an American-born Christian Protestant denomination that reports about 22 million members worldwide.
According to Fulbright, as new Seventh-day Adventist congregations mature, their classifications in the eyes of the greater denominational body move from "mission" to "company" before, upon meeting certain thresholds, they are officially recognized as a proper church. During The Well's pre-church period, the Georgia-Cumberland Conference, the Adventist administrative body for about half of Tennessee, effectively grafted the congregation onto itself.
The help ran deeper. Congregant tithes go to the conference, and large churches subsidize smaller churches, Fulbright said. And even outside this system, his former Collegedale Seventh-day Adventist Church contributed to The Well $30,000 in its first year, $20,000 in its second and $10,000 in its third, he said.
Early expenses? Furniture, for one. Around Christmas of 2008, The Well held its first proper service at a dance studio sublet on Saturday mornings in Chattanooga's Southside. In those early days there were a few chairs, and attendees circled up seven or eight couches, Diller said. A guitar-playing member didn't know the church songs, Diller recalled, but nimbly learned them on the fly as Fulbright and others sang along.
Soon, the congregation got tables and more chairs. Fulbright gave sermons and led discussions. Congregants skewed young -- closer in some ways to childhood than parenthood.
Diller remembers a couple years in, when her husband's parents visited from Florida and attended a service. His dad -- perhaps expecting by that point to find a bigger church, with nice pews and carpeting -- looked around at the dance studio in which about 45 people sat chatting around tables.
"So," he said, "how long do y'all think you're gonna keep this up?"
But Diller was content.
"That was a sweet time," she said. "Everybody has different golden ages."
Simple style
Soon the church rented the space full-time, renovated it and began to test its capacity as membership grew.
"It was almost chaotic," Fulbright said.
By around 2014, he said, the conference formally designated The Well as a church.
Around that time Kristy Davis, her husband and two young children moved to the Chattanooga area from Cookeville, Tennessee. They "church-hopped" -- availing themselves of the area's numerous Seventh-day Adventist church options, Davis said by phone Thursday.
On a given Saturday, the church they went to was dictated by their children's idiosyncratic nap schedule: When the children awoke, the parents identified a service they could attend on time.
One of these times, they chose The Well. Kristy Davis remembers an "intimate space that was bursting at the seams," full of people in their late 20s and 30s. By now there were children around, and the music echoed with richness and power.
"It was a beautiful thing," she said.
Davis liked the "watered down, simple worship style" and its emphasis on localized community service.
The children still had to sleep. But Davis said she and her husband "started manipulating their naps so that we could go to The Well."
If there was magic in the dance studio space, it dissipated in part when the congregation, then approaching a membership of 190, Fulbright said, moved to a bigger area in another part of the same building.
The remodel was tricky and drawn out, Diller said. Whereas in the old space entrants came in through one door into a pleasant coffee bar, now there were two entrances, Davis said, diluting the welcoming power.
"There's something about an intimate environment and a full room that creates a unique dynamic in churches, " Fulbright said. "If you get too big for your britches and you take on too much space too fast, I think people can feel like they're bouncing off the walls."
Attendance dipped. Still, Fulbright maintains the move had to be done.
The church, meanwhile, was softening on some of its emphases. Diller said she might have initially been a bit obnoxious about the non-commuting emphasis, which alienated some would-be members.
Commuting from outside the "bowl" of Chattanooga, the Davis family, for their part, tried to maintain the localized community service ethic, helping clean up at a school near the church or heading in with their sleeping bag to host people transitioning out of homelessness to whom the church gave a temporary place to stay.
Growing roots
Sometime in early 2019, Fulbright said, a conference official gave the idea -- and blessing -- for The Well to purchase its own property, so long as the mortgage roughly matched the current rent. Convinced this made financial sense and would bring the stability necessary to carry out The Well's mission, church leaders were already seeking properties when the pandemic hit.
(READ MORE: Chattanooga churches open new locations, break new ground during COVID-19 pandemic)
Reuniting in spring 2021 after a year of remote services, and seeking to build savings for a down payment, the church returned to the cheaper Saturday morning rental model, this time at the Bethlehem Center gymnasium.
Davis is grateful for the space, but said the arrangement has been less than ideal. It's hard to host social events, she said. Children have to pack up their projects in boxes rather than leaving them out for display. After service, the feeling among the congregation is "gotta get out!"
Diller was initially skeptical of buying a property, which she feared would suck up valuable resources. But she now sees the value. Rents in the Southside were getting untenable, and the congregation would have been part of a gentrification problem if they continually up and moved to cheaper places, she said.
Not long ago, a location at 1925 Rossville Ave., just down the street from their old place, showed immediate promise -- but Fulbright wasn't sure The Well could afford it.
The church made an offer, leading to an extended due diligence phase. For the roughly 10,000-square-foot space, they ultimately agreed to pay $1 million -- a sum that an area Adventist group called the Professional and Business Association financed at a below-market rate of 3.5%, Fulbright said.
Though the full renovation will take far longer, Fulbright hopes the church will be ready for occupancy in late spring, after the building gets up to code by adding parking, bathrooms and a disability ramp.
"We're willing to worship in a pretty primitive space," he said, "as long as we've got heat and air."
Contact Andrew Schwartz at aschwartz@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6431.