Its membership shrinking, a longtime McComb church is moving out of the building it has occupied for decades as a newer congregation in need of its own space plans to move in this month.
Central Baptist Church has sold its building on Third Street to Community of Believers Fellowship, whose official move-in date is Dec. 17.
“It has space for us to do a lot of things, and so we’re excited about God allowing us to be there, allowing us to open those doors and be in that building,” said Community of Believers Fellowship Pastor Greegory Partman.
Partman established his church in a building the congregation was leasing to own on Apache Drive. Then back-to-back tornadoes in 2019 and 2020 walloped the building as the COVID-19 pandemic caused attendance to plummet.
“We were in that building for six years,” Partman said. “We had paid a lot of money in the lease to try to own that building. It didn’t turn out.”
And if the tornado and pandemic’s effects on church attendance weren’t enough, Partman himself had a severe case of the virus that had him out of the pulpit for most of 2020.
“In March 2020, I got the worst case of COVID,” he said. “I was in the hospital for 80 days. I was on the respirator for 11 days. I spent about 35 days in King’s Daughters and then in rehab in Hammond, La., for about 35 days.”
Although he recovered from the virus, his church’s building remained in disrepair, and in-person services were on hold. Membership had fallen from about 140 to about 80.
“It was a tough ordeal for me, but the church remained vigilant during that period,” Partman said. “We were not meeting in person.”
Community of Believers bought some property on Gertman Hill Road with the intention of building a new church there, but skyrocketing building materials prices quashed that plan.
Partman approached Central Baptist Pastor Robert Netterville about the possibility of buying his church’s building, but the congregation wasn’t ready to sell.
“We talked about a year ago about this,” Netterville said. “He made an offer at the time and the church wasn’t willing to accept that. About a year later, I ran into him at the hospital. He was making a hospital visit and I was making a visit, and I asked him, ‘Hey, man, you still interested in the building?’ We negotiated and here we are, so God had His perfect timing.”
Central Baptist is now meeting in the auditorium of the student union building at Southwest Mississippi Community College. The congregation has bought some acreage in the Indian Reservation neighborhood in western McComb — not far from Partman’s old building — and plans to eventually build a smaller church there.
Like Partman experienced during the pandemic, Netterville said the past few years have been hard on membership and attendance for his congregation, and others.
He approached the members of Magnolia First Baptist, who recently sold their building as well, about possibly merging, “but it just didn’t work out.”
“I’ve tried to get some of these smaller congregations to merge together,” Netterville said. “You could have a 300-member church.”
As Central Baptist moves out and Community of Believers moves in, they hope to grow membership and leave a positive impression on the community.
“I’m not a church planter but I’m going to have to learn,” Netterville said. “We’re replanting our church.”
Partman sees the Central Baptist campus as the perfect place for that. There’s a spacious new parking lot adjacent to the church’s original building that was constructed in 1955 and the new sanctuary,which was built in 1973.
“It was well kept. It’s a great location,” Partman said. “It’s in the center of town, really. It has a lot of folks in that neighborhood, just between Bendat and Broadway, Delaware and Presley.”
Netterville said Community of Believers is the ideal congregation to take over Central Baptist’s soon-to-be former building.
“We wanted to make sure that somebody that preached the Bible, that believed in salvation, that was conservative in their theology — we just felt like this community needed that kind of a church here,” Netterville said.
The two churches held a trunk-or-treat event in October, and they’ll have a joint worship service and ceremonial exchanging of keys on Sunday evening.
And while the two congregations — one majority Black and the other majorty-white — will part ways from there, it’s possible they’ll work together in the future to reach out to the community.
“ We’re going to have to be able to work together. We’re going to have to be able to create an atmosphere of working together, regardless of what our partisanship may be, regardless of what sign may be on the outside of the church,” Partman said. “It's not a phenomenon, it’s been done before, but every chance we get to chip away at the block that divides us, we need to take that opportunity.
“It’s about ministry and everybody needs a minister, too, and we do have a different culture as it relates to worship, but we’re serving the same God.”
