News

Biltmore Baptist plants new church on Upward Road

An eight-member praise band leads the congregation in hymns at the new Biltmore Baptist Church campus on Upward Road in Hendersonville.

By Bill Moss, Published: March 28, 2015

Hundreds of people streamed from their cars down a gentle slope and entered a former NASCAR racing team headquarters Sunday for the first worship service at the brand new campus of Biltmore Baptist Church in Hendersonville.

Outside the doors, church members wearing bright blue T-shirts imprinted with "How Can I Help You" greeted the guests. Inside, the blue-clad team members offered plates of cookies and bulletins, which contain a welcome from the senior minister and a list of coming events but no list of the order of service. All that's up on giant screens.
Some of the worshipers have been attending Biltmore Baptist in Arden, the mother ship of a growing church that also includes campuses in Swannanoa and Franklin, some had fallen away and still others received a postcard mailing inviting them to the first service at the new campus.
Planting its eastern-most outpost on Upward Road in a building that once housed the Andy Petree racing team, Biltmore deployed a corps of 300 smiling greeters and rolled out its highly produced worship service and to an appreciative audience. If the presentation looks like MTV meets Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Biltmore's leaders stand by a vibrant relevance that has generated growth across Western North Carolina and made the church the envy of every board of deacons that agonizes over declining Sunday morning attendance.

'Serve where you live'

A lobby leader on Biltmore's "first impressions team," Sherri Holbert was delighted to see the big turnout for the first worship service in Hendersonville.
"It's such a large group sometimes it's hard to know who's new," she said. "I saw (County Commissioner) Charlie Messer today and I was like, 'Have you always been at Biltmore?' and he said, 'Oh, yeah, we've been at Arden.' I just think that's the nature of a big church. I know in the first service I have seen a lot of new folks and people that have said to me, 'I've not been to church in five or six years and we're so excited that Biltmore was opening here.'"
"The whole point here is to serve where you live," Holbert said. "I know we're already engaging with Upward Elementary to help them with the programs. I know we're already working with The Storehouse. There will be a lot of those programs."
Top to bottom, Biltmore leaders insist they're not out to recruit the faithful from other established churches.
"What we say is stay where you are, serve where you live, be a church in the community," said Mike McKee. The pastor for new campuses, McKee led a visitor around the building where engine mechanics and body men once prepared stock cars for Sunday racing.
"The philosophy is instead of saying, OK we're going to build one massive building in one location, let's take the church to that community, let's have this type of venue and allow people to come to worship and be a part of what's happening," McKee said.
"Our goal here is not churched people," he added. "Our goal is the people that are not involved in church. We'll have some of our folks that were in Arden that are from here that will probably now come here. We have 300-plus volunteers that are already here making it happen but our goal here is the unchurched."

Big investment

Although from the outside the building looks like what it is — an industrial metal warehouse — a tour inside reveals that the church has invested a lot of money turning offices into classrooms, creating a large welcoming lobby and most of all setting up a sanctuary with comfortable seating, amplifiers and the drop-down screen that shows the video feed of Lead Pastor Bruce Frank, preaching from the Arden stage.

"When that screen drops down, he's about 8 feet tall but it looks like normal," McKee said.
The Hendersonville campus has its own minister, Marcus Hayes, plus a student pastor, a children's pastor and a worship pastor, Caleb Pressley, who leads a tight eight-piece band. The decision to open a fourth campus came after what the suits in a corporate suite would call a marketing study.
"We did our survey, we did our thing, and we think this is a great place to plant," McKee said. "We have people coming from Flat Rock, we have people coming from Greenville, we have folks coming from Hendersonville of course as well. But I've been impressed with the number of people I've met that are from everywhere."
Gini Taylor, the children's director, dashed from one classroom to another checking on groups of children of all ages.
"We have several kids in each age group," she said. "It's a real good turnout and I anticipate for it to keep growing."

Few dresses and ties

A native of Atlanta who grew up in Oklahoma and Texas and arrived at Biltmore in 2008, the Rev. Frank is a youthful and fit 50-year-old who brings a self-deprecating sense of humor and easy delivery to the pulpit. Preaching from the fifth chapter of Ephesians on Sunday morning, he urged husbands and wives to treat their spouses with respect, avoid harsh words and never ever "shame them" in public. By failing to follow Paul's counsel, he said, people bring unrealistic expectations and selfishness to marriage.
"The primary goal of marriage is not to make you happy," he said. "It's to make you holy."
There are fewer white heads, ties and dresses in the whole sanctuary than in one Sunday school class at the First Churches in downtown Hendersonville. In preaching about marriage, Frank addresses couples a long ways from their golden anniversary.
"If you're going to reach your 25th anniversary," he says at one point, "you're going to have to have a truckload of forgiveness."
Frank calls himself out. A counselor once told him, "You're not always right but you're always sure." He confessed that he loved to win an argument. "One of the things I wrote down is, 'Bruce, you can't want to be right more than you want to be Christ-like,'" he said. "Even if you're 99 percent right, own the 1 percent. Does it matter more to win the argument or to resemble Christ?"
Frank brings the message to a close at 12:12 p.m. and somewhat abruptly blinks off the screen, giving way to the praise band and final announcements by Pastor Marcus.
Although Chick-Fil-A is closed on Sunday for the Sabbath, its sandwiches were available for free on the way out, offered on platters by the ushers in blue T-shirts.
Biltmore timed the Hendersonville opening for Christianity's high season and its leaders have already thought about growth. Sunday's debut drew about 1,200 worshippers, although 300 of them were volunteers in what leaders acknowledged was a deliberate overstaffing.
"We have enough seats for 700 people," McKee said. "Obviously if we fill both of those (services) we'll have to look at what could be another hour we could go to. The next three weeks will be huge. Marcus will preach live out here next week and then Pastor Bruce will be back up on Easter."