First Baptist Church on Main Line to sell property and close

When Vera Tolbert, a Liberian who fled to Germany and then the United States because of political unrest in her country, landed in Philadelphia about 7 1/2 years ago, one of the first things she did was look for a church.

The first one she tried, Sharon Baptist Church, was too big. "I cannot go to a church where there are 1,000 people," she said.

Then a friend took Tolbert to the First Baptist Church of Ardmore, a small but remarkably diverse and tightly knit congregation where members from across the Philadelphia region attended services in an old stone edifice tucked into a residential section of South Ardmore. On Sundays, she worshipped with a mini-United Nations of congregants from Peru, India, Holland, the Congo, and the Caribbean.

"They were just warm, loving people," said Tolbert, 51, a Blue Cross researcher who lives in Overbrook Park. "They grew to be like a second family."

But for the First Baptist Church, its source of strength was also the root of its downfall. In the end, the Main Line church was just too small.

With as few as 15 people still attending weekly services, the congregation made the painful decision in June to close and sell the property, including the 250-seat sanctuary, which has stood since 1923 on East Athens Avenue, and a stone parsonage next door. The remaining worshipers face an uncertain future, although most would like to keep attending services at the Ardmore site if they can sell it to another congregation.

Otherwise, said 78-year-old Barbara Breniser, who's been going to First Baptist since she was 2, when there were as many as 1,000 members, "we'll have to find someplace else. I just can't imagine it."

In the last couple of years, First Baptist's remaining worshipers have gathered on chairs in a small back room because the church can no longer afford the $11,000 annual bill to heat the large main sanctuary. Gone are the festive Christmas services and large dinners prepared in the basement kitchen on good china and hauled upstairs on a dumbwaiter.

There's been little upkeep on the 88-year-old building for years, as every dwindling dollar goes to pay for insurance and utilities. There has been no permanent pastor for three years, and the last paid employee, an organist, left in June after the shutdown decision.

In many ways, it's a painfully familiar story for the old-school Protestant churches that were once the spiritual bedrock of the Main Line. Attendance in the pews has dropped sharply in the last couple of decades due largely to changing demographics. Younger newcomers to the western suburbs tend to be more affluent and less likely to attend church service, members say.

"The neighborhood outpriced your families," said Patrick Mullen of Alden, treasurer of First Baptist, who now leads services as well. "Older people left, and others have an I-don't-want-religion attitude nowadays."

Even as traditional white Anglo-Saxon churchgoers were disappearing, First Baptist found an unexpected second life as a welcoming refuge for a polyglot of international arrivals to Philadelphia and the western suburbs.

The congregation traces its roots to 1890, when the population of the Main Line was beginning to surge. Not unlike a modern American corporation, the church's history has been marked by mergers and breakups.

African American families broke away in the early 20th century to form their own church, Mount Zion Baptist, although the two congregations held a fondly remembered unity service in the early 1990s.

By then, First Baptist had merged with Overbrook Baptist. That union - along with a bequest and a trust fund - provided an influx of cash that helped keep First Baptist alive even as its monthly bills began to outstrip what it took in through the collection plate.

Still, the Ardmore church underwent something of a revival when a dynamic new pastor, the Rev. Dave Meneely, arrived in 1987. A former missionary in Africa, Meneely continued to make First Baptist more ethnically diverse. That was in accord with broader trends in its parent body, the American Baptist Church, which has grown in recent years largely through ethnic congregations such as new Korean American churches.

And so as congregants from the South Ardmore neighborhood vanished, First Baptist attracted farther-flung newcomers such as Tolbert and the Ten Booms, a large Dutch family from Indonesia whom the church adopted in 1961 and which included the eventual wife of Mullen, the treasurer. The new arrivals loved the close sense of community and the congregation's social awareness, such as supporting a mission in Zambia, which continues to this day.

"It's kind of like Cheers - everybody knows your name," said Bill Herion, a 60-year-old former Catholic who joined after watching Meneely officiate at a relative's funeral.

But the overall head count continued to shrink, and then First Baptist hit a streak of bad luck. Meneely left in 2006, and his replacement, the Rev. Kate Lynch, who provided a brief burst of energy and new ideas, died of breast cancer in 2008.

The church has just $60,000 left in the bank; its monthly bills run to about $3,000, but it takes in only roughly $1,000 a month in donations. One burst pipe or leak in the roof, and its savings could be wiped out.

First Baptist, which has no debt, is asking $900,000 for the property, with a mandate that all proceeds will go toward charity. It is in a residential zoning district and lacks off-street parking.

There's been tentative interest from an Episcopal congregation in Paoli and an Egyptian Coptic church in Goshen.

"We're very diverse, but we're all God's children, so what does it matter?" said Herion, who is overseeing the sale. Members hope a new buyer would allow them to join the new congregation. If not, they agree the dissolution would be hardest on the oldest congregants.

"The building . . . I'm used to it, all the different nooks and crannies," said Breniser, who lives nearby in a senior residence in Ardmore. "Just being in there . . . is comforting."