“When the Rev. Charles Wilson Jr. was contemplating a move to Roanoke about four years ago, the first place he was taken on a tour of the city was the former Villa Heights Baptist Church.
Now the pastor is working to resurrect the facility in northwest Roanoke. But Wilson’s goal is not just to make a permanent home for the church he founded.
He wants the building to serve as a community center of sorts, with a coffee shop and education spaces, an outdoor projector for movie screenings, maybe even a grocery store or gym. Wilson, 42, plans to start a community development corporation that can provide the infrastructure and support for others to start whatever programs they feel would best serve the community.
The Hill Church has only recently begun promoting more widely what it’s referring to as the NW Love initiative, bringing attention to the project with a slick video, featuring community members, businesses and landmarks, shared online late last year.
Wilson’s wife, Tranay, said the video was not only designed to raise awareness of their plans, but also to combat negative conversation about the northwest quadrant of the city, to ‘kind of pull the curtains back a bit to see like, wow, there’s some beauty that’s happening here.’
Wilson said people often ask why he’d take on this project and why he chose to do it in northwest Roanoke. He typically responds by asking ‘Why not?’
‘It’s the perfect place to go. We’re always asked to do what’s comfortable and convenient. That’s part of the problem is we usually do what’s comfortable and convenient,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t give God an opportunity to show that he’s the one going to do it. For us this is great, the Lord has shown he’s going to do it, he wants us to have it, he cares for the people in this community way more than we could possibly imagine.’
Listening to the neighborhoodThe couple first visited Roanoke when dropping their son off for college at Liberty University. A craving for ice cream prompted them to stop in the Star City. Wilson, who has worked as a pastor since 2006, lived in Dallas at the time but was thinking about starting a new church somewhere else.
The family moved to Roanoke in 2017 and The Hill Church held its first service on Easter Sunday 2019. Wilson estimated that the church, which currently shares space with the Church of the Holy Spirit in downtown Roanoke, has 50 to 60 members, though it’s a little hard to gauge during the pandemic when some people have not yet returned to in-person services.
Wilson said he wasn’t sure initially why he’d been called to Roanoke, but he said it became clearer after the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. He felt driven to build a diverse, multicultural church.
But during the couple’s first few years in Roanoke, Wilson said, they didn’t talk much about the church. Instead, they focused on listening and earning trust.
Wilson said his ideas for the building are based on what he’s heard and observed while meeting with community leaders and city council members, and serving on the Roanoke Neighborhood Advocates group and as a substitute teacher in the schools. But ultimately, he said, people who live and work in the church’s neighborhood will determine how the 45,000 square feet are used.
He joined the Melrose-Rugby Neighborhood Forum, as the church sits at the edge of its boundaries. President Estelle McCadden said Wilson has mobilized members of his church in the past to help out with events at Kennedy Park, and the two have talked about projects they could do together.
Once the church property is fixed up, McCadden said, it ‘would be an asset to the community.’
She thinks the building could end up being a draw for young people, especially with a coffee shop — something McCadden said the area lacks — or a gym. That would align with her goal of getting more young people engaged in the neighborhood — and in the forum.
‘The membership in our forum now is older people, elderly. We need some younger blood, as I call it,’ McCadden said.
Wilson’s goal is not necessarily to create programs, he said, but to complement ones that already exist or to provide space and support for those getting off the ground. The role of the community development corporation he plans to start is to offer coaching and mentoring that makes other nonprofits sustainable.
‘We don’t have this attitude like we’re superheroes coming in to do something great. We want to inspire the greatness that’s here and provide opportunities for that,’ Wilson said. ‘So really it’s what are the needs here in the community that the community’s requesting and not what the Hill Church or our NW Love component wants to do.’
Building a gathering space
Wilson has been working with Restoring Hope Roanoke, which was created in 2017 to help churches connect with their neighbors, to kick off the project. As an established nonprofit, Restoring Hope Roanoke can serve as a sponsoring agency, helping to ‘kind of incubate new ministries,’ said the Rev. Doug Hart, who serves as chairman of its board.
Hart said he and Wilson have traveled to Florida, Tennessee and Arkansas to visit other churches that are similarly building ministry around community and economic development, a passion the two men share.
There are challenges to doing this work, Hart acknowledged, noting Roanoke’s racial divide and the pain caused by urban renewal. Hart said he worries that too often, government and charitable organizations come in with programs that may be well-intentioned but are not rooted in community development….”
View the whole story here: https://roanoke.com/news/local/congregation-resurrects-an-old-roanoke-church-building-into-a-new-community-and-worship-center/article_59a6f81c-6fd9-11eb-98ac-6f68b6ae3b8c.html