The auditorium of First Baptist Church in downtown Jacksonville, Fla., is being demolished to make way for an apartment tower that will include a Publix supermarket, according to the Jacksonville Daily Record.
The demise of the 10,000-seat worship space follows the 2019 announcement of a major reduction of the Southern Baptist congregation’s downtown footprint from 10 city blocks to one. Senior Pastor Heath Lambert at the time described the plan as key to the church’s survivability.
“If you want to get people to come to First Baptist Church on Sunday morning, you have to get them to do two things they never do,” Lambert said during a Sunday sermon disclosing the plan. “You have to get them to come to church, and you have to get them to come downtown.”
The newly renovated Lindsay Auditorium currently used by First Baptist Church of Jacksonville, Fla. (Photo courtesy of Paragon 360)
He blamed high maintenance costs and a 20-year decline in membership — which was 28,000 at its peak — for the need to reduce campus size and operations. “What we can’t do on one block, we won’t do,” Lambert said.
The Jax Examiner speculated that First Baptist also had a part in its downtown membership falling to 4,000 in 2019 by becoming multi-site. “The church also helped to continue that decrease in membership at its downtown campus by offering satellite churches in Ortega and Nocatee.”
The church’s website indicates both campuses remain in operation.
While the congregation initially planned to sell 90% of its properties all at once, the pandemic necessitated unloading parcels piecemeal, including the $1.13 million sale of two buildings and surface lots in 2020, the $8.39 million sale of two blocks and the $6.10 million sale of the auditorium and a parking garage in 2022, the Daily Record reported.
Meanwhile, the city issued a demolition permit in June for the former church auditorium where Gateway Jax intends to build a 14-story, mixed-use structure with apartments and a grocery store, the newspaper recently reported. The demolition is continuing despite unresolved issues between the City Council and developer over more than $49 million in incentives.
As recently as Aug. 9, The Florida Times-Union images of the work show wide-open doors revealing crumbling walls and ceilings inside the former auditorium, a section of the ravaged upstairs pew-area and one end of the building with a large section of missing wall. The massive worship space was dubbed the “Homerdome,” a reference to former pastors Homer Lindsay Sr. and Homer Lindsay Jr.
The church’s website describes a current downtown campus of two buildings with one auditorium each, a small park, two parking garages and one parking lot. Facilities include counseling offices and multiple age groups and counseling offices.
Jerry Vines
First Baptist once was known as the “Miracle of Downtown Jacksonville” for scooping up wide swaths of the city’s downtown as retailers and department stores departed for the suburbs beginning in the 1970s. Former co-pastors Homer Lindsay Sr. and Homer Lindsay Jr., followed by Jerry Vines, made the church a social and political force as the church became the third-largest in the SBC at one time.
Vines was elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention during the “conservative resurgence” and is the subject of an upcoming episode of BNG’s “Stuck in the Middle with You” podcast.
The church has been the site of controversy, as well. Preaching in 1992 in the auditorium now being demolished, Vines declared Islam’s Prophet Muhammad to be a “demon-possessed pedophile.”
In 2008, then lead-pastor Mac Brunson was sued by an anonymous blogger critical of the church who alleged the First Baptist convinced one of its members, a sheriff’s deputy, to open an investigation into his identity. The case eventually was settled.
Heath Lambert
Lambert stirred controversy of his own in 2023 by requiring church members to sign onto a sexuality statement that decreed marriage is exclusively between a man and a woman and male and female are the only God-given genders.
Refusal to sign constituted a resignation of membership, according to an explanation on First Baptist’s website.
The downtown church currently meets in a newly renovated Lindsay Auditorium originally built in 1976 and updated in 2021.
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