Its windows are smashed, its doors are open, and its interior is ravaged. Soon, the former Akron Baptist Temple megachurch could be coming down.
City of Akron officials introduced legislation to Akron City Council on Monday to fund the demolition of the Word Church building – originally the Akron Baptist Temple – on a 29-acre property at 2324 Manchester Rd.
“This particular piece of property has fallen into the abyss and deterioration,” Deputy Director of Public Service Eufrancia Lash told Akron City Council’s Planning Committee on Monday afternoon. “If you go by this particular property now, it is wide open. It poses a severe public safety problem.”
Brad Beckert, the city’s business retention and expansion manager, echoed Lash.
“We’ve had quite a few complaints on this building within the last three years, starting basically in 2020,” he told the Planning Committee, saying the police and fire departments have been regularly called there. “Even though there’s a lot of homeless encampments, vagrants going in and out of that building, the building’s been stripped of everything on the inside. It’s really become a nuisance and a very dangerous structure to our residents there.”
The church’s current status is a far cry from its heyday as one of the country’s largest megachurches, founded by a televangelist named Dallas F. Billington in the 1930s. In 1962, Time magazine wrote a story called “Religion: Bestselling Church” that detailed the rise of the congregation.
“Early each Sunday, 800 members of the Akron Baptist Temple faithfully arrive at the twelve-acre garden of blacktop and buildings that is their church. They are not the congregation, but merely the staff of deacons, teachers, janitors, ushers, singers, pianists and parking-lot attendants. Once on the job and in uniform – choir in their Sunday best, car hustlers in white – they are ready to receive the crowds who come to hear their pastor …
“Beginning with a congregation of 13, Billington now has 17,000 parishioners, presides over Sunday crowds that surpass 10,000 in church and Sunday school, supervises an annual budget of $620,000 drawn from weekly collections that average $10,750, supports the work of 160 missionaries, and draws vast plans for expansion. A new, $500,000 addition will soon be made to the $6,000,000 temple’s four red brick buildings.”
The Word Church bought the property in 2018 for $1.5 million, but Rev. R.A. Vernon put the church back on the market the next year. Not enough congregants went to the complex to make it work financially. It has remained vacant since going on the market and has fallen into disrepair.
See inside the former Akron Baptist Temple property.
“This particular property has been a problem for our community for a long time,” said Ward 9 Council Member Tina Boyes during the Planning Committee meeting. “And I, and a number of others, have attempted to clean it up time and time again, and you see more and more debris being added, more and more windows broken out. To your point, you can walk straight into the building now and through it. This is not good for the businesses surrounding it, and it’s not good for those who are in the building.”
Documents attached to the city’s proposed legislation say it will cost $1.24 million to demolish the massive property.
“The ownership [of the lot] would remain with the church,” Deputy Director of Economic Development Sean Vollman told the Planning Committee. “We would put a lien on the property for the amount of the demolition as well as the other costs that we have into as far as securing it and the such. It would remain with the Word Church, and we’d probably talk to the land bank about beginning the foreclosure procedure.”
