For the congregation at Sardis Baptist Church in Charlotte, the meetinghouse and the church are two different things.

“We emphasize that Sardis Baptist Meeting-house is the physical address for the congrega-tion,” said pastor Tim Moore. “Sardis Baptist Church, the people, the congregation, gathers at the meetinghouse.”

Sardis was organized 20 years ago and became an affiliated congregation with the Alliance on Jan. 1. “The pioneers who founded Sardis came out of a 2,000-member mega-church that was preparing to move farther out to the suburbs,” Tim said. “Sardis was started in the hopes of creating a more authentic, intimate Baptist congregation that emphasized community and tolerance among its members’ spiritual journeys.”

For several years the congreation met at a private school. Twelve years ago Sardis built its first meetinghouse. In February it dedicated an education building.

Sardis took its vote to affiliate with the Al-liance in April 2007, coming on the heels of a decision by the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina to exclude any church that baptized a gay or lesbian person or had gay or lesbian persons on their membership roles.

“This violation of local church autonomy was the final straw for our congregation,” Tim said. “Sardis Baptist Church declared that it will decide, through guidance of the Holy Spirit, who it will and will not baptize and who it will and will not receive into church mem-bership. We were not about to allow the state convention to infringe upon this right and responsibility of our congregation, and we de-cided to leave the North Carolina convention.”

“This discussion caused us to look at our

Baptist partnerships,” he said. “We had been a Cooperative Baptist Fellowship congregation since the early days of CBF, but we decided we wanted a broader network than that. The Alliance was a natural choice. We had good relations with other Charlotte churches that were in the Alliance – Park Road, St. John’s, Wedgewood and Myers Park. The Alliance’s central tenets of Baptist freedom and heritage spoke to our folks.”

The Alliance was no stranger to Tim, who has been pastor at Sardis for 13 years. He has been an individual member of the Alliance since the late 1980s when he was in seminary, and he served on the board from 1994-1997. He has also served on the North Carolina Al-liance board and published that group’s first newsletter. Mandy England Cole, associate pastor at Sardis, is a current Alliance board member.

Over the years Sardis has joined other con-gregations in ecumenical, community mission work. One example is the Room in the Inn program, which runs from December through March in Charlotte. Sardis hosts a dozen homeless persons once a month through the program, feeding them dinner, supplying a warm place to sleep and feeding them break-fast. “When we built the new building last year,” Tim said, “the congregation decided to make space for a shower and washer and dryer for our guests.”

Sardis is currently preparing to create a medi-tation garden, which will include a labyrinth and space for a columbarium. It is also in the working stages of creating a three-year com-prehensive marketing and outreach plan in an effort to do a better job of telling its story and inviting persons to be a part of its fellowship.

Quick facts

1Sardis celebrated its 20th

anniversary in October

2008.

2Sardis has four

ministerial level staff

members, all part-time,

including pastor Tim

Moore. “It is a unique

pastoral model and one that

has served the church very

well for the past 10 years,”

he said. The model started

when Tim and his wife

had triplets and he wanted

to spend most of his time

during the week at home

taking care of them.

3 Sardis voted to affiliate

with the Alliance in

April 2007 to take effect on

Jan. 1, 2008.

4The pastor, Tim Moore,

served on the Alliance

board 1994-97. Associate

pastor Mandy England Cole

served 2007-2011.

How to find

5811 Sardis RoadCharlotte, NC, 28270Phone 704.362.0811http://sardisbaptistcharlotte.org/

Sardis Baptist ChurchCharlotte, NC

Alliance of baptists1328 16th Street NW | Washington, DC 20036202.745.7609 | Info@allianceofbaptists.org

November 20, 2008

Sardis pastor Tim Moore, pictured here helping at Vacation Bible School, grew up in an American Baptist congregation in Huntington, WV. He earned a a B.S. degree in business at Mars Hill College in North Carolina in 1984, and graduated from Andover Newton Theological School in Massachusetts with an M.Div. in 1989. He earned a D.Min. from Princeton in 1998. Prior to his service at Sardis, he was associate pastor at Shamrock Drive Baptist Church in Charlotte for six years.