Church invests millions in student center to reach next gen
Submitted photos
CORRYTON — Corryton Baptist Church in Knox County completed a $4.5 million student center on its campus, and the facility was designed with a clear evangelistic purpose: get young people through the doors.
“You’ve got to somehow try to get them to you,” said Rocky Ramsey, who has served as the church’s pastor for more than 41 years.
“Schools are getting tougher and tougher to get into. So, part of what we’re going to do is take a night of the week and have it as just kind of an open youth night,” he said.
The urgency behind the goal extends beyond Corryton and into Southern Baptist life. Pew Research data shows Baby Boomers make up only about one-fifth of the U.S. population yet represent nearly half of Southern Baptist church membership.
“Churches age, and if they don’t bring young people along, they die,” Ramsey said.
The new facility is designed to help reverse that trend. It features multiple meeting rooms, three indoor pickleball courts, a game room with air hockey, foosball and video games, ping pong tables, leather lounge areas, and an outdoor patio with permanent picnic tables, green turf, and a concrete ping pong table. The church also plans to open the building to the broader community after hosting an open house March 1.
Ramsey said the student center reflects a philosophy at Corryton Baptist that has guided the church for decades.
“We’ve always tried to aim down,” he said. “We need to build for the future, not for the present.
That approach has shaped the congregation since at least 1990, when Corryton Baptist introduced contemporary worship music — not to be trendy, Ramsey said, but to connect with people who had walked away from church.
“We made the changes to be relevant to people who had given up on church but maybe hadn’t given up on God,” he said. “People who’d been to church and got burned, bored, or both.”
Surveys over the years have consistently shown that roughly half of Corryton Baptist’s approximately 800 weekly attendees were not churchgoers before they arrived.
Funding the project required a significant commitment from the congregation. Ramsey, who said he was initially the most hesitant about taking on a building program, noted that the church pledged $4.6 million against a $4.5 million price tag.
“That just almost never happens,” he said. “We’re not a wealthy church. Nobody gave $2 million.”
The completed student center is only the first phase of planned improvements. The church’s existing student space, which was the original worship center, will be converted into a children’s ministry facility as the next project.
For now, Ramsey’s focus is on what happens when the first group of neighborhood kids walks through the doors on a weeknight and finds a place built just for them.
“We hope it’ll become the happening place to be for kids in the area,” he said. B&R
