ATHENS, Ga. (BP) – Try to make a judgement on Cleveland Road Baptist Church from its exterior. Look at its brick façade from 30-plus years ago and tall, classic steeple. Drive around from the road that bears its name and see the parsonage in back, all of it surrounded by a forest of pine, magnolia, cedar and birch.
Make the call on what it’s like inside. Most people, if not all, would be wrong.
In many ways it’s what you would think. The church has a little more than 80 members. Pews adorn the sanctuary. Pastor Parker Moore preaches in a shirt and tie.
But it sticks out that around three-quarters of the people are college students. You’re part of the older crowd if you remember when iPods were a thing.
The young people are leading the way, and they’re loving it.
When Moore, 30, accepted the call to Cleveland Road it was a homecoming. He and his wife, Audrey, had met nearby at the University of Georgia and attended the church as students. In 2019 he received a call from its remaining handful of members. If there was a church on life support, it was Cleveland Road.
The plight of those who had invested in him as a college student touched Moore.
“I thought about the hospital stays where they wouldn’t have a pastor to visit them. I wondered who would preach their funerals. And, I wondered who would be there to help them close the church’s doors if it came to that.
“All of those things weighed on me,” he said.
Moore has always been a southerner at heart even though he grew up in Queens, N.Y., where his father, Ed, has been pastor of North Shore Baptist Church for 30 years.
“I had an affinity for the South and the University of Georgia,” Moore said.
That affinity came naturally. His mother is from northwest Georgia and his parents met at UGA, where Ed was a walk-on defensive end who became a letterman for the Bulldogs in the Herschel era. Moore moved in with his grandparents his senior year of high school for the in-state tuition rate to attend UGA.
His love for the South notwithstanding, Moore is thankful for his childhood of being a pastor’s kid in Queens.
“It was a little piece of heaven,” he said. “There were 35 countries represented in our church and our people were united in the Gospel. Our church had around 300 in attendance and it was an outpost for us.”
The realities of real estate in New York City bring a different game plan for churches outgrowing their space. There are no discussions on adding another wing. Over the years Moore watched as North Shore planted multiple Southern Baptist congregations throughout the metro area.
Still, he had no intention of going into full-time vocational ministry. That changed when he was 19. At UGA he earned a double major in Communication Studies and Religion. Currently he’s pursuing a Master of Divinity through Southern Baptist Theological Seminary online.
In 2015 Moore and his wife, Audrey, moved to Savannah when he became youth director at Bull Street Baptist Church. Just as important, he entered an intentional mentoring relationship with Pastor Calvin Fowler.
“My official title was ‘youth director and pastoral apprentice,’” Moore said. “We’d meet weekly and I’d sit in on elders’ meetings even though I wasn’t an elder, marriage counseling and other things. I watched and learned, getting a taste of everything that went with senior pastoral ministry.”
