First Baptist Church

Part 8: The Cathedrals of Downtown Minneapolis

Aug 02, 2022

This is part 8 of a multi-part series.

Day four of my cathedral tour highlights the First Baptist Church of Minneapolis, renamed to River City Church in 2020:

The ministry was founded in 1853. The congregation built and moved in to this church building in 1885. The building underwent a restoration in 1923, and is undergoing another restoration, or “replanting”, as they call it, now. Their website has a detailed history of the church, with lots of great pictures, if you are interested.

My day actually started with a brief stop at the Basilica of Saint Mary. Originally intended as a bathroom stop, I ended up attending a short service. They let me take the program home:

This was really special for me, as I have not attended a Catholic service since I was in high school. This marked the second, and final, time I was invited to join in worship on my cathedral tour. I did my qigong in The Mary Garden, which was quite a beautiful location to practice in. I shared the bench with a woman in prayer as I was meditating in preparation for my moving qigong practice.

From there I walked down to the First Baptist Church, and took some pictures of the exterior. It’s a beautiful old building, which showed what seemed to be signs of new ownership:

The front door was locked, and there was no bell. I stepped a few paces away to get a couple more shots of the exterior, when a man came and held the door open, asking, “Are you coming in?” I hurried in with a thank you. I was looking around for someone to talk to. There was no front desk, and while there were a number of young men around, none of them really seemed inclined to talk to me.

I figured I would just follow my routine, starting out by entering the sanctuary and saying a prayer. A bunch of guys were working up towards the stage, setting up what seemed to be a massive new sound system. I took a seat a bit farther back than I normally would, because my regular third-row seat would put us uncomfortably close. I prayed a bit, but I was pretty distracted by the noise the construction crew was making. So I went ahead and began taking pictures of the sanctuary.

I noticed a number of the pews were damaged, and I even found a side room off the sanctuary that was filled with damaged pews:

The interior of the church was not in good shape. Most of the other rooms in the building were stripped down, aside from one room I found full of archival material. For whatever reason, the pipes of the organ are mostly concealed behind a sort of screen, which you can see behind the cross above the choir seating here:

I’m not sure why you would want to hide organ pipes away like that. Because the interior of the church was mostly stripped bare, and wide open, I was able to get a look at the actual pipes from the back, an opportunity I consider myself very lucky to have had.

By this point, I had completed my self-guided tour of the interior of the church, and I had yet to really talk to anyone there. So I went back to the sanctuary and started asking questions to a young man there. I asked if the church was under new ownership; He said yes. I mentioned that I noticed the organ pipes, but I didn’t see the console for the organ; Did he know where it was? He pointed it out to me. So I went to take a look. It’s sort of in pieces at the moment:

This organ is more or less priceless, by my estimation, and I do hope they will preserve it well.

My asking questions seemed to catch the attention of the man in charge, who came to talk to me, asking me what I was doing there. I told him I was just there to visit and say a prayer. I mentioned that I had tried to say a prayer a little earlier, but it was hard with the construction. He said yeah, it’s going to be noisy in here. He politely told me that I could stay for a little while, but that the church was not really open. I told him I would leave in a moment. I made one more attempt to pray, and headed out. He intercepted me and escorted me out. I asked him some questions about the church on the way out. I expressed some genuine interest in River City Church, and that was the first time he was even mildly comfortable with my presence. They are aiming to be done with construction for Easter next year (2023). I’m really curious to see what it will look like then!

I initially thought that the situation was very similar to that of Substance Church, where an older Protestant church building was bought out by a contemporary Evangelical church. There clearly have been some changes here, and it’s hard to find out about the details of what happened. Matt Clausen left as Senior Pastor in fall 2017, and was replaced by Jeremy Adelman, who was the Adult Ministries Pastor at the time. (See here and here.) Jeremy remains the Senior Pastor to this day.

The church remains Baptist, even though their website doesn’t explicitly say so. It is currently a part of the Venture Church Network, as you can see from this church listing, but I wasn’t able to figure out when they joined the network. Venture Church Network, renamed from Conservative Baptist Association of America in 2021, is Baptist, conservative, and Evangelical, according to Wikipedia. So on the whole, it does seem like a similar story to Substance Church, but instead of a Methodist church building being bought out by an up-and-coming Evangelical church, there seems to be an Evangelical revival happening within Baptism itself.

Here are the pictures I took of First Baptist that I haven’t shared above. It’s a really gorgeous church, and I’m so thankful that it’s getting renovated rather than torn down.