Another dawn

Morning Star Baptist Church felt trapped in a decline – as if caught between Pharaoh and the Red Sea – in its former location in East Central Spokane.

So the congregation chose to look to the future by calling a full-time pastor, moving in October into an accessible location, establishing a memorial library for its famous astronaut son, and starting day care and outreach to its new neighborhood in Northwest Spokane.

For the Rev. Herman Lewis, it’s the first time in 25 years that he has been a full-time senior pastor. He came to Morning Star seven months ago on faith, leaving an $80,000-a-year job in management with Holiday Inn.

Morning Star’s move has resulted in about 100 people attending Sunday morning services, compared to 13 previously, Lewis says.

Accessibility – along with preaching and outreach – has made it possible for older members to come. Several no longer were able to climb the stairs at the former building at 1829 E. Mallon Ave., the church’s location for 40 of its 104 years.

And none of the members lived in that neighborhood anymore.

At 3909 W. Rowan Ave., in a building that a multiracial Pentecostal church outgrew, Morning Star painted stripes for four handicap parking spots, so people can walk or wheel right in from the parking lot.

“A 96-year-old woman we (previously) had to carry up the steps in her wheelchair cried when she learned we bought the building. Here she can just roll into the building,” says Lewis, who has a passion for elderly people from spending time with his grandmother while growing up.

The new location also has space for a library to honor a famous member: astronaut Michael Anderson, who died with his six crewmates when the Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart on re-entry in February 2003.

Lewis says the library has been a dream of Anderson’s parents, church members Bobbie and Barbara Anderson. They want it to be a place where other young people can come, see artifacts, read books and be inspired to follow their dreams, as their son did.

“If young people have a goal and a dream, we want them to stick with it,” Lewis says.

Lewis’ parents moved from New Orleans to Winnie, Texas, when he was 14. There, they attended St. Paul Baptist Church, where Lewis recognized his call to ministry at age 16.

“When I first felt God calling me to ministry, I walked a mile and a half to my grandmother’s home to tell her first,” he recalls.

“My parents were having marital problems. She told me to go back and tell them.”

Lewis found they were so moved by his call to ministry, they decided to straighten out their relationship and stayed together until their deaths. Two of his seven brothers also are pastors (he has four sisters as well).

After graduation from high school in 1975, he attended LaMarr University for two years. An all-state quarterback, a basketball player and track athlete, he felt out of place.

“I kept thinking about the Bible when the coach was talking,” he says.

At age 21, Lewis became a licensed pastor and served his first church in Beaumont, Texas, from 1981 to 1989. The bishop paid for him to attend Mount Zion Lively Hope Bible Institute, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in theology in 1984.

He served Texas churches in Brazoria from 1989 to 1994 and Galveston from 1994 to 2004, leading the latter to construct a new building to hold 500 people.

A senior engineer with Holiday Inn, his employer for many years, Lewis was moved to a position in the Seattle-Tacoma area last year and began serving a church there. A Morning Star member heard him preach and told the Spokane congregation about him.

“I told them I wasn’t interested,” Lewis says. “They told me to pray over it.

“I knew nothing about Spokane except the sign I saw in Seattle.”

He was impressed that the congregation wanted him to be their full-time pastor, not just to preach on Sundays. So he retired from his career with Holiday Inn to become their pastor.

As he started at Morning Star, members showed him blueprints for a new building. It would cost $1 million to remodel the church, or more to tear it down and build a new church on East Mallon.

“I heard God calling me to move the church, not remodel or rebuild the former building,” Lewis says, adding, “I didn’t have a clue where.”

He had the business card of a pilot he had met at the SeaTac Holiday Inn, whose wife was a real estate agent in Spokane. Lewis called her and in a week found the new location.

But when he went to see the building, members of another church were there, ready to write a check for $19,000 less than the full price.

“I told the Realtor, ‘This is our church,’ ” he says. “We offered the full price.”

Although Morning Star had savings plus collateral on the Mallon building, a bank and a mortgage company at first turned them down because they had so few members.

Church members prayed. The bank changed its mind.

Lewis learned on a Friday that the building was theirs, and he began moving things with a rental truck on Saturday. On Sunday, Oct. 22, the church had its first service there.

He has baptized 14 people since coming to Spokane, and nine since moving to the new location, which has a TV screen for projecting sermons and songs.

Now, in the building, the dreams continue. The church plans to form a nonprofit organization to open a day-care center for preschoolers and start an after-school learning center for the community, open from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Lewis’ wife, Sandra, and several women in the church have completed training to operate the day-care center and the learning center.

Morning Star also has been reaching out to provide food for hungry families and to meet with neighborhood churches to learn about other needs.