Historic Nashville Church Founded By Amy Grant’s Great-Grandfather Languishes Amid Lawsuits
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — For nearly 100 years, the Central Church of Christ preached the Gospel, welcomed the vulnerable and served the city. Now, the one-time downtown anchor faces litigation and a future full of uncertainty.
Insurance magnate Andrew Mizell “A.M.” Burton — a benefactor of Lipscomb University — built the Central church in the city’s heart in 1925. For nearly a century, the church used its location to meet the needs of people downtown.
But in recent years, a sweeping slate of changes has engulfed the church: Central became a nonprofit corporation and renamed itself the Nashville Church of Christ. It launched a renovation but then ceased meeting in its historic space in 2018. Now, worship occurs on Zoom. Longtime church members have left.
Former members interviewed by The Christian Chronicle attribute the changes — which have left them distraught and skeptical about motives — to Shawn Mathis, who became the Central church’s third elder in 2017.
Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported on a “yearslong legal dispute” between the church and Burton’s heirs, including his great-granddaughter Amy Grant. If her name sounds familiar, she’s a six-time Grammy Award winner famous for her pop and contemporary Christian music.
The Chronicle requested interviews with Mathis and additional Nashville Church of Christ ministers but received no reply.
The attorney representing the church, C. Troy Clark, declined to respond to specific questions, instead referring the newspaper to public documents. Clark is a deacon of the Central Church of Christ in Augusta, Georgia.
Clark said his clients are “trying the best that we can to follow what we believe to be our legal and ethical obligations … as it relates to … what we would call extrajudicial statements about the pending litigation.”
Lost connections
Howell Townes grew up at Central and served the congregation for 30 years as treasurer. His parents married there in 1933.
Townes recalled that Mathis and his wife began attending sometime in 2017. That September, the treasurer was planning to get a haircut when an email from the preacher summoned him to a meeting with Mathis. There, Townes said that Mathis told the leadership they must incorporate as a nonprofit to comply with IRS requirements and save the church from lawsuits.
The treasurer didn’t buy it.
“Due to Central deciding to become a 501(c)(3) organization (which I feel is not required of a church and therefore unnecessary), I plan to resign as both the Treasurer and a Deacon at Central,” Townes told a Central elder in an October 2017 email.
“I never set foot in that building again,” Townes told the Chronicle.
Townes said he and his wife, Janet, feel sad and angry as they think about “all the connections” they’ve lost.
“My grandparents went there. … I met Janet there,” said Townes, now a member of a different Nashville congregation, the Lindsley Avenue Church of Christ. “We were doing some good in God’s name in the center of downtown Nashville. And we’re not doing that now.”
Former member Ken Tucker and his wife, Martha, began attending Central around 2011. The Tuckers liked Central’s size and opportunities for service.
“We felt confident in a small congregation where we could actually be used,” he said.
Central welcomed the couple. Tucker taught Sunday school and occasionally preached and led singing. Eventually the congregation invited him to serve as an elder, an invitation he declined because of his wife’s poor health.
Martha, now deceased, left the congregation when Mathis became an elder.
Tucker thought that Mathis’ installation was “strange.” Still, he stayed with the congregation a little longer to finish a teaching commitment. But he eventually left, too.
Tucker pointed to what he described as excessive praise heaped on the new leader by outside speaker Larry Mathis, Shawn’s father. Echoing other members, Tucker labeled the installation a “coronation.”
A former preacher in Woodbury, Tenn., about 55 miles southeast of Nashville, Larry Mathis is now listed as an elder and education minister on the Nashville Church of Christ website.
Tucker likewise recalled Shawn Mathis’ urgent desire for Central to incorporate.
“He was insistent, right from the beginning to … make it a nonprofit organization, although it was already a nonprofit organization,” Tucker said.
Embroiled in litigation
As noted by the Wall Street Journal, the Nashville Church of Christ faces problems beyond disaffected former members.
In 2020, the church sued Burton’s heirs over rights to the building after family members began investigating changes there. The church states in legal documents that it began meeting in other locations in December 2018 because of “full-scale renovations.” The church worshiped primarily online during the pandemic, according to those documents.
Among the 26 defendants named in the suit, besides Grant, were the singer’s second-cousin, Andy Burton, son of A.M. Burton II, a minister to Nashville’s Hillsboro Church of Christ for more than 30 years. A.M. Burton II recently died.
A key issue for Grant is keeping alive the story of her great-grandfather, his values and the Central Church of Christ.
“This is part of all of our history, the impact that one human can have in such a short time, especially when working together in the context of … a faith community,” Grant told the Chronicle.
“The work of that church was instrumental in changing the face of downtown Nashville,” she added.
What her great-grandfather did in 1925 can inspire leaders in 2025, she believes.
Grant grew up in Churches of Christ, attending Nashville’s Hillsboro and West End congregations. While her career makes it difficult to place “formal membership” in one church, she said, the singer feels a “deep connection” to Churches of Christ, shaped profoundly by the a cappella hymns she sang as a child and teenager.
Tall buildings in the crowded core of downtown Nashville, Tenn., flank the Nashville Church of Christ, formerly the Central Church of Christ. (Photo by Ted Parks)
Deeds and taxes
Key to the Nashville Church of Christ controversy is the deed to the disputed church property.
Divisive doctrinal issues of the time color the language, which requires church trustees to reject “instrumental music in their worship” and “disapprove of all human organized societies.”
More crucially, the deed reserves the property for “the use and benefit of the Church of Christ,” a condition that, if violated, mandates that the property revert to the estate of A.M. Burton. If no congregation meets in the building, the Burton family argues that the church is no longer honoring their forebear’s intentions.
According to the office of the Metropolitan Trustee, Nashville Church of Christ Inc. owes $96,079.77 in property taxes and interest for 2024. The government began assessing taxes on the property in 2020, yielding a total tax bill of more than $400,000.
The state found that “the property is not used in furtherance of exempt purposes” according to a 2021 document obtained by the Chronicle. “Any current use of the property is sporadic at best,” the state maintains, adding that incomplete renovations and risks from toxic substances “would seemingly preclude regular use.”
Besides the land where the church building stands, the Nashville Church of Christ owns two pieces of property used as parking lots.
“When we left … the church was getting over $40,000 a month automatically from the parking lot rent,” Townes said. “That’s what kept Central alive financially … because our numbers had decreased as people went to suburban congregations.”
The office of Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti — a member of the Harpeth Hills Church of Christ in Brentwood, south of Nashville — has investigated the Nashville Church of Christ over questions related to its use of missionary funds.
Documents from the attorney general’s office detail six-figure salaries for some of the Nashville Church of Christ’s ministers, supplemented by housing and health insurance allowances.
A request to preaching minister Spencer Davidson for a Zoom link to join online worship went unanswered. When the Chronicle used a link provided by a previous attendee, the host refused to let the reporter participate.
About 45 minutes later, the reporter found the church building’s front doors locked, with garbage clogging a stairwell and excrement dotting a narrow passageway separating the building from a neighboring structure.
‘The Central Church of Christ died’
Mathis spoke about his work at the Nashville Church of Christ in a “Friends of the Restoration” lecture at Faulkner University in Montgomery, Ala., in 2019.
The Nashville leader characterized the congregation as a “case study” of the dysfunction in leadership that can drive people from ministry and churches out of existence.
Mathis stressed that elders are not only responsible for members’ personal spiritual needs but for congregational financial management.
“The elders are the governors of the Lord’s church today. You heard the word, ‘the governors,’” Mathis said, emphasizing elders’ roles as congregational administrators.
Mathis critiqued aspects of Central’s leadership. While the first generation of Central leaders — men such as A.M. Burton — had provided clear direction, the congregation had failed to conduct succession planning, he said. As early leaders died, the church began to falter.
He offered what he warned were strong words about the church’s recent history.
“The former elders’ wives took over the congregation, and the elders were figureheads for 25 years,” Mathis claimed. “That’s a serious problem.”
He later added, “The church became a social club for the elderly.”
Mathis praised the previous leadership’s money management, observing that the elders had “kept the money well,” including the funds generated by the parking lots.
“There’s a lot of money to be dealt with, a lot of money to do the Lord’s work,” he said.
In the 2019 presentation, the Nashville Church of Christ elder recited a litany of problems he found at the Central building, including “poor electrical wiring” along with “a stench from broken plumbing systems, black mold under carpet (and) two squatters living in the building.” He spoke of “vagrants” who bullied elderly church members and stretched out on pews during Bible class.
Once renovations began, “it was dangerous to have people in the building,” Mathis contended.
“I believe the Central Church of Christ died,” he said. “We’re relaunching the church there.”
On its website, the Nashville Church of Christ underscores its desire for a global impact.
“We believe that we, the Church — the called-out body of Christ — exist beyond the walls of a building or geographical boundaries,” the site reads.
“Our online church services allow us to connect outside our immediate communities, sharing the gospel far and wide.”
The website provides a link to the Harbinger Institute, which urges visitors to inquire about “six week seminars” and “special programs.” The online theological school has ties to the church.
‘I just don’t want it to die’
While the Nashville Church of Christ touts its online ministry “outside” the local community, students of the downtown congregation’s history praise the inside-the-city outreach it pioneered a century ago.
The original Central church sprang from efforts to establish a thriving Church of Christ squarely in Nashville’s urban core, explained Mac Ice, librarian and researcher at Abilene Christian University in Texas.
Between 1997 and 2008, Ice served the congregation first as youth minister, then as associate minister.
Toward the end of the 19th century, area church leaders had adopted a strategy for planting churches called “swarming,” Ice said, expanding outwardly from downtown to start congregations in different parts of Nashville.
“They planted churches in each quadrant of the city … very near the streetcar lines by intent,” Ice said. “They (were) taking advantage of the suburban growth of the town.”
The focus on the periphery left the city’s heart spiritually forlorn. A.M. Burton stepped into the vacuum. The church he helped finance filled the void with a Gospel not only proclaimed but embodied, historical accounts reveal.
In a 1999 study, minister and educator Harold Shank outlined the urban congregation’s boots-on-the-ground approach.
Central offered free dental and medical services, Shank wrote. It built a safe playground for kids otherwise left to the streets. A day care program assisted children of working mothers. The church served a free lunch for the unhoused and poor, providing 45,000 hot meals between 1925 and 1928. It acquired housing for young men and women.
May Ola England, 83, now a member of the Mt. Juliet Church of Christ near Nashville, benefited from Central’s visionary programs. In the early 1960s, she lived in the congregation’s girls’ home, a residence across the street from the Central building that provided affordable housing for young women new to the city.
England was a recent graduate of what is now Freed-Hardeman University in Henderson, Tenn. After growing up in a small Oklahoma town, she had found work in Nashville.
England attended Central, where she was especially fond of minister Thomas Whitfield. “I loved him as a Sunday school teacher,” she said. “He was … so good to all of us.”
A.M. Burton’s descendant Andy Burton saw the congregation’s focus on people’s physical as well as spiritual needs as a reflection of his great-grandfather’s deep faith in Jesus’ teachings.
The Burton descendant pointed to a 1927 story in The Tennessean where his great-grandfather went straight to Matthew 25 to answer a reporter’s question about starting Central: “For I was hungry, and you gave me meat; I was thirsty, and you gave me drink.”
“He was way ahead of his time. … His whole view of a church was,” the younger Burton said.
“There are stories about the church being open at night for the homeless when it got cold,” he added, “and that homeless men would be asleep on the pews in the middle of the night.”
Andy Burton hopes that the building his great-grandfather constructed can keep serving as a beacon, “a center for something like what Granddad was trying to do.”
“I just don’t want it to die,” Burton said of the legacy of his great-grandfather, who wanted “the church to really have a living testimony to the community.”
This piece is republished from The Christian Chronicle.
Ted Parks is a Nashville-based correspondent for The Christian Chronicle. A contributor to the Chronicle since the 1990s, he teaches Spanish at Lipscomb University.