Second, Nashville’s Fire Stirs
Old Memories For New Pastor

by Jeff Crossan

In June, when the members of Nashville’s Second Presbyterian Church asked the Rev. Jim Kitchens to be their new pastor, they knew the 53-year-old minister had the experience they were looking for. What they didn’t know was that Kitchens also had experience they weren’t yet seeking but would soon need. He was experienced in dealing with the trauma of a devastating church fire.

In the early morning of September 17, while Kitchens and his wife Deborah were asleep in a Bakersfield, California motel room — the first leg of their journey to Nashville just under way — the 62-year-old sanctuary of Second Presbyterian Church was gutted by a three alarm fire that left the beautiful, white brick building a smoking shell and the 450 member congregation stunned and grieving.

Nearly 10 years earlier, on October 4, 1993, the church Kitchens was serving in California, Davis Community Church, suffered extensive damage due to an arson fire.

In both instances, Kitchens received a phone call in the night informing him that his church had burned.

The phone call from Second Church member Sue Biddle, chair of the search committee that selected Kitchens for the job, awakened not just the pastor and his wife, but many memories of his prior experience.

“What came to me was the whole Gestalt,” says Kitchens, “everything from receiving the call in the middle of the night to the horror of the trauma itself, all the way through to a sense of knowing that when all was said and done, we ended up talking about that fire as the blessing for which you would never pray. Many wonderful things happened in that congregation as we rebuilt.”

And that bit of knowledge bolsters Kitchen’s confidence. He says the daunting task before him hasn’t caused him to question his decision to leave the California church he pastored for 15 years. Rather, Second’s fiery disaster has heightened his sense of call to serve the saddened Nashville congregation.

“This doesn’t scare me away,” says Kitchens, originally from Mississippi, “and it doesn’t depress me. It’s like, well, I know what my main focus of work and ministry is going to be for the first few months. It’s going to be working with the community to come back after this fire. I do feel like I have skills for doing that. I’m glad I’ve got that experience. It’s just not something you ever put on your dossier.”

Kitchens and the seven member church staff at Second Presbyterian will be sharing office space in a house next to the sanctuary site on property the church purchased for expansion. The house, also containing the church library, was untouched by the fire, the origin of which remains unknown.

Second’s sanctuary, considered by many Nashville residents to have been the city’s most beautiful church building, bore the brunt of the blaze’s damage. Church offices and a fellowship hall, which housed the church’s adult day care program, Senior Citizen’s Inc., were also severely damaged. The educational wing of classrooms behind the sanctuary suffered smoke and water damage.

The new activities center, completed late last year, was protected from the blaze by fire doors and escaped all but smoke damage. Just three days before the fire, the congregation had held a celebratory lunch there to recognize the staff for their hard work during the church’s two-year interim period. The church will hold worship services in the center until a new sanctuary is built.

While loss of a church building, particularly a sanctuary, is bound to be an emotional setback for any congregation, such a disaster can also benefit a family of faith in the long run. Kitchens witnessed this positive side of disaster in the aftermath of the fire at his California church.

“Trauma pierces that bubble of security,” he says. “We said, if God’s house, the sanctuary, that place where we encounter God, can be violated, is there any safe place to stand in life? That’s the spiritual and existential question that arises for people. We trot out what we intuitively know – that the church is not the building, it’s the people. But we come to experience the depth of what that saying points toward; that it is being the body of Christ and experiencing being a part of the body of Christ that becomes most starkly real when you lose those physical structures that symbolize that for us. We found spiritual resources and wells that we had never tapped before. Not only were we able to tap them in terms of dealing with the immediate response but they became wells from which we could continue to draw for ministry and mission as we came out of the rebuilding phase.”

New ministries were developed at the Davis church as a direct result of the spiritual growth experienced by the congregation after the fire. One such ministry, the Bread of Life Center, a program fostering Christian spiritual development, has played an important role in the community’s life since 1994.

“The fire really jump-started that dream,” Kitchens says.

Kitchens feels certain that Second Presbyterian, a church highly respected throughout the denomination for its work on behalf of social justice causes and the homeless, will recover from the disaster and continue its outreach work in the local community and the world.

“With a community that has as good a heart as Second does, yeah, this is a real blow to the solar plexus,” says Kitchens. “But folks will come through this and care for one another till we get to a place that is really good. It will just take us a while to get there. There’s work to be done between here and there.”