Burned Out Church Brings Back Memories

“We can’t have what is in the future until we let go of the past,” said Pastor Nathan Ridgeway of the Faith, Life, Fellowship Church; and what a past that has been.

The brick-and-steel church with the towering spire was a familiar sight to many Peachtree Corners residents. Thirty years ago the land was part of a horse farm. With the population boom of the early-to-late 1980s there was a great deal of development in the area. According to the Gwinnett County Tax Assessors Office, the former horse farm was developed into a church in the mid-1980s by Perimeter Presbyterian.

From Perimeter Presbyterian it became Perimeter Church. When Perimeter Church’s congregation grew too large for the building on Spalding, it moved to its current home on S.R. 141 and Old Alabama. Mt. Paran East bought and used the church building until the Faith, Life, Fellowship Church moved in, of which Nathan Ridgeway was pastor.

The building changed hands again 18 months ago when Ridgeway sold the building and the land to Nobel Village, LLC a company that tried to develop the property into a rest home. Ridgeway and the FLF Church moved to the Berkeley Lake Chapel and the rest home development idea ran into problems with the county.

That means for a little over a year the erstwhile church stood empty. The building and its land had become more and more dilapidated as the months wore on. It had become an eyesore and a place for petty vandalism. Many residents wondered if the buildings, that had for so long been a part of the community’s spiritual and geographic landscape, would one day find a new owner and rally again.

But when Mary Taylor of Peachtree Station was driving home from work on Tuesday, Nov. 29, around 10 p.m. she began to smell and see smoke the closer she came to Spalding Drive.

She soon saw that the empty church was engulfed in flames. “I’ve lived here 21 years and I have never seen so many fire trucks,” says Taylor.

Peachtree Corners resident, Jane Mentzer, who lives in Spalding Park Place, the neighborhood adjacent to the church says, “My husband was walking the dog and saw the fire. I called 911 and woke up my next-door neighbors, just in case any sparks from the fire drifted over to our houses.”

Lt. Billy Standridge of Fire Station No. 4 said it took 28 firefighters a total of four hours to put out the blaze with hot spots erupting the next morning. The fire was classified as “Defensive” meaning that because of a possible building collapse, the firefighters had to extinguish the fire from outside using latter trucks. The county fire marshal is still investigating the possible cause of the fire.

Now the building stands like a burnt-out husk. Fire Engines stop by from time to time to make sure no more hot spots have activated. The casually curious drive or walk up to the church to inspect the buildings for themselves.

Peachtree Corners is an area more used to creation than destruction and what saves this event from being thought of as a tragedy for the community are the words Pastor Ridgeway said, “We can’t have what is in the future until we let go of the past.”