Solid Rock United Methodist Church is one of our remarkable partner Thriving Rural Churches. At Solid Rock, inside a little blue steel building along Highway 24 in Cameron, North Carolina, is “church like you’ve never seen it”: a congregation whose average age is in the 20’s, where hundreds of hungry people are fed each week through “Martha’s Place,” and where “those people” become “us” as they are welcomed and accepted and discover that Christ came for them, too.

At Solid Rock, church is not something that happens on Sundays, but something that happens all through the week, and that then gets celebrated with the first day Sabbath. A sign of this shift comes each Sunday afternoon when the blue building is transformed from a sanctuary into a different kind of holy place, a child care center for children during the week. Later, during each weekday morning a group of people will meet at 5:30 am to pray for the children, the church, and its ministries. That night, others will gather to attend the church’s theological institute or to meet in a home group called Share. Then, come Sunday, the band Floodgate will call the community to worship, and the sounds of praise will raise the roof again: celebrating the God who makes us church.

See pictures and read Faith & Leadership’s profile of Solid Rock, a dead church resurrected.