Eight Decades on Carver School Road
The Carver Road Church of Christ occupies a 7.5-acre campus at 4399 Carver School Road in the northeastern part of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The congregation that meets there grew out of storefront and tent meetings in the mid-1940s and has spent the last four decades on its current site, where members built a sanctuary seating eight hundred, a K-12 charter school, and a 42-unit senior apartment complex. The church describes itself with the motto "Our Work of Faith, Labor of Love, and Patience of Hope," drawn from 1 Thessalonians 1:2.
The full name on signage and mailings is "Carver Road Church of Christ," but the body has gone by two earlier names. It began in 1945 in a storefront at Wheeler and First Street, became the Greenwood Avenue Church of Christ in 1946, and was renamed Castle Heights Church of Christ when it moved to a building at Carver Road and Highway 311 in 1964. The current name took hold after the move to the present property in 1983.
Roots in Mid-Century Tent Meetings
Gospel tent meetings held around Winston-Salem drew the first members in 1945, when an evangelist named David Shows Sr. preached and baptized many of the converts. Christians from two nearby congregations (the Capernaum Church of Christ in Clemmons, North Carolina, and the Redland Church of Christ in Advance, North Carolina) joined with those new believers to form what the history describes as the first Church of Christ among black brethren in Winston-Salem. The early members met at 206 N. Greenwood Avenue and called elders Lewis Wharton, George Curlee, and Emmit Cloud to shepherd the flock in the early 1950s.
The Greenwood congregation sold its property in 1964 and relocated to the Castle Heights community, where elders Emmit Cloud, Nick Shelton, and Frank Dulin served with deacons Ollie Carpenter and Julius Bray. Ministers during this period included David Shows Sr., Charles Hancock, Eugene Lee, and Nathaniel Miller. By the late 1970s the building had outgrown its lot, and the members purchased the Carver School Road property in 1977 and paid it off the following year.
The 1983 Sanctuary and a Growing Campus
The new edifice opened in June 1983 at a cost of 1.5 million dollars. Its design included seating for eight hundred, twenty-eight classrooms, a kitchen and fellowship hall, a minister's study, a secretary's office, a leadership office, a nursery, and a library. The debt on that building was retired in 1996. A second building project completed in 2009 added upper-level classrooms, an elevator, community and church pantries, a commercial kitchen, and a full basketball gym that converts into a carpeted banquet hall.
Dr. Jefferson R. Caruthers Jr. and the Preacher-Shepherd Model
The current minister, Dr. Jefferson R. Caruthers Jr., has led the congregation since July 2005. He is the son of a gospel preacher and grew up in California, where he became a Christian in 1969. He holds degrees from Southwestern Christian College, David Lipscomb College, Harding University Graduate School of Religion, Cleveland State University, Faulkner University, and a Doctor of Ministry from Hood Theological Seminary. Before coming to Winston-Salem, he preached for the Central Avenue Church of Christ in Coldwater, Mississippi (1983 to 1993) and the Adams Avenue Church of Christ in Cleveland, Ohio (1994 to 2005).
On the Carver Road campus, Dr. Caruthers serves alongside three other shepherds, with the title "Minister-Shepherd." The four shepherds are Dr. Jefferson and Felecia Caruthers, John and Diane Foxworth, Roy and Edelina Oliphant, and Walter and Carol Weathers. Five couples serve as deacons: Micheal and Monique Curry, James and Alinda Gadson, George and Kim McNair, Bernard and Mary Terry, and Joe and Mattie Wilson. The Caruthers family lives on campus in the Kuriakos House, which serves as a center for family ministry. Mario McKennon serves on the ministry team as youth minister and assistant to Dr. Caruthers.
Sunday Worship, Wednesday Bible Study, and a Radio Ministry
Sunday morning is the main gathering of the week. The congregation meets at 10:00 a.m. for worship, with services livestreamed each week on the church's YouTube channel. A song leader leads the assembly, and the ladies' ministry prepares the Lord's Supper each Sunday. Bible classes for all ages meet alongside the worship hour.
Wednesday is a Bible-study day, with a regular 11:00 a.m. class on the calendar. Youth meetings for the church's young people are scheduled on Wednesday afternoons, and Husbands' and Fathers' Ministry meetings gather periodically. Dr. Caruthers also preaches on a radio broadcast that airs twice each week, on Sundays and Thursdays.
Men's Ministries and Ladies' Ministries
Two parallel ministry structures give the congregation much of its shape. Men's Ministries is organized into fourteen committees that handle most of the operational and pastoral needs of the body: Edification and Worship, Building and Grounds, Benevolence, Education and Curriculum Planning, Evangelism, Family Development and Support, Member Accountability, Education, Elderly and Seniors, New Members, Sick and Shut-In, Technology, Youth, and Transportation. Each committee has a written purpose and works under the elders' oversight.
Ladies' Ministries runs an even longer list of committees that care for the life of the church. Anniversary, Baptism, Beautification, Bereavement, Birthday, Bulletin Board, Clothing Bank, Communion, Food, Greeters, Kitchen, Ladies' Day and Retreat, Nursery, Secretary, Decoration, Social Media, Sunshine, and Treasurer committees each take on a particular task. The Bereavement committee prepares food at the church after funerals; the Baptism committee prepares garments for new converts; the Communion committee sets up the Lord's Supper every Sunday; and the Nursery committee provides a clean and safe infant and toddler environment during worship. The annual Ladies' Day program and the off-site Ladies' Retreat are the largest special projects of the women's work.
Reading Safari: A Children's Reading Program
Reading Safari is a year-round children's reading incentive program sponsored by the church. It began in Cleveland, Ohio in 1999 and now serves children ages 2 through 12 in the Winston-Salem area. Members pick books of their own choosing, record them on book tags, and turn them in for prizes at periodic meetings. Readers who complete one hundred books by the end of the year are recognized at a January ceremony with a trophy and a Barnes and Noble gift card; readers of at least forty books receive a medal. The program maintains its own Facebook page for updates.
Quality Education Academy and the K-12 Charter School
The campus is also home to a K-12 charter school. It began in 1992 with kindergarten through fifth grade and grew steadily: a middle-school charter was added in 1997, the high school grades followed, and a dedicated school building with a gymnatorium was completed in 1999. Dr. Caruthers chairs the school's board, and the school's history is closely bound up with the church's. Printable study materials for the Sunday Bible class curriculum include chapter-by-chapter worksheets for the Gospel of Luke and the book of Judges.
Kuriakos House, Diakonia House, and the Prison Ministry
Two houses on the Lansing Drive side of the campus extend the church's ministry beyond Sunday morning. The Kuriakos House (the name means "of the Lord") is a residence next to the sanctuary that Dr. and Mrs. Caruthers purchased to provide family ministry. Felecia Caruthers directs it, and members use their gifts to lead life-skills activities and to minister to families of every configuration.
The Diakonia (Ministry) House across Lansing Drive is a ministerial intern house purchased in 2012. Each summer, ministry students spend two months training with Dr. Caruthers in preaching and teaching. The first interns were Andrew Braxter and Jason Mills, students from Southwestern Christian College.
Under previous minister Cloys R. Cecil, the congregation also started a prison ministry and Bible studies in the Cleveland Avenue neighborhood, along with classes held in convalescent homes. The clothing bank housed in the utility building has been part of the church's benevolence work for decades.
Quality Independent Living: A Forty-Two-Unit Apartment Community
Quality Independent Living is a senior apartment community built by the church on Lansing Drive and dedicated on August 8, 2004. It has a capacity of forty-two units and serves the older adults of the congregation and the surrounding neighborhood. Brother Leroy Nelson was its founding director. The facility is a tangible expression of the congregation's commitment to walk with its members through every stage of life.
Roots in the Churches of Christ Brotherhood
Carver Road is part of the broader Churches of Christ, a cappella tradition that traces its roots to the Restoration Movement of the early nineteenth century. The congregation participates in a number of fellowship institutions: Dr. Caruthers sits on the executive board of the National Lectureship of Churches of Christ, chairs the North Carolina Brotherhood and State Lectureship, and serves on the boards of the National Teachers' Workshop and the Southeastern Lectureship. He is also an adjunct instructor at New York Theological Seminary and an instructor for the School of Religious Studies in Little Rock, Arkansas, and he hosts the Proclamation Press New Year's Symposium each January.
Brother Cloys Cecil runs a school for preachers that he founded in September of 2005, and Dr. Caruthers publishes Bible study materials through Proclamation Press. The church's bulletins and weekly articles carry titles such as "A Faith Distinguishing Gates, Trees, and Rocks" and "What We Have Heard, What He Says."
Giving, Visiting, and Staying Connected
The congregation supports its ministry through three giving channels. Members and visitors may give by cash or check using envelopes collected by the ushers during the worship service, by mail to the church office, or through Cash App using the $CarverRoadCOC cashtag. Worship services are livestreamed on the church's YouTube channel, which also features recordings of previous sermons. Dr. Caruthers's writing includes his "Statement of Faith" and the paper "O Man of God" that he presented at the 77th Annual National Lectureship.
The church office sits at 4399 Carver School Road, Winston-Salem, NC 27105, and can be reached by phone at 336-767-7949 or by email at cr-churchofchrist@outlook.com.
For more than eighty years the people who gather on Carver School Road have made the same passage: from a storefront on Wheeler and First Street, to a house on Greenwood Avenue, to the Castle Heights crossroads, to the present sanctuary and school on the hill. The work, love, and hope at the heart of the motto remain the heart of the place.