Great Soul-Winning Churches - Elmer Towns

foundation and the single-story building was lifted to two stories. Over 1,000 were seated in the
second auditorium on many occasions.
In 1968, the church needed more room. This time Graves designed on paper a new
auditorium that would hold over 2,000 people, and in 1972, the Sunday School averaged 1,218,
the 92nd largest in the nation, according to Christian Life magazine.
Miracle location.—Graves tried to buy land in the present location but couldn’t. Only
then did he realize that he had the right building, but the wrong location. Next to a railway track,
on a country road, it takes 45 minutes to an hour for all the people to get out of the parking lot
after a service. Many visitors will not come back because of the inconvenience.
Graves tried to buy land on Interstate-85, but he figured $20,000 per acre was too much.
One day his wife pointed out a piece of property on Bypass 70, a four-lane expressway, a
location that proved better than I-85, because it has four times as much traffic. Graves purchased
13 acres which, from the expressway, appeared to have gullies, swamps and, according to one
member, “You’d sink to your knees.” When the member complained, Graves answered, “For
every gully there’s a mountain, and we’ll scrape it all even.” They paid $70,000 for the land and
$17,000 for grading-a total of $87,000, still much cheaper than could be purchased anywhere
else. The church sold $4,000 of pulpwood off the land. A year later, the land was valued at
$244,000.
The new location will seat over 3,000, has 26 public-school-sized classrooms, a cafeteria
for 200 pupils, a junior church for 300.
When Graves tried to move the church, he couldn’t get a building permit from the city of
Durham. During this time he testified, “I thought Heaven was shut up; for the first time in my
ministry, I couldn’t go forward.” He would wake up at night and pray, yet felt God was not
answering. The city turned him down for seven months, because there was no guarantee of
sewerage. Finally, through the help of Ronald Creech, president of Capitol Church Bonds, who
sold his bonds, the preacher went to see the mayor, but also did his homework and took a letter
of promise from the Highway Commission to put in the service road on the expressway. He had
his permit the next week.
The church needed to sell $500,000 in bonds for the move to the new property. Graves
signed a contract with Capitol Church Bonds of Durham on December 26, 1972. Forty sales
teams for the bonds were organized by the bond company within the church, and within five
days they got promises for the entire bond issue; the largest order was $100,000. Because the
neighborhood trusts Graves and knows that he is going to stay at Fellowship Free Will Baptist
Church, they oversold the bond issue by $300,000, a credit to his integrity and the organizational
efficiency of Ronald Creech. On New Year’s Eve, the actual selling of the bonds took place and,
according to the Durham Herald, the bonds were sold that night in 27 minutes.
Miracle School.—The Fellowship Christian School was begun in an unusual way. Two
years ago, the last week of December, the church voted to start a Christian school, but at that
time Graves didn’t have teachers in mind nor a principal. Yet three weeks later they began, in the
middle of the year (a time when a school should not begin) with over 200 students, teachers and