Announcing the Vultee Student Missions Endowment Fund

February 22, 2023

In the years following the second World War, a few returning servicemen and their families began to meet on Sundays in the old army barracks alongside the airstrip at Nashville's Berry Field. This church did not have an official building or name. They were  Christians called to relationship and worship.

By 1949, the budding congregation had grown out of the barracks and moved into a building on nearby Vultee Boulevard, just down the road from the manufacturing plant that shared its name with both the street and the machine it produced: a World War Il dive bomber known as the Vultee Vengeance.

In 1960, having outgrown its meeting place for the second time, the church on Vultee Boulevard relocated to a new facility on Murfreesboro Road. This time, however, a name moved with them. Over the next 62 years, Vultee Church of Christ came to represent not vengeance, like its namesake, but vision.

"Vultee's vision was always focused on the next generation. We had to be - they were ours!" says longtime Vultee member, minister, and shepherd, Carl McKelvey. "We formed around them." Another church member, Roy Burch, adds, “It was a congregation that lived together as a family. It was multigenerational. We included our youth in all that we did. We learned together, we played together, and we served together – in ministry and mission.”

Although the church recently closed its physical doors, a spiritual door has opened through which many "next generations" will hopefully be blessed. God's providence has allowed establishment of the Vultee Charitable Foundation.

This year, in recognition of Vultee's passion for equipping young people for ministry and mission, a sizeable gift is being made to the Lipscomb Missions program to initiate a Student Missions Endowment Fund. Proceeds from this fund will be used to support missions and to aid students who cannot otherwise secure sufficient funding to participate on short-term missions teams.

Those who are familiar with the Vultee congregation will recognize how this gift fits with its reputation.

“Vultee was kind of like a ‘mother church’ in Nashville for a number of years,” says Scott McDowell, who served as its preaching minister in the early nineties, “and has a rich heritage.”

McKelvey recalls," we were what you might call a 'blue collar' church. We were made up of a lot of vets and young families starting out in their first homes. Our members responded to calls for help in their communities, cooperated with each other, and stayed engaged in ministry. For years, about 90% of those who attended worship stayed for Sunday school. That's a high amount of involvement!"

"For a while we were the fastest growing church in Nashville. At one time we had 150 children who weren't old enough to go to school, and we had another 200 in elementary school. With all those children we had to form an outstanding education program. When they got older, we started a tremendous youth program."

David England, a long-time Lipscomb employee who grew up at Vultee, remembers being one of those children. He says, "when you're a kid and you're always kind of pushing against the boundaries, you don't realize how special and formative a place like Vultee is. Even though we ultimately had youth ministers, our parents were heavily involved as leaders in each of the
various age levels. The upside of that was that the parents had to think about who they were and how they would lead, and they had to work together. The downside was that you [as a kid] couldn't get away with anything!"

McKelvey agrees. "The Vultee congregation was good at being open to ideas and trying new things. That's why we were able to start our education program." Later, Vultee stepped out and hired the first full-time youth minister for churches of Christ in the region.

That posture of openness is also why, in addition to education, the church at Vultee was known for its dedication to missional ministry at home and abroad. The facility was heavily used on a daily basis as a hub of ministry. "There was someone at the building working all the time," says McKelvey, "and we were very integrated into the community. "

Vultee Church of Christ was the first church of its kind in Nashville to build an activity center. "It was cutting edge in its time," says Robert King, former education minister at Vultee. "They had a gym before churches had gyms!" Its basketball court was open to community leagues and was used by church members and neighborhood kids alike.

Vultee provided a kindergarten, a children's daycare, a therapy site for special needs children, and a weekly ministry to children in the Tennessee Preparatory School. "We tried to be open with what we had. For a time the Inner City Church didn't have their own building, so for 10 years we got to open our building to share it with them. It was great!" says McKelvey.

For over 40 years, servant leaders from the congregation shepherded the development and administration of Nashville Christian Towers, a nonprofit, senior-living facility built adjacent to the church building.

Expanding out from their Nashville community, Vultee supported short and long-term mission efforts domestically and in foreign locales, including Korea, Sierra Leone, Japan, and Honduras. When church leadership decided it was time to close the doors, they made sure that the missionaries had advanced support to allow them time to find future sponsors. "We wanted them to be secure so they could still focus on their preaching and teaching," says McKelvey.

Perhaps, due to its reputation for education and mission, Vultee Church of Christ and Lipscomb University often found themselves in partnership. McKelvey says, "we [Vultee] always made sure to be a part of the annual lectureships, which turned into Summer Celebration. In those early days, congregations would bring exhibits and set them up in rooms or in tents to showcase the work they were doing. [Also] a number of our children went to the university campus school [now Lipscomb Academy]." Plus, Vultee ran a morning and afternoon bus program to ease the burden of transportation for children in the community who wanted to access christian education at Lipscomb.

McDowell describes the legacy of Vultee as one of relationships. “A lot of people came through there and went on to do other things, but they kept that bit of the Vultee DNA, the understanding that ministry is all about relationships.”

"Many of the same people who made the Vultee congregation great also made the Lipscomb community great," McKelvey says. Dozens of Vultee members became faculty or staff at Lipscomb, and many employees of Lipscomb found a church home at Vultee. "It seems to me like everybody in Nashville went to Vultee at one time or another," he says, "especially so at Lipscomb."

Men like Joe Sanders, Leo Snow, Mack Wayne Craig, Steve Flatt, Steve Davidson, Scott McDowell, and Robert King, along with Carl McKelvey, served as part- or full-time ministers at Vultee while also working as professors or administrators at the university. Additionally, long-term Vultee elder, Harris Smith, served on the Lipscomb University Board of Directors for several years.

It is the desire of the board of the Vultee Charitable Foundation, in its inaugural year of giving, to honor these men and their wives by creating a perpetual financial resource to encourage students to experience the blessings of missions and service.

To that end the foundation is seeding the Student Missions Endowment and encouraging others to give in honor of the men above who served both Lipscomb and the Vultee Church.

Make a gift in honor of Vultee Church of Christ

Vultee Student Missions Endowment

Read Building on Our History Part 1

Read Building on Our History Part 2

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Category: Student Life

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