For decades, the little brick church located along a glorified country road in tiny Plains, Georgia, assumed an outsized profile. On “typical” Sundays, 10 times as many visitors showed up as did members of Maranatha Baptist’s congregation, many of whom helped with crowd control and shoehorning still more cars into the overflowing parking lot.
For those hundreds of visitors each week, it was their once-in-a-lifetime chance to sit in a Sunday school class taught by a former president of the United States.
For Jimmy Carter, though, this was life as he’d always known and wanted it.
Carter, who died Sunday at age 100, began teaching the Sunday school as a young man and never stopped. Not as a student at the U.S. Naval Academy or during his years of service on submarines when, he wrote, “I would stand forward in the torpedo room close to the launching tube to read the religious text.”
Even during his presidency, he’d slip into First Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., a few Sundays each year to teach the adult class.
Following a dispiriting 1980 reelection loss to Ronald Reagan, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter moved back home to Plains. But they didn’t return to their old church, Plains Baptist. During their time away, a controversy had erupted over Plains Baptist’s refusal to admit Black members. So a group of the church had split off and formed Maranatha Baptist, which made clear it welcomed “all worshipers.” That included the former first couple, who joined Maranatha Baptist on their first Sunday back in their lifelong hometown.
“Rosalynn and I thought about it many times. We have friends in both congregations,” Jimmy Carter told the Atlanta Constitution in 1989. “We finally decided Maranatha was young and needed help, and its basic philosophy was closer to mine. They were more progressive on the race issue.”
That continued, as in 2019, a visiting Black pastor preached at Maranatha one Sunday.
Maranatha was in need of a pastor, and the former president called the Rev. Tony Lowdon in short order and asked him to step in full-time to minister to the mostly white congregation.
“He’s an excellent preacher and leader, and I was delighted to be the one to call him and tell him we wanted him to be our pastor,” Carter said
When Maranatha opened in 1978, it was a one-story brick church and had one steeple, compared to the much more imposing Plains Baptist’s two. The Carters instantly became Maranatha’s most famous members; still, both were only in their mid-50s and were thinking of trying to fill coming decades with meaning and purpose.
They found both at Maranatha, where, ex-White House occupants or not, they helped the rest of the small congregation keep house; Rosalynn Carter regularly cleaned the bathrooms and Jimmy Carter mowed the lawn. An accomplished woodworker, he made the cross and collection bowls that Maranatha used for decades.
“On my first day here, I left the building and I see President Carter come up, like, at 8 p.m. with a hammer and he’s fixing a door,” former pastor Brandon Patterson recalled with a chuckle in 2017. “He acts literally like everyone else.”
Well, he acted like Jimmy Carter, anyway. True to form, Carter began teaching Sunday school regularly at Maranatha almost immediately on his return, a fact that stayed under the radar for a few years. Then, word got out, and a stream of visitors began beating a path to the little church just past the giant grinning peanut on Georgia Highway 45. By the time he revealed his brain cancer diagnosis in August 2015, it was commonplace for several hundred additional “students” to sit through the former president’s class a couple times a month, then stick around after the worship service to take photos with him and “Miss Rosalynn.”
The Sunday after he started treatment, about 800 visitors showed up, including some who’d lined up outside the day before. Maranatha managed to stuff in 460 of them, including at least 100 watching on TV in an overflow room. The rest got sent down the street to the old Plains High School, where Carter, then 90, taught and took photos for a second time in one morning.
Credit: ccompton@ajc.com
Credit: ccompton@ajc.com
Concerned for his well being, his friends forbade him from ever doing that again. Instead, Carter, who’d cut back on traveling to undergo treatment, made good on their predictions and upped his teaching schedule to nearly every Sunday. And he kept it up right through remission four months later and well beyond: When he finally decided to start cutting back to teaching “only” twice a month in April 2018, it wasn’t due to dwindling demand.
Just the opposite in fact. With as many 350 people from all over the world visiting Maranatha and his beloved Plains whenever he taught, Carter was concerned about the impact on both if he were to suddenly stop teaching. So the shrewd ex-Navy engineer decided instead to embark on a “weaning” process, his pastor disclosed at the time.
Predictably, that just attracted more visitors. So many, in fact, that Maranatha started discussing options that included creating more overflow rooms inside or even erecting a small building outside for the same purpose.
By then, the church’s active membership was only about 25-30 people. But its impact was almost incalculable.
“In 200 years, I dare say, the legacy of this church is going to be a greater legacy than any other church in America,” Patterson predicted. “What other church can say a president taught there for 20 or 30 years. We’re it.”
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