This story is a part of our Shaping the City series, celebrating Black Business Month in Nashville
What do we do with the blessings we have been given? Our beloved North Nashville is rich with blessings—a place where 90 Black-owned businesses, four HBCUs, and two Black-founded and Black-led financial institutions stand alongside a community steeped in culture and history. It is a place sustained by people committed to preserving its beauty and anchored by houses of worship that have stood as beacons in the community since as early as 1866.
The North Nashville we know is ever-changing. The population is growing. The infrastructure is expanding. Gentrification is rampant. The cost of living seems to quadruple by the minute. The needs of the longtime residents on this side of town are evident – now more than ever.
With these changes come new challenges, but this resilient community is in safe hands as places of worship lead the charge with initiatives that are dedicated to impacting the city far beyond the sanctuary.
The House of God Church, Mt. Zion Baptist Church, and Pleasant Green Missionary Baptist Church each stand at the helm of using the assets they’ve inherited to uphold an institutional responsibility.
These churches prove real change happens when preservation and innovation walk hand in hand.
Building for What’s Next: Elevate North Nashville with The House of God Church
In a jointly funded initiative between The House of God Church and Elevate North Nashville, Elevate North Nashville Community Development Corporation (ENN/CDC) works to not only provide affordable housing for the community, but to transform its residents from the inside out.
This initiative’s main objective is clear: people are not problems to be fixed, nor liabilities to avoid, but lives worth supporting.
The vision for Elevate North Nashville includes brand-new, modern apartment structures, townhomes, duplexes, and retail spaces, building within Historic Jefferson Street, West Heiman Street, 24th Ave, 28th Ave, and Batavia Street.
But development is only step one – these builds are a seed planted that will eventually bud into something far more impactful.
“The work is really about providing opportunities for people, whether that is making sure there is food, transportation, housing, and healthcare for the senior citizens within the community. We are looking to make sure no one in that community is overlooked,” says Tammy Butler Robinson, Board Chair of ENN/CDC.
Beyond development is the motto for this initiative. These structures will provide services that will allow for the community to not only survive but thrive. The initiative’s focus areas include: a whole life enrichment center, early family care, community education, a food pantry, mobilized healthcare, and workforce development.
The buildings may be new, but the mission is not. For The House of God, development is simply the vehicle for a much larger commitment to community. At Mount Zion Baptist Church, that same commitment has taken shape through a different kind of investment: creating infrastructure designed to serve the community for generations to come.
Reclaiming What Was: Mt. Zion Baptist Church Outreach Center
Located in the former building of a North Nashville cultural cornerstone, Mary’s BBQ, Mt. Zion Baptist Church has reclaimed this space and transformed it into a resource hub for the community.
For more than six decades, this location served as a place of fellowship, gathering, and good food for the North Nashville community. Now, through Mt. Zion’s acquisition of the property, that legacy of community continues in a new form, ensuring the space remains centered around the people who call this neighborhood home.
Located directly next to the mother location of Mt. Zion Baptist Church, the outreach center officially opened in May of this year.
With the changing landscape of North Nashville, it became imperative that preservation and innovation work in tandem. For Mt. Zion, preserving the legacy of a beloved community space does not mean leaving it untouched. It means finding new ways for that space to continue serving the people around it.
“Legacy isn’t simply about what we preserve. It is also about what we position for the next generation,” says Shannon Fitzpatrick, Director of Community Outreach at Mt. Zion.
The Black church, in Nashville and beyond, has long functioned as a pillar of its community. What Mt. Zion is doing now is a continuation of that work.
The center serves a multitude of functions, from food assistance and clothing support to disaster relief and a third space for local students. It offers resources when residents are navigating hardship, but it also offers something just as important: a place to gather, connect, and feel supported. In a neighborhood where so much is changing, Mt. Zion’s work is a reminder that community spaces do not have to disappear with the changing times. Sometimes, they simply evolve — carrying the spirit of what came before into what comes next.
For Mt. Zion, preserving legacy meant reclaiming a space that had long been a gathering place for North Nashville. But in a community where rising costs are making it increasingly difficult for longtime residents to stay, preservation also must mean preserving the people who make that community what it is. That is where Pleasant Green Baptist Church comes in.
Making Room to Stay: Pleasant Green Missionary Baptist Church
The challenge of displacement is a story woven throughout Jefferson Street’s history. A place once bustling with musicians and booming with business, Historic Jefferson Street had become a mecca for Nashville’s Black community by the mid-20th century — a corridor steeped in culture, commerce, and history.
When the construction of Interstate 40 cut through this flourishing street in the 1960s, community members and business owners were displaced from a place they had worked so hard to build. Decades later, when a horrific tornado swept through North Nashville in 2020, once again leaving many North Nashvilians displaced, another threat emerged. As gentrification reshaped the neighborhood and rising housing costs pushed homeownership further out of reach, a very specific question arose: How do we keep the longtime residents of Jefferson Street on Jefferson Street? Pleasant Green has a solution.
For Pastor Chris Jackson, that solution is deeply rooted in his understanding of land as both inheritance and stewardship. He compares Jefferson Street to the Promised Land — not simply because of what the corridor once was, but because of what it represents to the generations who came before.
In the biblical story, the Promised Land was an inheritance — something entrusted to a people after generations of struggle and sacrifice. For Pastor Jackson, Jefferson Street carries a similar weight. He sees a corridor built by Black Nashvillians who poured their blood, sweat and tears into creating a place where their families and communities could flourish. Now, he believes, the responsibility falls on the next generation to protect what was built before them.
“I believe I’m considering Jefferson Street, the Promised Land from our foreparents who came before, who worked hard to acquire it,” Pastor Jackson says. “The least we could do is save it.”
The Pleasant Green Community Development Corporation (PGC CDC) has a plan for Hope House, an affordable multifamily housing model right in the heart of Jefferson Street. Providing affordable housing, though, is only the baseline.
“There are plenty of places to live in Nashville, but are they also places to grow? And intentionally grow,” Pastor Jackson says. Through the project, residents will have access to monthly empowerment sessions, city resources and connections tailored to their individual goals — whether that means buying a home, starting a business or addressing their health, emotional, relational or spiritual needs. “I believe that God is a need-meeting God.”
Building What Comes Next
Across North Nashville, the work of these churches looks different, but the intention is the same: to take what has been placed in their hands and make it useful for the people around them.
For The House of God Church, that means recognizing that people are in different seasons of life and creating the spaces and resources that allow them to find what they need — and, ultimately, to “see those seeds come to fruition,” as Tammy puts it.
For Mt. Zion, it is about looking beyond the traditional function of the church and asking a simple question: What do we already have that can be activated? Land. Classrooms. Kitchens. Parking lots. Volunteers. Relationships. Professional expertise. The resources may look different from church to church, but the opportunity is the same.
“Every church doesn’t need to build a community center,” Shannon says. “But every church can ask, what do we have that could be activated to better serve the community around us?”
And for Pleasant Green, that activation is a matter of stewardship. “A church, I believe, has to continue to change, to continue to reinvent itself, to continue to rise to the occasion, to meet the needs of the community,” says Pastor Jackson.
The question, then, isn’t whether these churches have been given blessings; those are clear. It is what they choose to do with them.
Because the buildings, the land, the relationships and the resources are more than simply assets. They are opportunities — to preserve what has been built, to respond to what is needed now, and to plant seeds that will grow and outlive the people who planted them.
For Pastor Jackson, that responsibility comes down to a question he believes God asks of all of us: “What did you do with what I have given you?”
Across North Nashville, these churches are answering.
Shoot Location: Scarritt Bennett Center
Interviews by: Ashley Currie
Photography: Alexa Battle
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