Were it not for the cross that hangs over the fireplace, you might mistake the foyer at Bible Center Church for a ski lodge.
The church's 65,000-square-foot building located in a remote area off Corridor G has lots of wood and stone. It's meant to resemble the Stonewall Jackson Resort. "Men are harder to get to church than women so we wanted to be a little more attractive for men," interim executive pastor Lee Walker said. "So that's why it's got a little bit of a masculine look."
In an age when fewer people consider themselves Christians, between 1,600 and 1,700 people come through the doors at Bible Center each Sunday for one of two worship services.
Nationally, the number of people who consider their religion to be "none" has grown from 16 percent in 2007 to 23 percent in 2015, according to the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan "fact tank" that conducts public opinion polling, demographic research and content analysis. The "nones" are concentrated among younger adults: 35 percent of Millennials are nones, and the median age of those unaffiliated with a religion is now 36, down from 38 in 2007, according to Pew.
"[People] don't go to church now," said Jay Arn, an associate pastor at Maranatha Fellowship in St. Albans. "It's nothing to encounter someone who doesn't know about Jesus in the United States.
"We think that's Africa or Vietnam or Russia or something, but, no, that's right here in the United States, and it's because we've gotten away from our roots and people don't see the value of attending church any more."
That hasn't deterred Maranatha and other Charleston-area churches, where hundreds of people come each week to worship. It's just that their ways of drawing people in may be different from the days when Americans seemingly flocked to them every time the doors opened.
Each week, about 1,200 people come to two services at Maranatha Fellowship. The services are charismatic, he said. A full band plays worship songs. There's also a choir. The church recently started what's probably a unique outreach in the area: a food truck. Volunteers take the truck to events and to places like Capitol Street in Charleston to hand out food to people coming out of bars, Arn said. It's not designed to grow the church, but to reach out to people, he said. He doesn't know of anyone who has joined the church as a direct result of being fed, though.
"But I know we're planting seeds," Arn said. "So maybe six months from now when they get into a problem or an issue they'll remember that and say 'I know where I can go and get help.'
"We just want to try to get God's love outside of these four walls," Arn said. "You'd think it would be easy to do but it's not. People get comfortable. They get into routines and we want to try to challenge those by coming up with new and different ways of reaching people."
According to a 2014 Gallup poll, 34 percent of West Virginians said they attend church weekly, while 18 percent said they attend near weekly or monthly and 47 said they never attend. That's fewer than in Utah, where 51 percent of residents go to church weekly - the highest rate in the country, and more than in Vermont, which at 17 percent has the fewest number of churchgoers in the country.
Arn said despite fewer people in the pews at churches, people are still searching for something.
"I think young people are very spiritual," he said. "They're searching - that's why they get into meditation and other forms of spirituality. [They're] looking to figure out why am I being drawn this spiritual direction?"
As opposed to 20 years ago, many churches have gotten away from the traditional service times of Sunday morning, Sunday night and Wednesday night, choosing to substitute small group meetings during the week at various times instead of a Sunday night or Wednesday night service. But not Maranatha. The St. Albans church has two Sunday morning services and a Sunday night service, too.
"We've talked about doing away with our Sunday night service, but it's so popular and so well attended that we're sticking with it," Arn said. "A lot of churches you go to, let's say they had 1,000 on a Sunday morning, their Sunday night service might be 75. But ours, our Sunday night service is probably two thirds of the Sunday morning service. But people enjoy it."
Bible Center isn't the only church in the area where the building is a main draw for people. The foyer at River Ridge Church on Greenbrier Street in Charleston was designed to look like a Starbucks, pastor Matt Santen said. A fireplace with seating warms visitors before they go into the service. There are also high tables and chairs and coffee stations in the foyer.
Santen said often he'll hear new people at his church say that they love it - even before they hear the sermon or know what the church's band sounds like.
"They don't know if it's good or if it sucks," Santen said. "But because when you're in here, five minutes before the service or between services, there is a buzz that's going on that's created by the environment that you're in,"
River Ridge welcomes on average about 750 people each Sunday.
Santen says his church's approach to growth has been relational. When it started in the early 2000s, there weren't a lot of churches in Charleston like it, he said. Santen and his wife were a part of Chestnut Ridge Church in Morgantown and moved to Charleston in 2002 to start River Ridge.
"If you were looking for a [church with] contemporary music, casual atmosphere and messages that are conversational in style, not preachy and not super formal, we were really the only church for a long time," he said. "Now, there's a couple other churches that are similar to ours."
River Ridge started as a church plant that met in the Capitol Theater. They moved to their building on Greenbrier Street in 2007. A second, Putnam County campus that was established in 2008 has since outgrown the Charleston location, Santen said. It started in a school before the church purchased an old Saturn dealership, where parishioners now meet. The first Sunday the Teays Valley campus was open, attendance shot from 400 to 800 there in one week, Santen said.
"It was mainly because there was no space at the school," he said. "It was just bursting at the seams. I think if they had moved into a bigger auditorium at a high school they probably would have experienced very similar growth."
The two campus are mostly autonomous, he said.
Santen attributes the church's growth to authenticity.
"Who we are on Sunday is who we are during the week," he said. "I don't pretend to be super spiritual on Sunday, nor do I pretend to be super spiritual during the week, and I think that's very attractive to people."
The church's teachings are also practical, he said.
"On Sunday mornings, above all else I want to be true to the Bible and then helping people to apply the Bible and Christianity to their everyday lives," Santen said. "It's not just a box in my life and then I go on with my life. It permeates through everything that I am."
The church doesn't advertise or send out marketing materials. It doesn't send out postcards or other mailings, he said.
"We really feel like the best way to grow a church is that people come, they are affected by the gospel they are affected by the message that they hear and they go invite other people and share that with other people, so our growth for the most part has always been slow and steady growth," Santen said.
Ultimately, Santen said River Ridge would like to open more campuses as more pockets of people want a branch in their own communities.
Bible Center moved to its current location in 2008, after buying the land in 2006. The church's sanctuary holds right at 1,000 people depending on how the chairs are configured. Of its two Sunday morning services, one is more traditional than the other and has a choir. A band with guitars and drums leads the worship in the other service, Walker said.
At its height in 2008, the church had just more than 2,000, which put it into the megachurch category. Attendance dropped some after a popular pastor left and the church was without a pastor for more than two years, Walker said.
Small community groups are one way the church has helped to grow attendance, he said. Groups of 12 to 16 people meet in each other's homes and other places, and study the Bible and the pastor's sermon each week. About 500 to 600 people participate in those, he said.
"We have a phrase around here that as much as we grow large, we need to grow small," Walker said.
At Bible Center, what goes on under the sanctuary each Sunday is just as important as the service in the sanctuary. The children's ministry, held downstairs, welcomes between 300 and 400 young people each week. The children have their own auditorium under the sanctuary. BASE Camp, as it is referred to, is meant to look like a cabin in the woods. There are realistic-looking trees beside the facade of a cabin on the stage. Strings of lights are overhead. The children have their own services, take their own offerings, make up their own band, Walker said.
"The goal is that kids would want to bring their parents to church and it works," Walker said. Elsewhere on the floor there are nature-themed classrooms for each of the different age groups of children.
Walker said the Pew report that said more people are identifying as having no religion was a "wake-up call" for churches. But while the numbers could be disappointing, he sees something else in those statistics. If you look closely the numbers, he said, mainline and Catholic churches saw the biggest hits, he said. Evangelicals saw no movement, he said.
"One interpretation of those statistics is that people who were nominal Christians moved to the 'none' category'" Walker said. "[That the] people who they would say they're a part of the church, but they didn't attend very often and it wasn't a big part of their life, those people moved from saying that I'm whatever denomination to saying I'm nothing."
Reach Lori Kersey at Lori.Kersey@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-1240 or follow @LoriKerseyWV on Twitter.