Asbury Church Reopens After Renovations
The chime of a church bell welcomed visitors and congregation members to Asbury United Methodist Church on May 24 for the church’s grand reopening celebration — the first time its sanctuary had been used in two years.
The sound of the bell brought back memories for trustee Doug Stevenson, who’d gone 50 years without hearing it clang.
“It’s been a long time,” he told the News-Gazette a few weeks later.
DOUG STEVENSON (left) and Bill McGough saw wood as part of the two-year renovation of Asbury. Volunteers contributed an estimated 5,000 hours of work to the project. (photo courtesy of Isabelle Chewning)
Stevenson said he remembers his uncle ringing the bell when he was a kid. Now, the bell is back to work calling the congregation of a 157-year-old church to worship.
The bell tower’s restoration is just one part of Asbury’s two-year renovation. The church raised almost $108,000 and relied on about 5,000 hours of volunteer labor for the project.
It all began in May 2024, when a beam failed and the sanctuary floor dropped about 4 inches during a Sunday service. Nobody was injured.
“We knew at the time, before all this happened, that the church needed some work,” Stevenson said. “I think that was a wake-up call that the Lord gave us.”
The church dates back to 1869, when freed Black slaves decided they wanted their own place to worship. The church was rebuilt circa 1917 after a fire burned the original building to the ground.
Now, the church is beginning a new chapter.
But trustee Gwendolyn Porterfield, a lifelong attendee who’s been going to church at Asbury for more than 75 years, said the reopening ceremony was rooted in the past.
“It was just like old times,” she said.
‘Like a Brand New Building’
What started with one damaged beam turned into an almost complete transformation for the church.
“Pretty much like a brand new building except for the outside shell,” said volunteer Bill McGough, who contributed more than 1,500 hours of his time to the project.
McGough, who had prior experience renovating the Old Brownsburg Store, said the floor dropped because of termite damage to an 11-foot section of horizontal beam. But he said that wasn’t the only structural problem facing the church.
The vertical beams in the basement had their bases in the dirt, causing them to rot. Live wires were hanging loose in the walls, and the plumbing wasn’t working properly. McGough said the renovations also included improvements to the bathroom, kitchen, finishing, lighting and HVAC system.
To make those changes, the church needed money it didn’t have. McGough said there was a lot of uncertainty over whether the project would be successful.
“Very few people believed this would be a thing,” he said. “Everybody thought this building and this culture would just go into the ... scrap heap of history.”
But McGough said the church was too important to give up on.
“From early on, we all knew this was not about buildings being renovated,” he said. “It was really about preserving a legacy of a culture that existed in the area.”
‘Standing Strong’
The church’s fundraising campaign became known as “Standing Strong: Brownsburg’s Historic Asbury Church.”
JR Rife, pastor and trustee president, said the project got its first big win when Historic Lexington Foundation (HLF) agreed to contribute a $21,000 matching grant.
Margaret Samdahl, executive director of the Foundation, said her organization was willing to supply the grant because they were confident the community would match it.
“We thought, ‘We’re willing to do this because we feel like that it will be more than doubled,’” Samdahl said.
Samdahl was right. Asbury’s donors not only met the match but far exceeded it, giving a total of more than $47,500. Rife said that the initial HLF grant made everything else possible.
“They were the first ones that actually picked us up off the ground and told us that ... we had worth, that they cared about us,” he said.
But HLF was only one of several grant providers, Rife said. The Community Foundation for Rockbridge, Bath and Allegheny (CFRBA) gave almost $11,000 for improvements to the stained glass windows and bell tower. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources (DHR) contributed to the work on the church’s cemetery through four African American Cemetery & Graves Fund grants totaling about $28,500.
Rife said even the approximately $108,000 from grants and donors wouldn’t have been enough to cover everything. But contractors also helped out by giving Asbury discounts and in some cases supplying free equipment and labor.
“The whole community responded,” said Buster Lewis, who managed the logistics of applying for grants. “It wasn’t just the church members. Everybody jumped in.”
One cemetery grant from the DHR gave Asbury almost $15,000 for groundpenetrating radar (GPR), which uses radio waves to generate images from under the ground’s surface.
The GPR showed more than 100 unmarked graves in Asbury’s cemetery, Rife said. The church plans to place markers over all the graves in the future.
He said Asbury is also applying for funding from the DHR to restore its parsonage, where the pastor would traditionally live.
‘A Real Revival’
By the start of 2026, the church had gone more than a year and a half without holding any services. But in January, Rife said volunteers and contractors finished work on the basement.
The basement has been renamed the Betty Brown and Friends Fellowship Hall in memory of a woman Mc-Gough said was the “mother of the church” before her death in 2024. The church began holding services in the fellowship hall while the upper sanctuary was still under construction.
“I just feel very lucky that I sort of happened upon Asbury at this moment of a real revival,” said Elizabeth Kiem, who started attending the church while renovations were still ongoing.
Rife said Asbury was packed for the reopening ceremony, with visitors from several other local churches joining the congregation.
“To bring all of those churches and people together from different backgrounds,” Rife said, “that’s what this church is about.”
Rife said he plans for Asbury to get more involved in the Brownsburg community going forward. The church has already allowed groups like HLF and the Brownsburg Community Association to use its basement for meetings. Rife said he also wants to bring back events like lawn parties, picnics and hymn sings.
“We want to be all things community,” Rife said.
Services will take place at 11 a.m. on most Sundays, he said. But they’ll start at 1 p.m. every fourth Sunday so that members of other churches can visit.
“We like to say, ‘Open doors, open arms,’” Rife said.
AT TOP, Asbury’s church bell is ringing once again following the bell tower’s restoration. AT TOP RIGHT, trustee Doug Stevenson cleans a headstone in Asbury’s cemetery. ABOVE, Doug Stevenson, Gwendolyn Porterfield, Alice Carter, Louis Brown, Linda Daughtery and Edward Carter prepare to cut the ribbon at the sanctuary’s re-opening ceremony. AT RIGHT, termite damage is visible beneath the church’s drywall in September 2024.
