Posted on 10/22/2003 9:03:17 AM PDT by yonif
CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- The Christian Church and the city of Charlotte were a match made in conventioneering heaven.
The church's biennial General Assembly, which ended Tuesday, brought an estimated 7,000 people to fill tables at the city's restaurants and beds at its hotels.
And conventioneers got to spend five gorgeous fall days in a clean, affordable city in the heart of the Bible Belt.
"I've enjoyed the city. People have been very nice. It's very hospitable," the Rev. David James, pastor at First Christian Church in San Lorenzo, Calif., said as he got ready to head home from the five-day meeting.
It's a package that's made Charlotte a denominational destination. The Christian Church was the fourth major religious group to meet here in 2003.
The Progressive National Baptist Convention came in August. The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship met in June. And the Presbyterian Church in America was here in the spring.
Collectively, the meetings attracted an estimated 22,500 visitors to downtown Charlotte and direct spending of approximately $10 million.
Arriving later this week are an expected 4,000 people for a Youth Specialties conference of Christian youth workers. And in late December, a Wesleyan Church youth conference is expected to bring 10,000 people to town.
"Charlotte has a warm, Southern hospitality, it just lends itself to the religious sector," said Molly Hedrick, vice president of communications for Visit Charlotte, the city's convention bureau. "It's a very friendly city, it's a comfortable city for them. ... It's more along their personality and their need to have a meeting that gives the right atmosphere."
Charlotte's airport is a hub for US Airways, and Interstates 77 and 85 make highway access easy from across the Southeast.
Most of the mainline Protestant denominations are well-represented here, and religious revivals regularly draw large crowds to the Charlotte Coliseum. Billy Graham was born in Charlotte and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association is building a new headquarters building and museum in the city.
With business travel and convention spending still severely depressed as a result of the long recession and terrorism concerns, religious conventions have become crucial to the tourism bottom line of "second-tier" destination cities such as Charlotte; Nashville, Tenn.; St. Louis; Cincinnati; and Indianapolis.
Attendees -- who often pay for their own travel and use their vacation time to visit -- may spend less than business conventioneers. But meeting sizes don't shrink due to a bad business climate and attendees don't demand the flash and glitz of a Las Vegas or New Orleans.
Religious meetings are "a marketplace that for the most part is inelastic," said Warren Breaux, vice president of sales at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center in Nashville. "They're kind of impervious to the market conditions."
Breaux spoke in January to a national meeting of religious convention managers held in -- yes -- Charlotte. He told them that there is a new enthusiasm for religious meetings among convention and tourism officials, particularly in first-tier cities such as Orlando and San Diego that are feeling the squeeze from the business travel market.
"Everybody's going to begin to look at that marketplace to help us through the wild swings of the corporate marketplace," Breaux said recently.
In the 2003 fiscal year, religious meetings accounted for 6 percent of hotel rooms booked for future events in Charlotte, said Christa Williams, a national sales manager for Visit Charlotte. That made the category the third-biggest for the local hospitality industry, behind only sports events and association meetings.
Since 1996, when the Religious Convention Managers Association first held its annual gathering in Charlotte, the city has booked 43 religious conventions and meetings, Hedrick said.
"Charlotte offers a lot of those amenities of the first-tier cities, yet we are small enough that our rates are reasonable," Williams said. Because the focus of most religious meetings is worship and fellowship, the groups often don't demand a city packed with a lot of tourist attractions or a vibrant nightlife.
"Usually they don't have that much spare time," Williams said. "But they definitely need places to eat. ... "They often tell me, 'We won't be in your bars, but we'll definitely be in your restaurants."
James, the California pastor, has been to Christian Church assemblies in Denver; Tulsa, Okla.; Kansas City; and St. Louis. "This is the first General Assembly in a while where I haven't felt crowded," he said. "You have a lot of hotels here, and that's key. Some places, they have a convention center and a Holiday Inn and that's it."
James was particularly impressed that he was able to walk a few blocks from the convention center and find a restaurant where he did not have to wait for a table at dinner.
The Rev. Bill Edwards, associate general minister and vice present of the Christian Church, helps select sites for the group's general assemblies. He said cities like Charlotte are ideal meeting places.
"What works best for us is the kind of second-tier cities that work hard to accommodate us," he said.
His church is headed to Portland, Ore., in 2005; to Fort Worth, Texas, in 2007; and Indianapolis in 2009.
Unlike first-tier destinations, where the church might be one of a number of conventions in town during a given time, it gets undivided attention in Charlotte.
"We're not in competition with any other event in the city, so that's kind of nice," Edwards said.
"This is basically like a family reunion," he said. "We have 3,000 voting delegates hare and the other 3,000 come to be part of the fellowship. When we gather, it is an expression of the body of Christ, of the wholeness of the church."
I'll have you know we're a first class, world class city. You can tell, 'cause we are building a new NBA arena.
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