You can easily spot the First Baptist Church Dallas by its sweeping curved glass facade, the central stone cone structure, and the tall metal cross planted right on top.
Now, Dallas is famous for corporate giants building towering glass monuments to themselves, but right here, the ambition is entirely spiritual. The drive to build bigger and reach higher isn't just for banks and oil companies. Back in 1868, this congregation started with just eleven people meeting in a Masonic hall. Today, it is a sprawling, multi-block empire.
It takes some serious personality to build an empire, and this church has seen its share of towering egos. Take Dr. W.A. Criswell-no relation to the developer from our last stop. He built this into the largest Southern Baptist church in the world over his forty-seven-year run. But letting go of that much power is hard. In 1990, a man named Joel C. Gregory was brought in to replace him. But Criswell kept the title of Senior Pastor, creating a bitter dual-leadership dynamic where two men essentially fought for control of the same pulpit. The tension got so bad that Gregory dramatically quit during a Wednesday night service and completely left pastoral ministry for a while, even selling funeral planning services before finally finding his way back to teaching.
To really grasp the scale of their ambition, take a look at the image on your phone. That shows the church in 2013, the year they finished a staggering one hundred and thirty million dollar expansion. That price tag makes it the most expensive Protestant building project in modern history, complete with a three thousand seat worship center.
And that massive new center ended up being a lifesaver. In July 2024, a devastating four-alarm fire broke out in the basement of the original historic 1890 red-brick sanctuary. It took sixty fire crews working through the night to put it out. The roof completely collapsed, though the historic exterior walls miraculously survived. The current pastor, Robert Jeffress, pointed out that if they hadn't built the new facility a decade earlier, the congregation would have been entirely homeless.
Speaking of Jeffress, if you pull up the app one more time, you can see how the exterior looked in 2008, right after he took the reins. Under his leadership, the church leaned heavily into the political arena, even debuting an original worship song titled Make America Great Again in 2017. It drew heavy criticism from people who saw it as Christian nationalism, which is the controversial blending of religious faith with a specific political identity.
But underneath the modern politics and billion-dollar expansions, there is a very human history here. In 1898, a pastor named George Washington Truett accidentally shot his close friend, the Dallas Police Chief, during a bird hunt. When his friend died later that night, Truett spiraled into a deep depression. He paced his floor for days, ready to quit forever. It was only the fierce loyalty of his congregation, who flat-out refused his resignation, that gave him the strength to return to the pulpit and lead for decades.
This church is vast, open, and always expanding outward, but our next stop takes a different angle. We are moving from this sprawling spiritual empire to a much more enclosed, quiet, and slightly controversial spiritual space nearby. Let us head over to Thanks-Giving Square, which is about a five-minute walk away. Oh, and if you were wondering, the church is open for visitors on weekdays and all day Sunday, but the doors are closed on Saturdays.
