Wedding DJ at Christ Rescue Temple Church in Winston Salem, NC

The Space

A 1982 merger led by Bishop Willie Davis Jr. is what turned this East Winston-Salem congregation, established in 1932 as Christ Temple Holiness Church, into Christ Rescue Temple Apostolic Church. That merger did not just rename the church, it set the direction it has followed since: an institution built around serving the surrounding community as much as holding services.

Over the decades, the church has expanded well past its sanctuary, adding apartment complexes for senior citizens, singles, and married couples on the surrounding property. A campus that has grown to support housing for its own members points to real physical scale behind the church, even where a couple’s ceremony itself would center on the sanctuary alone. That kind of steady, multi-building growth generally does not happen around a single small room; it happens around a congregation that outgrew one space and kept building.

Capacity & Layout

The church operates a 40-bed rest home, the Golden Lamb Rest Home, and a daycare center licensed for 150 children, both housed on the same grounds as the sanctuary. Facilities built to serve that many people day to day, rest home residents and daycare children alike, sit on a campus with real capacity behind it, not a single small building doing double duty.

Every Thursday, Bishop Willie Davis Jr. leads the church in feeding more than 100 families and homeless neighbors, a standing weekly gathering that shows the sanctuary and its adjoining spaces are used to hosting a crowd on a regular basis, not just on Sundays. A church that manages a rest home, a daycare, housing, and a weekly meal for over 100 people on top of regular services is already running several concurrent schedules, so a ceremony booked here fits into an institution well practiced at coordinating a full campus.

Amenities

Between the rest home, the daycare, and the senior and family apartment complexes, Christ Rescue Temple runs more like a small campus than a single-building church, with services that operate on their own schedules across the property. That built-in infrastructure, housing, childcare, and a weekly community meal, reflects decades of steady expansion under one leadership.

Bishop Willie Davis Jr. has led the congregation since the 1982 merger, giving the church a continuity of leadership across more than four decades that shows up in how many separate programs now run under the Christ Rescue Temple name. That long, single line of leadership, from the 1982 merger through today, is part of what gives the church its settled, established character in the neighborhood.

Location & Getting There

The church sits in East Winston-Salem, in a neighborhood shaped by the same community services the church itself provides: housing, childcare, and weekly meals for families in the area. Guests arriving for a ceremony here are arriving into a working part of the community rather than a venue set apart from its surroundings, one where the church’s own apartment complexes and rest home are part of the streetscape.

With a sanctuary built to anchor a congregation alongside a rest home and a daycare on the same grounds, the space favors a straightforward, contained sound setup for a ceremony, the kind that carries clearly through one main room without needing to reach across open outdoor ground.