Moments of Nope?

On a recent July morning, before his sermon on resisting revenge, David Chadwick served his congregants a brief update on the church’s real estate situation. After a year of searching, Chadwick and the council of elders at his new church, Moments of Hope, had finally reached the promised land: the Morrison YMCA in the affluent south Charlotte community of Ballantyne, which would finally be the growing nondenominational church’s permanent home.

The 6-foot-8-inch former college basketball player, now silver-haired and 77, positioned himself next to a small table in the center of the room inside Moments of Hope’s current site: a former Harris Teeter in Providence Square Plaza, about 20 minutes from the Y. A thick Bible rested in front of him. Chadwick, clad in a blazer, slacks, and button-down dress shirt, swiveled like a searchlight as he addressed the congregation, whom he affectionately calls “Hopesters.”

“It’s a done deal,” he said to applause. “No matter how many people protest, no matter how many people sign a petition, this is a done deal.” The church had already raised more than half of the $42.5 million necessary to buy the 87,000-square-foot building and its accompanying 23 acres, he said. Now, Chadwick hoped the rest would come from some of his “friends” in the community and pledges from Moments of Hope members. (He calls these “sacrificial gifts.”)

“That’s like Jesus himself, who gave up his life so that we can have eternal life,” he said. “Where God guides, folks, God always provides. And has God provided us the Morrison YMCA? It sure looks that way.” He expected Moments of Hope to move in by Easter 2027.

That’s where things get complicated. The Morrison Y, apart from being a Ballantyne community hub, currently rents space to another church, Forest Hill. Chadwick founded Forest Hill in 1980 and led it until 2019, when the church’s board forced him out, citing his authoritarian leadership style. Since 2011, Forest Hill has held Sunday services and other activities at the Morrison Y in return for raising $4.5 million to get the Y a new indoor track and two basketball courts, among other amenities. For Moments of Hope to move in, Ballantyne residents will not only have to give up their YMCA, but Forest Hill will have to move out. 

Chadwick, who has been one of Charlotte’s highest-profile pastors for more than four decades, announced Moments of Hope’s  intention to buy the Morrison Y from the YMCA of Greater Charlotte in June. Four weeks later, several groups—including the Y’s current members and Forest Hill’s congregants—were still making nasty noises about the transaction. To them, this looked like obvious personal payback. Chadwick has a chance to buy out the church that ejected him as head pastor, and revenge has nothing to do with it? Come on. 

Yet Chadwick insists it doesn’t. “I love that church, and I only want it to succeed,” Chadwick told The Charlotte Observer in June. “From my heart, I have met with their senior pastor, and I pray for their success. I hold no grudges.” (In an e-mailed response to an interview request from The Assembly, Moments of Hope spokesperson Erin Vinson said Chadwick “is extremely busy” and unavailable.)

The business update now finished, Chadwick moved on to the sermon, which was part of an ongoing series on the Gospel of Luke. This one was especially challenging, he warned, “Christianity 401, graduate school Christianity.” Luke 6:27-36: Love your enemies—even the ones who take to their smartphones to vent. “Online right now, there are some people taking huge shots at me,” Chadwick told his flock. “You just need to know, I’m not reading it. Don’t respond in kind to their anger.” 

He shifted his weight from foot to sneaker-clad foot. “Try to understand their pain. Practice empathy. Walk a mile in their shoes. Jump inside their skin,” he said. “If you know anything about them, try to find out where they may be hurt. Because here’s the truth, dear friends: Hurt people hurt people. Isn’t that right?”

To underscore the point, a Hopester then wheeled a life-sized cross to the center of the room. Chadwick encouraged the congregants to come forward, touch the cross, and pray to forgive someone who’d hurt them. “I’ll start the parade,” Chadwick said. He clasped one arm of the cross, bowed his head, and closed his eyes.

‘The Best Place on Earth’

Just a few hours later, hundreds gathered outside the Morrison Y for a different kind of service. At this one, the congregants chanted, “Save our Y!” and raised deafening cheers as passing drivers honked their horns in support. Attendees displayed handmade signs. “The Only Tithe I’m Willing to Pay Is to the Morrison YMCA,” read one. “Moments of Nope,” read another.

Still another got right to a very personal point, the pastor’s sermon notwithstanding: “Stop Chadwick’s Revenge.”

At a traffic circle not far away, 25-year-old JD Hopper grasped a bullhorn. Even on an oppressively muggy day, he wore a black suit, garnished with a purple tie. “I just wanted to look good for this,” he said, “because I knew there was going to be a big turnout.” A pronounced widow’s peak highlighted his close-cropped hair. The crowd chanted and whooped around him. 

Hopper, who was born in Boston and moved to Ballantyne with his family when he was less than a year old, has emerged as the unlikely leader of the anti-sale protest movement. He’s belonged to the Y since he was a kid (which he admits wasn’t that long ago). “This is the best place on Earth,” he told me when we discussed Ballantyne, “and Morrison’s a big part of that.” 

With no shortage of chain stores and golf courses, the planned suburb of Ballantyne is often criticized as antiseptic and isolating. Hopper doesn’t see it that way. “It’s kind of its own community, you know,” he says. “But it’s beautiful because it’s close enough to the rest of Charlotte. You’ll see people; you’ll recognize people. It’s like a beautiful mix of small town and  big city, almost like you get the best of both worlds.”

The day after Chadwick announced the purchase on June 17, Hopper responded with his own video riposte, which he posted to his Instagram page. The self-described “entrepreneur, public speaker, and educator” spoke into an enormous microphone on his desk.

“So, a megachurch that somehow has $42 million just lying around—$42 million that could be used to, oh, I don’t know, feed the poor, or house the poor, or just help the poor, you know, stuff Jesus actually did—they are using that money to buy out the Morrison YMCA, a staple in the community of Ballantyne that serves so many purposes that they are just taking away.” He urged viewers to cancel their Y memberships “if they decide to go through with this horrendous decision.”

The video, which Hopper has since taken down, went viral—it even made the local news. Within days, Hopper was e-mailing media outlets, setting up a Save Morrison YMCA Facebook page, and launched a regularly updated e-mail newsletter. The e-mails are liberally seasoned with memes adapted from The Simpsons and animated films like Inside Out.

Hopper says he never expected any of this. “I just posted a video one day, just a random video talking about why the YMCA is beautiful—just as a guy, not as a public speaker, not as a business owner, just a member of the YMCA—and everything has grown from that,” he told me. “It just so happens that I also have good public speaking skills and good rallying ability.”

He added that the issue of what may or may not have been Chadwick’s motive—“I’ll leave it to the people to connect the dots” on the revenge issue—is only one source of his outrage.

The main issue to him and other people at the rally is the Y itself: dance classes and summer camp and child care for working mothers, sure, but also the sense of community that’s arisen from all of those things since it opened in 1999. The Y is one of the few places in Ballantyne where neighbors can rub shoulders and develop friendships.

That’s what happened to Shawn and Kelly McGrath, who moved there from Atlanta after Shawn secured a job in Charlotte 13 years ago. When the couple started looking for houses, Kelly said, “the Y being this close was a big factor in purchasing where we are.” They had both come to the rally with their 15-year-old son, Gavin.

Until the 1990s, what’s now Ballantyne was a private, 2,000-acre hunting preserve that abutted the South Carolina line. In 1992, Johnny Harris, a real estate developer whose family owned the property, teamed with his brother-in-law and fellow developer Howard “Smoky” Bissell to get it rezoned for development. At the time, it was the largest rezoning in the city’s history.

It enabled the developers to achieve a master-planned vision: a corporate park, golf course, and country club, with high-end homes. They were connected by a network of streets that spread east and west from U.S. Highway 521, aka Johnston Road, just south of the Interstate 485 beltway—a community where insularity was, literally, by design.

“When it was built, the brand was very much like a privatopia. It was removed from the city. It was really kind of exclusive,” said Liz Morrell, the Charlotte Urban Institute’s director of public policy research. The Morrison Y functions as Ballantyne’s public square, she added: “I think the lack of that civic commons that the Morrison Y provides is an example of something where people realized: This is what falls short about this type of exurban, edge-city, master-planned neighborhood.”

Like the McGraths, many residents move to Ballantyne because of work but don’t necessarily have a built-in network of social connections. “This is an engine for engagement in the community,” Shawn McGrath said. When he traveled for his job, he said, the proximity of Morrison Y helped Kelly create a “home and a community for us that really got us implanted and put our roots in Charlotte.”

Several other attendees at the July 12 rally agreed: The closing of the Morrison Y means more than it might elsewhere because, for a generation, it was the only place where residents could get to know each other. “This has enriched all of our children’s lives,” said Y member Robin Hershman Moore, who showed up with her 15-year-old daughter, Hunter, a member herself since kindergarten. “All of that goes away in the battle over this piece of land.”

After a few neighborly exchanges, the speeches soon commenced. Sweating in his suit, with bullhorn in hand, Hopper launched into a kind of Sermon in the Traffic Circle. “Stand up!” he urged. “Tell the YMCA how we feel!” If anyone wanted to share stories of how the Morrison Y had helped them, he told the crowd, they could cross the road to the island, take over the bullhorn, and testify.

‘Isn’t It Beautiful?’

Chadwick has been a fixture in Charlotte’s evangelical sphere for more than four decades, and his influence has often extended beyond those borders. He’s led a prayer circle that included former Gov. Pat McCrory, who served 14 years as Charlotte’s mayor. He’s hosted a Sunday morning radio show on the news station WBT for more than 25 years. His weekly sermons are live-streamed and, afterward, available on demand at the Moments of Hope website. He’s written eight books.

He also has a history of aggressively expanding his church’s membership and footprint: Under his leadership in 1986, Forest Hill, then a Presbyterian church, paid $5 million for the 25-acre site on Park Road where Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker once ran the PTL television ministry. “Isn’t it gorgeous?” he once said as he led reporters on a tour. “The setting is so pastoral, so quiet. You can see why we fell in love with it.”

But the same hard-charging approach may have contributed to his 2019 downfall and dismissal from Forest Hill. “Some number of my senior staff went to the elders in January, and they complained about my leadership style,” Chadwick told the Observer. “And they basically said, ‘If he doesn’t leave, we’re going to leave.’”

Tom Emmrich, then the head of the Council of Elders, declined to give specifics but said more than 10 staff members had complained about Chadwick’s abrasive, “authoritarian” demeanor, which Chadwick conceded somewhat afterward: “I can be direct. I can be demanding. I hold people accountable. And I think I might have gotten caught some in a generational vortex.”

“There was a bit of a stare-down,” Emmrich said at the time. “We had issues that had to be addressed. And we had a person [Chadwick] who didn’t seem inclined that he was going to address them.”

Neither has spoken publicly about the split in any more detail. Emmrich has not responded to interview requests from The Assembly. Forest Hill responded to an interview request with a statement, attributed to Pastor Doc Hanberry: “Forest Hill Church remains committed to the Ballantyne community and will continue to passionately pursue the vision that God has given: to bring Heaven to Greater Charlotte one person at a time by helping the next person take their next step in their relationship with Jesus.” Forest Hill spokesperson Natalie Shepard declined to comment further.

Within a month of his departure from Forest Hill, Chadwick had already founded Moments of Hope and held two Easter services for a combined 1,600 people at the Alexander Graham Middle School gym.

Moments of Hope, also the name of Chadwick’s media ministry at Forest Hill, embraces the three-part philosophy of “Know, Grow, Go”: Know Jesus, grow through relationships with God’s word and with other people, and go into the world to make disciples. The church moved to the former Harris Teeter at Providence Square in 2022, but even that wasn’t big enough. Its leaders needed more space, and in 2025, they found it.

‘Where Connections are Built’

Outside the Morrison Y, another sign made it plain that David Chadwick wasn’t the only object of the protesters’ wrath. This sign urged Sue Glass to go back to Denver.

Glass is the president and CEO of the YMCA of Greater Charlotte, the organization that oversees 14 YMCA centers and two day and summer camps in the Charlotte area. (Last year, the organization began referring to its branches as “centers” because “centers are where connections are built,” as Glass said in a news release.) The Y hired Glass in 2023 from Denver, Colorado, where she oversaw that city’s YMCA system. She’s the first woman to hold the Y’s top leadership position in Charlotte.

It was ultimately the Y’s decision to approve the sale of the Morrison facility—something Chadwick has been quick to point out. As Glass explained in an interview with The Assembly in late July, she understands Ballantyne residents’ anger. But she said money from the sale will help offset a post-COVID revenue decline and allow the YMCA to make needed improvements to centers in more marginalized communities—like the Stratford Richardson center in historically Black west Charlotte and the small, aging Johnston YMCA in the NoDa arts district.

“Our staff and our members … knew this was going to be a really hard conversation,” Glass said. “Sometimes it’s a hard burden to bear in leadership, but it’s the reality.”

YMCAs nationwide have struggled with declining membership and revenue since COVID, and the YMCA of Greater Charlotte has admitted it’s hurting financially: It brought in only $74.1 million in 2024, but its expenses topped $85.5 million, which created an $11.4 million deficit, according to its IRS Form 990 filing for that year. (The next year was a little better, with a reported net income of $204,364 for 2025.) Part of this was the pandemic, but part was market reality: Private gyms like Planet Fitness and public recreation centers often offer less expensive memberships; a Y membership for a single adult costs $72 per month, for example, while some Planet Fitness monthly memberships are only $15.

“YMCAs—and we’re very proud of them in Charlotte, in particular—are really part of the fabric of the community, and we’ve seen that in the reaction from folks in the Ballantyne area,” said Jeff Brown, a Charlotte attorney and chair of the YMCA’s board of directors. “We ultimately made the decision that is in the long-term interest of the organization.” 

Glass said the YMCA continues to develop its specific plans for south Charlotte and other areas, which may include new locations for at least some of the Morrison Y’s 17 full-time and 273 part-time employees.

Market forces aside, the YMCA had not considered selling the Morrison branch until June 2025, when Graeme “Greg” Keith Jr. approached them about it. Keith is the chairman and CEO of The Keith Corporation, a prominent Charlotte commercial real estate firm, and vice chair of Moments of Hope’s board of elders. For the next year, Glass and Brown said, Keith helped negotiate the sale in his position as a church board member.

Those who oppose the sale find this suspicious—nothing illegal, necessarily, but a classic back-room deal none of them knew about until this past June. “Oh, it’s so shady,” said Joscelyne Hauserman, 35, whose 5-year-old daughter learned to swim in the Morrison Y pool. She carried a sign that read, “Mega Ego, Mega Greed, Mega Church!” “The secrecy. The fact that all of these amazing people out here did not have a voice.”

The Keith family has a longstanding relationship with both the YMCA and some of the most powerful people in Charlotte’s history—including its most celebrated son. Keith’s father, Graeme Keith Sr., was a close friend of the Rev. Billy Graham; the elder Keith, the former chairman and CEO of Barclays American Corporation, was commonly known as “Billy Graham’s banker.”

The Keiths represent a version of Charlotte that reached its apex in the 1980s, when the city was known as an evangelical capital and lines between religion and business blurred. After father and son founded The Keith Corporation in 1989, the company developed the 60-acre campus that houses the 200,000-square-foot Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and the Billy Graham Library. The Keith family is known for its longtime support of the YMCA: Graeme Keith Sr. died at 90 in 2023 but lived long enough to see the University City YMCA branch, 20 miles away in north Charlotte, renamed in his family’s honor in 2017.

Greg Keith and David Chadwick go back decades as well. In a June video, Chadwick referred to him as “my dear friend” and noted that they’d been friends for more than 40 years, since the two former college basketball players played pickup games together at the Alexander Graham Middle School gym—the same place where, years later, Chadwick would hold the first Moments of Hope services. (Chadwick played for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1968-71, and Keith lettered at the University of Georgia in 1975.)

During their conversation, Chadwick said Keith had led the search for a permanent site almost from the moment he founded Moments of Hope. Keith added that he’d looked at more than 200 properties before he approached the YMCA about the Morrison Y property. It’s an ideal place, the two men agreed, because of its size—the building has quadruple the church’s space at Providence Square—and because 80% of the church’s members live in south Charlotte between the towns of Pineville and Matthews.

“We’ve been working on this now for over a year, and it’s come to fruition, and it’s just a blessing from God,” Keith told Chadwick as the two sat side by side before microphones. “He provides, but he provides in his time and his way. … You just learn to wait on the Lord.”

Greg Keith did not respond to multiple interview requests from The Assembly.

‘Share the Treasured Stories!’

As of early August, despite Chadwick’s assurances of a “done deal,” it remains unclear how the battle will end.

Moments of Hope is proceeding on the assumption that it will raise the money needed to complete the sale. The Y is taking the same approach, although its attempts at explanations aren’t landing well. Hopper referred to the e-mail it sent to members expressing its commitment to Charlotte as “one of the most insulting, tone-deaf, jumbled-up messes of word salad I have ever read.” 

The Save Morrison YMCA Facebook page remains active. “The Y has given us so much—share the treasured stories!” one commenter wrote. “We are there in spirit cheering you on!”

The anti-sale coalition has met to discuss ways to “fight back,” one of its supporters, Henry Santos, said in a July 30 Facebook video. Hopper followed up with his own update August 2, announcing a storytelling event for the following Saturday that he said would be filmed for an upcoming documentary.

“It’ll be fantastic,” Hopper said, “and you won’t want to miss it.” He added that the group plans action “legally, financially, and politically” but declined to disclose details, “which goes against every instinct in my body.”

That’s a lot of work for one person, and Hopper is exhausted. He said the coalition was forming committees to divide labor and remove some from his shoulders.

“There’s going to be a more formal structure so it’s not just, like, ‘JD versus these two Goliaths of the YMCA and Moments of Hope,’” he said. “It’s been quite stressful. I’ve been happy to do it. It’s been the honor of my life in a lot of ways.”

In a city whose longtime mayor, Vi Lyles, resigned in June, some of Hopper’s fans have suggested, perhaps jokingly, that he run for the office next year. He’s not sure. “I’m already so, like, stressed out as it is,” he said.

Fortunately, scripture speaks to that problem as well. Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.