File:Renewal Church - fmr First Baptist Church - North Tonawanda, New York - 20220601.jpg

English: Renewal Church, 530 Meadow Drive, North Tonawanda, New York, June 2022. The most eye-catching recurring motif to the design of this starkly Modernist structure is obviously the parabolic arch, enormous ones of which make up the roof of the sanctuary and smaller ones (unfortunately invisible from this angle) crown the main entrance on the east side of the building. It's a favorite trope of Niagara Falls-based architect Wallace V. Moll, another example of which can be seen in the rear entrance canopy of his St. John Baptist Church in Buffalo. But also note the façade, wherein a raking band of rectangular stained-glass windows frame glossy stone panels ornamented only by a cross, and at the base of which is placed a sunken garden that enables a further measure of natural light to illuminate the sanctuary as well as the basement. The building was constructed as home of the First Baptist Church of North Tonawanda, a congregation that traces its history to 1885, when its founding pastor, Rev. Martin W. Twing, enlisted a pair of colleagues from Buffalo to help him found the Tonawandas' first English-speaking Baptist congregation. Heretofore, they had spent most of their history holding services in a small, wood-framed building on Vandervoort Street (still extant, it's now an event space), which despite several successive expansions eventually proved to be definitively too small to house a congregation whose steady growth was owed to the city's mid-20th-century transition from a more-or-less self-contained municipality to an element of the suburban sprawl emanating outward from Buffalo and Niagara Falls. Ground was broken for the present building in July 1964, and it was dedicated the following June. First Baptist Church continued as a going concern until 2013, when it merged with Randall Baptist in nearby Amherst and sold its former home to the nondenominational Renewal Church.