Members live in Durham and Raleigh and farther — instead of the Apex neighborhoods that surround the historic White Oak Baptist Church.

They simply can’t afford to live there.

Even if family roots go deep in Apex, the town’s new growth has peaked average home prices to a place working salaries have a hard time reaching.

So Pastor Tyner wants to remedy the situation — by building his own homes.

“That’s what a church ought to be all about,” said Tyner, not just talking about charity, but giving it back every day.

Tyner’s nonprofit organization, the White Oak Foundation, is currently building a subdivision in downtown Apex off Lynch Street. The 25 homes will start at 1,100 square feet with a price of $125,000, well below today’s average price for a home in Apex.

Tyner has plans for other subdivisions, though he needed a way to finance them.

That’s why the White Oak Foundation is also currently building a 102-room hotel off Schieffelin Road near U.S. 1 and N.C. 55.

The hotel — part of the Fairfield Inn & Suites chain — will offer jobs for the community and $500,00 to $1 million in annual projected revenue for Tyner’s various projects.

“I’m excited about it; it’s going to be successful,” Tyner said of the project last week.

But then Tyner has always been an optimist and a doer, ever since he came to White Oak Church back in the early 1970s.

Back then he was a young man “full of energy” as Leon Herndon, chairman of the church’s deacon’s ministry, remembers him.

Tyner was still a student at Shaw University when he first filled in at the White Oak pulpit, but the congregation took to him and he took to them. After graduation he became the church’s resident pastor.

He wasn’t its full-time pastor, though — the little church couldn’t afford one. So for the next 30 years Tyner would commute two and half hours each way from his hometown of Murfreesboro in rural northeastern North Carolina, at least twice a week to Apex.

“It could have been a challenge for another preacher,” Herndon said, though for Tyner it wasn’t. Tyner liked keeping his connections to home.

When he wasn’t preaching he was helping out on the family farm and getting a master’s degree in education. He eventually worked as a public school administrator in his native Northampton County.

It didn’t stop him from filling Apex with his ideas though.

“He’s a terrific person to work with,” said Rebecca Stroud, who has worked as an administrative assistant at the church about as long as Tyner has been its pastor.

“He’s fair and he’s a people person,” she said.

Working with Tyner has meant helping him create summer camps for at-risk kids and Wednesday night tutoring throughout the school year.

Education has always been something that Tyner has utilized and stressed in his church, partly because it is a large part of what has helped him achieve his dreams.

It was education that pushed him beyond the segregation and poverty of eastern North Carolina in the 1950s and 1960s.

Education, and a great home, were the tools his parents gave to him to have a successful, happy life. Now it’s what he hopes to give to others through his work — whether it’s tutoring a child or building a home for a family.