c. 1997 Religion News Service

JOHNSTON STATION, Miss. _ Four and a half years after three teen-agers torched its predecessor in the middle of the night, members of Rocky Point Missionary Baptist Church dedicated a new, bigger church Sunday (Oct. 5), built on donations and the volunteer labor of strangers from cities around the country.

Worshipers gathered in a new brick church filled with the aroma of fresh wood and fabric, its needle-like white steeple blazing in the clear afternoon sun. Air-conditioning made the familiar old paper fans obsolete; gleaming new lighting fixtures dangled from a cathedral ceiling of exposed timber.

Nearby, a section of scorched concrete slab was the only evidence arsonists had burned down the 100-year-old congregation’s church. Rocky Point was one of two predominantly black churches set ablaze that night.

“What (they) intended for evil, God turned into good,” Gary Knight, a Mississippi Methodist church official who helped in the rebuilding effort, told a crowd of friends and well-wishers who spilled out of the church and onto the red-dirt parking lot.

Rebuilding Rocky Point became such a project that at its completion, friends and well-wishers swamped the congregation of 50 or so. Outside the new building, tents shaded tables laden with potato salad, vegetables, cakes and pies to feed the more than 200 guests.

Many were from Asia Baptist Church in New Orleans, whose pastor, the Rev. Zebadee Bridges, 71, grew up near Rocky Point and shepherded the reconstruction.

Bridges left Mississippi for New Orleans at 19 when boll weevils destroyed his family’s cotton crop, he said. He still returns frequently to visit family and tend his 200-acre cattle farm nearby. “My people have been here for years,” he said.

Bridges’ great-grandfather, John Alexander, a slave, lies in an unmarked grave somewhere in Rocky Point’s churchyard, he said. Alexander’s children lie elsewhere under cedars and small oaks in the same yard.

Last fall, Bridges and a local pastor, the Rev. Luther McEwen, got behind efforts to rebuild Rocky Point.

By that time the church had lost more than its building.

The year after the fire Rocky Point’s elderly pastor, the Rev. Henry Manning, died of a stroke. Leaderless, the congregation fell into an internal struggle that paralyzed the rebuilding project.

Meanwhile authorities arrested, tried and convicted three local teen-agers for setting fire to Rocky Point. Two were sentenced to 37 months in prison; the third got 46 months because of a prior criminal record.

“It was a shock to have that done to us, a real shock,” said Amy Robinson, 35, a Rocky Point member since childhood. “We all get along real well around here, and to have that happen to us, we just couldn’t believe it.”

After the fire, church members hired McEwen as an interim pastor. They worshiped Sunday afternoons in the borrowed Collins Grove Baptist Church, but no rebuilding plans were under way.

Bridges said he learned on a visit last year that the congregation’s plans to rebuild their church had broken down. Bridges and McEwen began making telephone calls.

Soon, he said, they tapped into the growing national response to aid dozens of Southern churches, most of them with black congregations, burned down over a four-year period. Authorities said the epidemic of arson appeared to be the product of people acting independently and only linked _ in some cases _ by racist animosities.

In time, strangers lined up to help Rocky Point.

International Paper Co. donated much of the lumber in the new church. The National Council of Churches provided more than $43,000 and sent a representative from New York to the dedication ceremonies.

Neighbors contributed $32,000 to an account at a local bank, including one donation of $5,000 from the father of one of the arsonists, Bridges said.

More tangibly, teams of volunteers from around the country appeared during the summer to donate skilled labor.

An interfaith group of Christians and Jews from Philadelphia did much of the interior carpentry. Methodist work groups from Iowa and Louisiana painted and hung drywall. Their work was coordinated and the teams housed for free at a nearby Presbyterian church in McComb, Miss.

At the ceremonies, Knight turned over a check for $25,000 from a Methodist relief agency. It appeared to be enough, Bridges said, to make the church debt free.

“It’s been a struggle,” he said before the service. “But they (church members) can take it from here. I told them, we’ve built you a church building. Now you have to build the church.”

MJP END NOLAN