fbpx
×

Log into your account

We have changed software providers for our subscription database. Old login credentials will no longer work. Please click the "Register" link below to create a new account. If you do not know your new account number you can contact [email protected]
Historic church flattened, ‘not giving up’
Joni B. Hannigan, Baptist Press
May 04, 2011
6 MIN READ TIME

Historic church flattened, ‘not giving up’

Historic church flattened, ‘not giving up’
Joni B. Hannigan, Baptist Press
May 04, 2011

ECLECTIC, Ala. — The half-mile-wide deadly tornado which tore through

Elmore County, Ala., late April 27 ripped down power lines, shredded trees and

tossed a trailer park on a path from Wetumpka to Kowaliga before pushing

through the front doors of tiny 115-year-old Mount Hebron East Baptist Church

in Eclectic.

The twister exploded the historic building and a 2-year-old adjacent fellowship

and educational building onto the church’s cemetery, its powerful winds

knocking flat the heavy headstones and spewing the churned up contents nearly

two miles into the surrounding woods.

Word spread quickly. Pastor Bob Williamson said a member who lives close to the

church site called and told him the church was “gone.”

“What do you mean gone?” he asked. She told him it had taken a direct hit and “nothing

was left except a pile of rubble and the slab of the fellowship hall.”

At the site the next day, Williamson reflected on his first reaction to the

destruction.

“I was just amazed to see the damage here, just obliterated, the church,”

Williamson said.

Some of the church members were weeping, he said, and wondering what to do.

“Well, we’re going to do that last thing the Lord told us to do and that’s to

be the people of God,” Williamson said he told them.

The pastor cancelled his plans to preach at a revival and determined that the

church would meet at the site for worship May 1. Williamson has been the church’s

pastor for about six months. He and his wife Vicky retired from the

International Mission Board after serving nearly 22 years in South Africa.

“I’m not leaving my church in this kind of struggle and going any place,”

Williamson said. “We’re gonna make a statement and it’s gonna be, ‘We’re not

giving up, we’re going on. We’re gonna be the people of God. We’re gonna

worship You and we’re gonna be faithful to do what You told us to do, and we’re

gonna be Mount Hebron East Baptist Church.’ … [W]e recommit ourselves to the

dream to be what God wants it to be. That’s what we’re gonna do.”

Photo by Joni B. Hannigan

A woman and child sat amid rubble in Eclectic, Ala., where a half-mile-wide tornado tore through the community, destroying a trailer park and the 115-year-old Mount Hebron East Baptist Church.

First Baptist Church in Eclectic volunteered to bring 50 chairs to the site and

a local funeral home loaned a tent, Williamson said.

“God is not surprised by this. You trust in the Lord and keep on doing the last

thing the Lord told you to do unless He tells you to do something different….

God’s faithful and we want to be faithful people,” he said. “That’s what we are

committed to be.”

Six people were confirmed dead in the area, the local sheriff’s department

reported; none were members of the church. One church member’s home was heavily

damaged, Williamson noted.

Jim Jackson, director of missions for Elmore Baptist Association, said it’s

miraculous that none of the association’s other 42 churches were destroyed

considering the intensity of the tornado and the widespread destruction. Some

of the churches received minor damage.

While children played on the now clean slab of the fellowship hall at Mount

Hebron East, stacks of hymnals, plastic flowers and a few other tangible items

stood in contrast to the splintered wood planks, insulation, cabinet doors and

roofing shingles still spread out behind the church.

Congregants and their families had been coming by all day. Some stayed to help

clean up. They wandered around and made small piles of things considered

usable.

Some of the onlookers were members of their community who had family

members with ties to the church or were just curious, Williamson said.

Dusty Duck, 27, was there most of the day helping. He and other men of the

church righted most of the heavy headstones and salvaged tables and pieces of the

pulpit.

“I’m just trying to lend a helping hand,” said Duck, who has grown up in the

church. His sister helped pull old hymnals out of the basement room under the

church’s wooden platform in anticipation of it giving way.

“My heart just dropped when I saw this,” Duck said.

He lives in one of the nearby trailer parks that was not destroyed. The one

that was destroyed was where four of the six who died in Elmore County lived,

according to officials.

God is still in control, Duck said, and even with all that is going on, he has

hope that the church will persevere.

“Hopefully the good Lord will let us rebuild and become stronger than this,”

Duck said. “It’s not the building that makes the church, it’s the people.”

(EDITOR’S NOTE — Hannigan, managing editor of the Florida Baptist Witness

newspaper, wrote this article as a special correspondent for The Alabama

Baptist. View an e-edition of The Alabama Baptist with extensive tornado

coverage at online.thealabamabaptist.org. Donations to disaster relief can be made

to state conventions, or directly to the North American Mission Board’s

disaster relief fund, at NAMB.net, or by

calling 1-866-407-NAMB (6262). A $10 donation can be made by texting “NAMBDR”

to the number “40579.”)

(SPECIAL NOTE — Thank you for your continued support of the Biblical

Recorder site. During this interim period while we are searching for a new

Editor/President the comments section will be temporarily discontinued. Thank

you for your understanding and patience in this. If you do have comments or

issues with items we run, please contact [email protected]

or call 919-847-2127.)