Huntsville’s Mt. Zion Baptist Church celebrates 150 years’ worth of ministry heritage

Huntsville’s Mt. Zion Baptist Church celebrates 150 years’ worth of ministry heritage

Lifetime Mt. Zion Baptist Church member Rebecca Wall held the final draft of her church’s history in her lap as she discussed its upcoming 150th anniversary.

Contained within the 300 pages is a chronology of faith that started with a one-room log cabin situated in the endless cotton fields once characteristic of Monrovia, near Huntsville.

Established in 1855, Mt. Zion Baptist started as an extension of Enon Baptist Church (now First Baptist Church, Huntsville).

The charter members — including Wall’s great-great grandfather, Alfred Wall — shared their little cabin, which rested on land that now serves as a cemetery, with a Presbyterian congregation.

The church’s first pastor, G.W. Carmichael, rode his horse in every other weekend to hold services. The congregation didn’t get a permanent pastor for nearly 100 years — until 1945.

“Although the church had to make do with only two services a month for all those years, Mt. Zion has always been a strong, thriving church that reached out to the community,” said Dot Morris, who collaborated with Wall and Joyce Gold to write the history.

Extensive missions work

It was one of the first congregations in the Tennessee Valley to allow slaves to worship in the same building as their owners, according to the church’s history.

After the Civil War, Mt. Zion founded a mission church for freed slaves.

By 1894, the church had an impressive 300 members on its roll. They were the first church in the area to offer a Sunday School program and one of the first to adopt the program known today as Woman’s Missionary Union. 

“Mt. Zion has always been a missions-oriented church,” said Danny Rose, the publicity coordinator for the committee planning the church’s 150th anniversary celebration, which was held Sept. 11. “We helped start University, Lakewood and Trinity Baptists (all churches located in the Huntsville area).”

Included in the history is Mt. Zion’s extensive missions record, which when broken down works out to 1,102 weeks of service in 26 locations in the United States and 20 foreign countries.

Rose is particularly proud of a missions trip several Mt. Zion members made to Ukraine in 1994.

“They actually hid the money to help build a church there in money belts so that the government wouldn’t find it and confiscate it.”

The church built a Christian ministry center in 1998 to accommodate an Upward Basketball program that draws 535 kids to the church every year.

R.E. Vaughn, a celebration committee member who has attended Mt. Zion all of his 81 years, remembers hunting squirrels and rabbits in the fields behind the church and climbing the giant oak trees that still stand in front of the sanctuary today. He helped his blind father build the third sanctuary, which stood until 1928. In the church’s history, they have relocated once and built five sanctuaries. A sixth, larger sanctuary is being considered.

Vaughn, Wall’s first cousin, was in his 20s by the time the church got its first full-time pastor, and he recalls that not much changed but, “it was nice to be able to hear a sermon every week.”

“Around that time we got a bell for the church,” Vaughn added. “We would ring it every Sunday morning to remind everyone in the area to come to church.”

The bell hasn’t rung in years. It now rests on a brick pedestal in Wall’s backyard, yet on Sunday mornings, as members file into service, some might say it is still ringing, silently beckoning the faithful to fellowship.

Ron Madison, Mt. Zion’s senior pastor, attributes the church’s exponential growth to God. “In the final analysis of growth, any changes are due to the Holy Spirit working amid the people so that God receives the glory,” Madison said.

“From a human standpoint, this church has strong roots in the Monrovia community. Yet the core families who have founded this church have been willing to open their hearts to all the new people coming into the area,” he added.

Plans for the 150th anniversary celebration began in January. One month later Wall, Morris and Gold began the arduous process of sifting through previously written histories, selecting photographs and interviewing the descendants of founding members, many of whom still attend Mt. Zion.

Tragically Morris’s husband, Bill (pastor of Mt. Zion until 1973), was killed in a car accident just a half a mile from the church in April, yet she refused to abandon the project. “The younger members of our church deserve to know the story of our enduring congregation,” she said. “This isn’t just for our member today but for their children and grandchildren.”

The hardbound history, along with a cookbook containing photographs of the church in times past and a children’s coloring book depicting the church’s development, were all on hand for the anniversary celebration. Rick Lance, executive director for the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions, was the guest preacher for the service, which drew 800 people.