Today there are 16 churches in the Bronx affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. Sam Simpson started five and encouraged the others to join the denomination, while at the same time helping restore what was a fire-ravaged community — some say nearly 70,000 fires from 1970 to 1975.
Simpson wasn’t even out of college in 1964 when First Baptist Church, Brooklyn, under the leadership of D.A. Morgan, called Simpson and his wife Lola as church planters in the Bronx, north of Manhattan.
“When we came to the Bronx, it was pretty good,” Simpson said. “People were sitting on park benches. The Grand Concourse was very nice. Things were good. But then you saw the deterioration and you watched the fires, thousands and thousands of them.”
The decline of the Bronx saw a corresponding growth of Southern Baptist work in the borough. Simpson didn’t have just a ringside seat — he was in the center ring.
Simpson started with a Thursday evening prayer meeting in the apartment home of Cecilia Robinson. The first worship service was Nov. 6, 1964, in a two-family home on Honeywell Avenue that had been purchased for Simpson’s use by the Home Mission Board, precursor to the Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Mission Board.
A Southern Baptist work continues there today as Honeywell Baptist Church. The pastor, Aristotle Simpri, is from Ghana. He’s a teacher at Long Island University and one of several people Simpson has mentored from layperson to pastor.
“From the first week of Bronx Baptist Church’s existence, Sunday School, morning and evening worship services and midweek prayer meetings were conducted,” Simpson wrote on the church’s Web site, www.bronxbaptist.org.
Within a year of the Simpsons’ arrival, the South Bronx began visibly to deteriorate. But the decay had started earlier.
As early as the 1950s, city social workers reported “enduring poverty” in the South Bronx. This was where some 170,000 people displaced from post-World War II slum clearing in Manhattan moved, according to an online history of the borough found on the Web site www.npl.org.
They were replacing people who had moved from apartments to homes of their own, or perhaps duplexes, north of Bronx County. The new Bronx tenants — often two and three families in an apartment meant for one — reaped the benefit of rent control laws enacted during World War II, but the lack of profits limited the amount of maintenance that landlords were willing to do, and the press of people added to the maintenance that needed to be done.
“Buildings were often set afire, sometimes by unscrupulous landlords hoping to collect insurance and other times by unscrupulous tenants taking advantage of the city’s policy that burned-out tenants should be given priority for public housing and receive money for new furnishings,” the Web site reported.
Another Web site — www.bobbalogh.com — listed six main reasons for the deterioration of the Bronx after 1965: (Keep in mind that while this was going on, Simpson was starting four churches; the fifth followed in 1986.)
Misguided federal policies on urban renewal, such as “clearing whole blocks of old but salvageable buildings, leaving acres of vacant lots in the middle of once cohesive neighborhoods.”
New York City “starved the Bronx of funds” and closed two hospitals, “gerrymandering political districts so that no one represented the South Bronx.”
When profits declined, some landlords “reduced maintenance, stopped paying real estate taxes and eventually abandoned or torched their properties.”
Residents burned their properties to get to the top of housing lists that included money for new furniture. “One report states that between 1970 and 1975 there were 68,456 fires in the borough — more than 33 each night, and most in the South Bronx.”
Jobs disappeared — an estimated 17,688 in manufacturing alone. Large firms left for lower taxes; small businesses left in fear.
As robbers, muggers and street gangs proliferated, stable families fled.
This was the world God had brought an unsuspecting Sam and Lola Simpson to. “People were scared because you could never tell what would happen in a building,” Simpson said. “These were large, nine- or 10-family houses. But we [Bronx Baptist] grew steadily during that time.” That’s typical of Simpson, who is known for his optimism.
“He will often get up in his pulpit and say ‘God is good. It is good to be good. It is good to do good.’ I don’t believe I’ve ever heard him speak without saying that,” said J.B. Graham, executive director of the Baptist Convention of New York. “That’s his trademark.”
On Nov. 6, 1966, two years after its first worship service, the new work started by Simpson was constituted with 64 charter members as Bronx Baptist Church. Its location: in the center of the South Bronx. Despite (or perhaps because of) the chaos going on around it, by 1970 the church had outgrown the two-family home. It moved to its present location on East 187th Street — still in the South Bronx, though about a mile north of the Honeywell Avenue property.
Reaching the community
That same year — 1970 — Simpson started the Protestant Church of Co-Op City. Co-Op City was a government housing project built between 1968 and 1970. It consisted of 15,000 apartments in three dozen high-rise buildings that were designed to house about 60,000 people.
The Co-Op City church today is one of the largest church buildings in the Bronx, Simpson said. It recently completed a multimillion-dollar building campaign for overall expansion. Calvin Owens has been pastor since the 1980s; it is no longer affiliated with Southern Baptists.
Simpson was appointed a Southern Baptist associate missionary and later, pastor-director for the Southern Baptist Church in the Bronx. In 1971, during some of the most virulent fire episodes, he was appointed to full missionary status.
In 1972 Simpson started Wake-Eden Community Baptist Church. That was the year President Jimmy Carter visited the Bronx. Newspapers — which had for the most part avoided the lawless area — described the destruction as akin to that of Berlin after World War II.
Like Co-Op City, Wake-Eden was in northeast Bronx — somewhat removed from the ongoing decimation of the South Bronx.
Some 200 people attend Sunday services at Wake-Eden today. They give 8 percent of their undesignated offerings to the Cooperative Program and another 8 percent to Metro New York Baptist Association for local missions needs.
The multicultural Wake-Eden congregation also recently started New Hope Baptist in Spring Valley north of the Bronx in Rockland County. Peter John, a deacon at Wake Eden, has been licensed to be the new congregation’s pastor.
In 1986, Simpson and the mother church, Bronx Baptist, started Grace Baptist Church, also in northeast Bronx. Delroy Reid-Salomon, then youth director at Bronx Baptist, helped start Grace, which first met in a restaurant.
The Bronx’s other Southern Baptist churches include Japanese and Korean as well as multicultural congregations. The population of the Bronx is “fairly well-mixed with blacks, Hispanics and whites,” Simpson said. “There’s a section called ‘Little Italy.’”
Continuing growth
Bronx Baptist gives 10 percent of its undesignated offerings to the Cooperative Program and another 10 percent to Metro New York Baptist Association. They also are involved heavily in supporting several community ministries and church planting.
Ministries ebb and flow at Bronx Baptist as the people called there come and go. At the present time, in addition to its day-care program and afterschool care program, the church provides hot meals once a week for all who would like to participate.
A Thursday evening “midnight” prayer meeting — so named because it goes from 8 p.m. to midnight or later — has been going on since 1973.
Bronx Baptist also has a strong youth program that becomes even stronger during the summer months with the arrival of summer missions teams who lead day camps at various parks. Youth also meet Friday nights at the church.
“In the city, evangelism is looking at the needs of the community and beginning to meet those needs,” Simpson said. “What is unique about Southern Baptists is their evangelism. In the city, evangelism starts with social ministry.” (BP)
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