Pine Barren Baptists reach area residents by revitalizing abandoned historic church

Clouds of white dust encircle Don Donald’s truck as he eases down the rarely traveled gravel road just off state Highway 21 in Wilcox County.
   
A sign a little ways from the highway indicates that the pavement is ending and gravel begins, but there’s not much proof there was ever any pavement there to begin with. He slows the truck soon after when even the gravel runs out and there’s nothing ahead but a dirt trail grown up with trees and knee-high grass.
   
“This used to be a major shipping route in 1900 or so,” said Donald, a commissioner for the Alabama Baptist Historical Commission (ABHC).
   
That’s the reason Bear Creek Baptist Church stands stately on the left side of the road, shielded from the highway by thick trees and preserved in a wide clearing containing a fenced-in cemetery. 
   
Except for some chipping paint and tired-looking columns, Bear Creek Baptist looks just like it did when a member locked its doors after its last service in the 1960s. The white wooden building edges the debilitated trail that used to be the “main road.” The church was a mainstay a century ago.
   
But decades later, when the traffic dried up, so did church attendance.
   
“They never officially closed; they just ceased to have services,” said Wayne McMillian, who recently resigned as director of missions for Pine Barren Baptist Association.
   
That’s why when McMillian, Donald and others set out to hold services again for the first time in nearly half a century, it was not so much a church start as it was a church restart.
  
“It seemed like a shame for no one to be meeting in the very church where Pine Barren Association began,” Donald said.
   
The idea to hold services again came when Gladys Mason, clerk and secretary for Pine Barren Association, ventured out to the cemetery to visit the graves of her grandparents and great-grandparents.
   
“Some of us have family that is buried there at the church, and we went back and realized that the church was gradually deteriorating,” Mason said. “They (those who went with her) started looking for guidance on what to do, so they started pointing at me and said, ‘You do something.’”
   
Mason did all she knew to do — she tried her pasture-gate key in the long-locked door and it worked. She opened the door to the church for the first time in decades. And in doing so, she opened the door for area residents to once again have a Baptist church — and for Pine Barren Baptists to preserve a piece of history.
   
Pine Barren Association was constituted at Bear Creek Baptist in 1850, and the church led the new association in baptisms for several years.
   
The church’s last record with the association in 1962 noted that the church had 38 members. And then it ceased to exist.
   
But the members didn’t — in fact, some in the area still have their official membership at Bear Creek. A few of them wound their way down that dusty road in July 2005, meeting for the first time in decades to decide if their church could be rejuvenated.
   
They decided emphatically that it could. Since that meeting a year ago, quarterly services have taken place in the church, led without electricity by McMillian, who preaches and plays guitar. Sixty who heard by letter or word of mouth came to the first service — the same number that attended when the association was organized there in 1850. And out of their generosity, enough money turned up in the offering baskets to repair the front porch and front columns.
   
“Bear Creek is an excellent example of Alabama Baptists’ commitment to preservation of our architectural history,” said Frances Hamilton, ABHC executive director. “The congregation not only restored a historic building but revived a congregation.”
   
The church’s revitalization is a great illustration of what can happen when Baptists commit themselves to the task, she added.
   
“Will it ever be a church again? Who knows,” McMillian said. “But services have been well attended, and people keep anticipating the next one. There are some who haven’t been going to church anywhere. Those are the target group.”
   
The closest church to Bear Creek is a once-a-month church in McWilliams, and the closest full-time Baptist church is 10 miles down the road in Pine Apple. One area resident who has been attending Bear Creek’s services is already asking if she can move her membership to the regenerated church.
   
“People used to move to the city, and now people are moving away from the city,” McMillian said. “Starting this church again has been exciting to people in this area, and we’ve reached people we normally wouldn’t.”