Church vows to beat tragedy

The Baltimore Sun

When the smoke finally cleared, the beloved 140-year-old house of worship emerged roofless but standing -- and West Baltimore church leaders expressed hope yesterday that it could be reborn.

"The structure is solid, and the walls we believe to be solid, according to the [city] inspector," said Bishop Oscar E. Brown of First Mount Olive Free Will Baptist Church. "Based upon the projections given up until this point, we won't have to demolish."

The Formstone-clad church in the 800 block of W. Saratoga St. caught fire Tuesday after a bolt of lightning struck the steeple, which soon toppled onto the adjoining roof. The resulting five-alarm blaze rendered the building a "total loss," according to fire officials.

Last night, at an emotional gathering at New Psalmist Baptist Church in West Baltimore -- complete with singing choirs and ecstatic cries -- First Mount Olive congregants and their supporters declared their will to overcome the tragedy.

"We didn't come to have a pity party," Brown said. When a fellow pastor announced a $10,000 donation, Brown fell to his knees as more than a thousand people rose with cheers of praise.

Earlier yesterday, church leaders declined to say whether their church's recently rebuilt spire was outfitted with a lightning rod, which experts say could have prevented the disaster.

"We're not at liberty to answer that question," said Deacon Bryan Miller, a church spokesman. "There are certain things we have to withhold. We're in a relationship with our insurance company, and we want to take precautions not to embarrass any entity, or the contractor" who recently worked on the steeple.

About 18 months ago, Brown said, debris started falling from the church's steeple, "and the city said if we did not repair it, they would shut us down."

Timothy J. Nickels, a contractor who worked on the steeple renovations last summer, said he did not know whether there was a lightning rod on the church's steeple.

"How am I supposed to know a thing like that?" said Nickels, president of Advance Contracting Inc.

A properly installed lightning rod would likely have prevented the fire, a top expert said.

About a third of all church-building fires are caused by lightning, said Martin A. Uman, co-director of the Lightning Research Lab at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Any lawsuits that result from Tuesday's fire, Uman said, "are going to involve whether it had lightning protection, whether it was adequate or inadequate, or whether the latest contractor didn't put it back up."

Yesterday morning, pieces of burnt wood, fragments of roof tile and broken glass littered Saratoga Street at the church's entrance, which had a red "Condemned" sign posted on the door.

Light filtered through large -- and apparently undamaged -- stained-glass windows at the altar, illuminating mounds of debris that lay among the wooden pews.

The imposing steeple was gone. All that remained of the roof were seven charred wooden rafters.

"It's unbelievable," Brown said. "You can stand right in the sanctuary and look up into the sky."

Brown said the church complex -- which is assessed by the state for tax purposes at about $2.4 million -- is fully insured and that agents had begun assessing the damage. He said city inspectors found the church's foundation and walls to be in good shape and that he hoped to rebuild the structure rather than demolish it. City inspector William Conkling, who toured the site with Brown yesterday morning, declined to answer questions.

Whatever church leaders decide, Brown said the 3,000 members of his congregation would now have their faith tested. "We have to live out the faith that we have been preaching," he said. "With every teaching, there comes a test. And this is our season of test, to see how strong our faith is."

Doris Veney, 51, who was baptized at the church, visited it yesterday on a lunch break from the nearby Social Security Administration building, where she works.

"This is a landmark church for black people," Veney said. "They lost something good. But it's coming back. I believe a lot of the preachers in this city are going to help Oscar Brown rebuild this church."

The church has been overwhelmed with more than 100 calls and offers of support, Brown said.

"Persons have been calling around the country to say they are sending funds to assist us," he said. "Right here in the city, pastors have offered their facilities for us to come and share with them, even if it meant changing their worship time. I thought that was tremendous."

The Rev. Carl A. Pierce, senior pastor of nearby Carter Memorial Church of God in Christ, said he offered his church to Brown for Sunday morning services. Pierce was the guest preacher at First Mount Olive a few Sundays ago for a 69th anniversary sermon, he said.

News of the church fire reverberated through a smaller group of Lutherans in Catonsville, whose descendants built the Saratoga Street church and worshiped there for nearly a century.

The Gothic-style structure began as a sanctuary for recent German immigrants, said the Rev. Stephen Schafer of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Catonsville, whose predecessors built the structure at Saratoga Street and Fremont Avenue in 1867.

The land was bought for $5,500 in 1865, according to church records, Schafer said. The initial structure was completed two years later, at a cost of $28,400, and outfitted with a $2,250 organ.

"It was a beautiful church," said Florence Borth, 80, one of seven living members of the St. Paul congregation who worshiped in West Baltimore before the congregation moved to the suburbs in the early 1950s. "It's really upsetting to think that this that we had started is nothing now."

Some of the original 1,000 congregants mortgaged their homes to finance the building's construction, said Borth, who was baptized and married in the church.

Her father, the son of immigrants, attended the church's parochial school, known for strict German teachers and corporal punishment. But Borth also recalled how children in the neighborhood liked to swing by the ropes of the three Westphalia bells in the tower.

She was relieved to hear that First Mount Olive was considering salvaging the structure. "That's wonderful," she said. "Because it was hard selling the church. But at the time, the surroundings had changed so."

When public housing developments were built in the neighborhood in the 1940s, many of the earlier German immigrants started moving to the suburbs, Borth said.

"We tried to get the neighborhood people, who were mostly of color, to come to our church, but they didn't seem to take too much at that time to the Lutheran faith."

In 1954, the dwindling Lutheran congregation moved to Catonsville and was soon replaced by the growing Baptist group. The red brick siding was covered in Formstone in 1956, and a baptismal pool was installed, according to the church's Web site.

Today, the new St. Paul chapel on Old Frederick Road seats just 300 worshipers, while their former church in West Baltimore regularly played host to three overflow "full gospel" services every Sunday featuring a 75-member choir.

Last night, Brown vowed that the Pentecostal-Baptist tradition would continue. Church services this Sunday will be held at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall.

"The news reporters keep asking where we're going to have church Sunday," Brown told the crowd. "And I said, 'Oh, we're gonna have church."

gadi.dechter@baltsun.com

Sun reporter Frank Roylance contributed to this article.

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