Fire and Hope in Pine Lake

Here's a follow-up article on the 1996 arson at Pine Lake Baptist Church.

Green, Melissa Fay. (1996, July or August). Fire and hope in Pine Lake. Atlanta Journal/Constitution, A11.

Throughout our history, racial intolerance has sparked church burnings. But today, amid a new rash of these acts of hate, a spirit of hope is rising from the ashes. 

Red-brick, white-steepled Pine Lake Baptist Church-- 10 miles east of Atlanta, a stone's throw from Stone Mountain-- dignifies an intersection otherwise offering speedboats, Amoco gas, Yamahas, and emission inspections. Last month, a 48-year-old sanctuary on the church grounds burned to the ground. The cause of the fire is undetermined, the investigation ongoing, but the spotlight the incident has thrown on this community is enlightening, for Pine Lake tells a very different tale that recently conveyed by the outbreak of black church burnings.

Outside Georgia, outside the South, the impression has been made of a region gone half-mad with racism, crawling with insomniac firebugs. That racism is alive and well in America is most unfortunately true, but it is not the only truth. What is also true-- perhaps especially in the South, where people of all stripes have been thrown together willy-nilly-- is that the racism still alive in some citizens coexists with a spirit of congeniality and a taste for diversity awakening in many others. And the congregants of Pine Lake, despite all appearances, fall in the latter category.

For most of its history, the all-white, 1,000-member Baptist church fell within the parameters of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s scathing accusation that the most segregated hour in America was 11 o'clock, Sunday morning. The old-time Pine Lake members are white, middle-class, Southern-born and reared, middle-aged and older, Republican. They live and work in the neighborhood of Stone Mountain-- that august Confederate memorial that served in 1915, as the site of the rebirth of the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and, for half of this century, as the stage for Klan rallies and cross-burnings. To look at these people-- affable, slow-talking men on whom the intense heat of the Georgia sun registers, and crisply dressed women on whom it doesn't-- is to imagine they might be the sort who would prefer to live, work, and worship in a mirror-image world of fellow White Southern Baptists.

But black congregants-- men, women, and children-- joined the white church members on the parking lot on the morning of the burning, and were welcomed by tears and hugs and included in a circle of spontaneous prayer. They represent a new wave of younger church members, including a dozen Jamaican and African-American families actively recruited by Pine Lake in the last several years.

"When a new family moved into the area, somebody goes and invites them to church," said Ronnie Peters, a friendly older congregant. "Black, white, doesn't make one bit of difference."

"I think they knocked on our door three separate times," said Glenn Stevens, a software consultant and native of Jamaica. "We gave in and joined."

To look closely at Pine Lake Baptist is to begin to graph how the South has changed since racial terrorism last figured prominently in the international news. That this type of church, once the backbone of segregationist thought, is now on the front lines of peaceful racial coexistence suggests that some ground has shifted underfoot.

Kathleen Mills, wife of the interim minister, put it most succinctly. "If what's waiting for me is a heaven full of nothing but white Baptists, I'm just not so sure I'm interested."

The world surrounding Pine Lake Baptist changed first. The portions of DeKalb County lying outside the city of Atlanta-- including areas like Pine Lake and Stone Mountain-- show a growth in the population of "blacks and other races" from 26 percent in 1980 to nearly 57 percent in 1995, according to the Atlanta Regional Commission. Rapidly increasing numbers of African-American, Hispanic, and foreign-born faces appear in formerly all-white public school classrooms, upscale neighborhoods, and professional workplaces. The pressing issue for the all-white churches has been: Do we stay? Do we go? And if we stay, what will we look like?

Now all the white congregants have made decisions to welcome new members regardless of color. "If a congregation is 90 percent white and 10 percent black, you're fine, you're welcome, they think you're splendid people," said Glenn Stevens. "But if the number hits 70/30, especially if the church is attracting a lot of black teenagers, the white flight begins. I personally know of three white churches in the area on the market."

But, according to interim minister Randy Mullis, Pine Lake Baptist has voted to stay and minister to the community. "You'll find nothing but genuineness and sincerity here," he said. Stevens agreed: "We have met people at Pine Lake Baptist who, believe it or not, are colorblind."

Of course, Pine Lake's black membership hasn't even hit 10 percent yet. Will the whites hold on if black numbers increase?

Around Atlanta, one finds increasing numbers of white congregations successfully adapting to their changing neighborhoods, greeting black members without bidding farewell to white. A few flourishing blended churches approach the different prayer styles and choir styles of their members by offering a smorgasbord of choices: a more staid, more "white" style of worship at 10 o'clock; a more participatory, more "black" style of worship at noon. In these churches, white flight has not been triggered even by a 50/50 racial balance.

Social change does not happen overnight. If, in a decade, a thriving well-integrated community is found at Pine Lake Baptist, one may begin to speak of profound change. Meanwhile, the congregants have made a good start at diversity and aver that they define "church family" without regard to skin color.
"If this turns out to be an act of terrorism," Mullis said, regarding the charcoaled shambles of the old sanctuary, "to try to interpret the message will make me sick at heart."

The message he and his congregants inadvertently send to the world is more promising. Here in the center of Dixie, in the shadow of the KKK's former stronghold, old-fashioned white people are lightheartedly welcoming black people into their church community, proving that, in matters of the spirit, there is a reality that transcends history and race.