Fire Fighters

As the number of African American church burnings continued to climb this summer, a group of local pastors put their heads together and came up with a plan that may bring the fires to a halt.

The ministers figured that bringing together church leaders from different races and religions might stop the fires before they even got started.

“We wanted to be united, not divided on this issue,” said the Rev. Lowe Barry, a minister at the California Christian Center in Compton. “We wanted to turn something negative into something positive.”

Since their first meeting two months ago, the church leaders have created a group to address the issue and during the last week the organization has gotten itself off the ground.

Churches Against Arson held its first fund-raiser last weekend, a gospel festival that drew more than 400 people and raised enough money to establish their national headquarters in Los Angeles. On Sunday, the organization plans to open the anti-arson office and will announce its national action plan.

Churches Against Arson is the largest independent grass-roots effort to help churches that have been burned, according to the National Council of Churches, a New York-based ecumenical organization that raises funds for various church-related causes and has managed to raise about $9 million for its Burned Churches Fund.

Officials at the organization say they hope the initiative will strengthen the national organization’s effort to rebuild more than 250 churches that have been devastated by arson since 1990.

“This tragedy has given birth to dialogue between people of many different races and religions,” said Don Rojas, manager of the burned churches project of the National Council of Churches. “There are so many initiatives from individual churches cropping up all over the place, but a multiracial movement like this can help lead the way toward a national dialogue on race relations.”

“From Devastation to Salvation” is the motto of the newly formed group, whose multiracial board of directors is made up of 15 pastors in the Los Angeles area. Once the organization settles into its Western Avenue office, opened with the $3,000 raised at the gospel festival, they plan to hire a full-time staff to provide 24-hour assistance to burned churches.

Although the detailed action plan has not been unveiled, members of the group say they hope to start an Adopt-a-Church campaign, which will provide a burned church with a sister church that can provide emotional support and worship space until their church can be repaired.

Other plans include a prevention program that would teach ministers about what kinds of surveillance equipment they should have at their church and an educational program that may prevent the fires from starting.

Churches Against Arson has asked about 500 churches in the state to support the organization, and it hopes to gain the support from the more than 250,000 churches nationwide. Barry said church leaders of all ethnicities have allied themselves with the group.

The Rev. Tim Smith, a white minister whose Cornerstone Christian Church in Torrance hosted the gospel festival Sunday, said he responded to Barry’s plea to put together a group of ministers because he wanted to help build a bridge between the races in the city. Smith invited about 80 pastors in the South Bay to the gospel event.

“Southern California is a melting pot,” Smith said. “With such a multiethnic population we can enhance our cause by supporting one another.”

One the first churches that Churches Against Arson plans to help is the Lighthouse Gospel Church in God and Christ in Watts, which was firebombed last month. The church suffered about $15,000 in damage after someone firebombed the church’s free grocery store.

Although authorities do not believe that the fire was related to the string of arson attacks on churches nationwide, the fire brought the church-burning issue closer to home. The Rev. Edward Bynum, the minister at the church, joined Churches Against Arson and said that once his church has been repaired, he hopes to work with the organization because he knows what it feels like to have a church ruined by fire.

“Churches help so many people and once they are burned it’s hard to get the financing needed to rebuild,” Bynum said. “When that happens, so many people who need help have nowhere to turn.