COLUMBUS, Miss. — At the First Pentecostal Church on Tuscaloosa Road, the last Saturday of February was a day filled with supposed-to-be’s.
Little Jereson McCool was supposed to be at the church hall surrounded by 60 members of his family and community to celebrate his fifth birthday, but his grandma’s train from South Carolina was running five hours late. Jereson’s mom Misty made the call from the train station to the church’s Pastor Steve Blaylock to see if they could move it to the next day.
Tom and Betty Lindsay, an elderly couple who live by the river, were supposed to hole-up in a residence located in the church because of pending flooding, but Betty’s sister insisted instead for the couple to stay at her home 20 miles away.
The mother-daughter cleaning crew that was supposed to be cleaning the sanctuary of the church for the big baptismal service that was planned for the next day decided at the last minute just to go do it early in the morning.
These last-minute changes to plans proved to be life-savers. A tornado — one of nine that ravaged parts of Alabama, Georgia, and here in Mississippi — destroyed the very church building they would have been in, ripping off the roof and collapsing the walls. A few untouched pews remained as a reminder a house of God once stood there.
“Even in the midst of all that destruction, there was so many miracles, things that just are unexplainable that happened, that only God could cause that,” said Blaylock.
The pastor’s voice cracked as he considered the loss of life that would have happened. Instead, what he said he felt in that moment, when he drove up the road and saw the structural devastation of his church, was profound gratefulness that none of those people who were supposed to be there, were there.
The violent tornado leveled 300 homes, closed down the local school, and cost one person her life. It also brought the community and strangers together the next morning to begin the process of rebuilding the structure and renewing faith.
“As we were trying Saturday evening to get anything out of the Sanctuary that we could recover we started talking about what are we gonna do about church tomorrow,” he said of the following days service.
“So I started asking you know, maybe we oughtta wait until another Sunday to do our Baptismal service rather than the next day. One particular man, Blake Brown, told us that if there’s any way possible, I still wanna get baptized. He was new to our church, and boy, that just excited me and everybody else. We’re like, we’ll make it happen. We’ll make it happen, if we have to go to the river or whatever we do, we’ll make it happen,” he said.
So they did. The miraculous thing was that people came. People came from their church, and locals who didn’t belong to the church came. Strangers came who had just happened to hear about what had happened.
“Obviously, we have been a greater light in our community than what we realize,” Blaylock said.
First Pentecostal, unlike some Southern Pentecostal churches, is not divided by race. Both blacks and whites practice in a town whose population is 60 percent black and 37 percent white.
It is also a Democrat town in a Republican state.
“There are so many forces in our world that divide people,” Blaylock said. “But to see the community in our area, we are a mixed community. We have Hispanics, we have Native Americans, we have blacks, we have white, we have mixes of all kinds. But everybody, everybody was out helping each other.”
“Nobody asked what political party that you supported while we were out there Saturday night and Sunday. Nobody cared who was beside them, they were just thankful that they were there, and that they were helping, and they expressed love,” said Blaylock.
A total of nine people were baptized that Sunday morning in an outdoor service. Two hundred attendees sat in folding chairs surrounded by jagged lumber as they used a borrowed baptism tank. Two hundred people showed up to dig them out so they could have their service.
Even the local Lowe’s showed up with a flatbed, bottles of water, and dozens of work gloves to lend a hand.
“Our motto before the storm was, ‘Loving God and Loving People.’ And now our motto is, ‘To Rebuild Bigger and Stronger Together.’ Might not be bad a motto for the whole country.”
