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Another Two Historic Churches Explode Into Flames...

Tyler Durden's Photo
by Tyler Durden
Authored...

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

Two more historic churches are gone. Burned to the ground like hundreds more before them.

In downtown Grand Rapids, fire tore through a 133-year-old building owned by LaGrave Avenue Christian Reformed Church late Wednesday night. While in Pennington, Alabama, the Ebenezer Baptist Church - a congregation founded in 1850 - was reduced to a total loss in a late-night blaze days earlier.

The official language surrounding the causes is already familiar: under investigation, unknown. The buildings are not coming back.

The Grand Rapids fire started around 10:55 p.m. Wednesday night, in the former Seventh-day Adventist building near Oakes Street and Sheldon Avenue - a masonry structure the city archives date to about 1894, originally All Souls Universalist Church.

Grand Rapids Professional Firefighters Local 366 said Rescue Company 2 arrived to "a large church with heavy smoke and fire showing from the basement windows." Crews pushed an interior attack with hoselines in the basement and on the main floor. The fire was already in the walls and void spaces.

Nineteen crews worked the scene. Off-duty firefighters were called in. The floor collapsed. Part of the roof came down. Two firefighters were struck by falling brick and are expected to recover; local reports later put the injury tally at three. Battalion Chief Kathleen Thompson said crews had to pull out and fight the fire from the outside. The secondary building is expected to be a total loss. The main LaGrave sanctuary next door was spared.

Rev. Peter Jonker, a minister on staff, told WOOD-TV: "I'm really sad. Both because it's a beautiful building and part of our city, but also for us, we had some really significant ministry plans."

Investigators are still looking at the cause. No ruling of arson has been announced. The phrase on the record is the same one now attached to so many of these scenes: unknown.

Ebenezer Baptist Church in Pennington, Choctaw County, caught fire around 10 p.m. on Tuesday of last week. Jerry Snowden, chairman of the deacons, said: "It's a total loss." The congregation had served the community for more than 175 years. Firefighters were still killing hot spots the next morning so the fire marshal could walk the ruins. Church members posted memories of baptisms, funerals and the brick walls their families had helped raise.

Two more churches in America are now rubble. And it keeps happening.

Last week in Cleveland, the former Friendship Baptist Church - a mid-1890s structure that began as a synagogue before becoming a Baptist sanctuary - was destroyed in an early-morning fire. Nearly sixty firefighters responded. The roof collapsed. The remnants were demolished.

Officials first called the cause unknown. Cleveland Fire Lt. Mike Norman later confirmed it was incendiary. "The motives are not believed to be financial. This was not a fire set for insurance money or to acquire the land." He called the loss "irreplaceable" and put the damage at about $500,000.

Buffalo's former St. Ann's Church and Shrine, built in 1886, was hit twice in four days in July after earlier damage this year. Investigators ruled the July fires arson. The Diocese of Buffalo sold the church, school and convent in November 2022 for $250,000 to Buffalo Crescent Holdings, Inc., a company affiliated with the Downtown Islamic Center, which planned an Islamic community centre for Buffalo's Bengali community. The site had been vacant since parish life ended in 2013.

Buffalo Common Council Majority Leader Leah Halton-Pope said she had just told city officials the building would probably be set on fire again. "I know it's been said that it was arson, which is to be expected."

She also said: "I literally just had a conversation this afternoon with a member of the administration asking what are we going to do about it and stressing that something has to be done over there to secure it, and then said it's probably going to be set on fire again, but I just didn't think it would happen today."

Preservation Buffalo Niagara director Bernice Radle said: "The St. Ann's property owners are unresponsive and refuse to secure the building. Preservation Buffalo Niagara calls on the City of Buffalo to pull out all the stops to wrestle this landmark church from its negligent absentee owner. Enough is enough!"

New York City has taken its own losses. On June 19 the 173-year-old South Bushwick Reformed Church in Brooklyn, a Greek Revival landmark, was gutted in a three-alarm fire that brought the steeple down. The FDNY later confirmed it was intentionally set.

Pastor James E. Steward II said: "It was more than just a building. It's lives and generations of lives that have been touched." After the ruling he added: "Now we understand it is intentional, which brings another layer of grief to myself, as well as the congregation and the community."

He also said, "Whoever is responsible for this ultimately has to answer to God," and "We have no known enemies." The city rejected a restoration plan based on an independent engineer's assessment and ordered demolition.

Weeks earlier, the vacant First Reformed Church of Astoria in Queens - organized in 1839, rebuilt after an 1888 fire - suffered a major fire that began in a vacant rectory and raced into the church.

This is happening everywhere. The United Kingdom has been subject to this same script for months.

On the night of February 22, Kings Hall Methodist Church in Southall, West London - a building more than a century old - was gutted. More than ten fire engines and around seventy firefighters fought it for hours. The roof and upper floors were destroyed. The cause was left under investigation. Downing Street had nothing of substance to say.

Days later a man walked into Manchester Central Mosque during Ramadan carrying a knife, an axe and a hammer. Worshippers stopped him. No one was harmed. Prime Minister Keir Starmer produced a statement immediately: "I am concerned to hear of the incident at Manchester Central Mosque last night. I know this will be worrying for Muslim communities, especially during Ramadan, a time of peace and reflection."

He added: "We have provided up to £40m funding for additional security at mosques, Muslim schools and community centres, and will continue to act to ensure communities are able to live without fear."

There was no comparable package for the thousands of poorly secured parish churches across England. National Churches Trust figures have recorded thousands of crimes at church properties in recent years, including hundreds of attacks and a large share of arsons. Security funding per Christian site has sat in a different universe from the sums directed at mosques and synagogues.

Leicester added another chapter at the end of July. St Andrew's Church on Jarrom Street, a Grade II* landmark built in 1862 to a design by Sir George Gilbert Scott, caught fire after 11 p.m. on July 28. Firefighters fought it through the night. The roof was wrecked. Officials later said the most probable cause was accidental, with the building secure and no sign of forced entry. Repairs will take years. Lord Mayor Kulwinder Singh Johal said he was "heartbroken" by the "devastating fire."

Stoke-on-Trent's former St Bernadette's Church on Fegg Hayes Road was separately ruled a deliberate fire. Staffordshire Fire and Rescue were called at about 8:40 p.m. on July 23. Six appliances and an aerial ladder platform attended. A service spokesperson said: "Following an investigation, the cause of the fire has been deemed to be deliberate."

Cumbernauld's St Mungo's, a B-listed 1960s landmark, was destroyed in a deliberate blaze last year. No one has been charged. The investigation remains open.

Britain's historic churches are disappearing in a drizzle of "unknown," "accidental" and "deliberate - no suspect."

The same week Grand Rapids burned, Canada added another total loss.

Early Monday on the Acadian Peninsula of New Brunswick, Saint-Simon Church - believed to be the largest wooden church left in the province, a 1910s landmark by Acadian architect Nazaire Dugas - burned to the ground. By daylight only a sliver of the base and a brick chimney remained. The New Brunswick Office of the Fire Marshal ruled it intentional.

After 2021, arsons against churches more than doubled. A Macdonald-Laurier Institute review found fewer than 4 percent of cases produced charges. From May 2021 to December 2023, at least 33 Canadian churches burned to the ground; 24 were confirmed arsons, two accidental, the rest unspecified. Over 96 percent unsolved.

In April the 1893 church in Saint-Romain, Quebec, was destroyed and treated as arson.

A country can lose three dozen churches and still call it a mystery if it never bothers to catch anyone.

France has recorded nearly fifty fires or arson attempts on churches and Christian sites in a single recent year, a sharp rise on the year before.

In late April the 19th-century Église Saint-Cyriaque in Montenach, Moselle - built between 1884 and 1886, survivor of two world wars - lost its timber roof and part of its bell tower. Officials blamed a nearby brush fire driven by strong winds. Mayor Jean-Paul Tinnes said: "The roof is gone, the bell tower is gone. It makes me cry. I've been mayor for over thirty years. My children were baptized here, I got married here... It's a historic building that everyone cherishes."

On June 12 the 17th-century Chapelle Sainte-Anne-des-Rochers in Trégastel lost most of its slate roof. Hours later a fire in Condom devastated a historic cloister attached to the cathedral, damaging more than 4,300 archived volumes. Studies have noted a Christian religious building disappearing in France every two weeks through fire, collapse or deliberate damage.

Historic Christianity is being subtracted from the streetscape of the West one fire at a time. The buildings that baptized towns, married generations and buried the dead are being deliberately purged.

The people who notice the pattern are told they are imagining it. The people who set some of these fires are almost never named.

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