Monday fire guts Brookside church
The letters on the church sign had melted from the heat of the fire, and were drooped over, upside down.
But the message was still there: “God is still in control.”
Rev. Herman Maxwell echoed that message Monday as he surveyed the damage to Lee’s Chapel Baptist Church in Brookside, which was destroyed by a blaze early that morning.
“God is still in control,” he told a passer-by who saw the fire on television.
“It’s just a building, and it was insured. I was hoping you were my agent,” Maxwell said to a reporter.
Firefighters were called to the scene at about 5 a.m., after flames were reported in the front of the church. The building, on Main Street in the old section of Brookside was fully involved in short order. By the time the fire was put out, everything but the brick walls was destroyed.
Parts of the building were still smoldering at noontime, as church members pulled an old church bell — used in the former church building in the lower part of the town — out of the debris. The bell was charred but intact, and still clanged loudly as the clapper moved when workers rolled it away from the building. Maxwell said they had hoped to put the bell in a new structure before the fire.
Lee’s Chapel Baptist has existed as a congregation for 118 years and currently has about 50 members, Maxwell said. The building was around 60 years old.
No cause for the fire has yet been determined, according to Fire Marshal Chris Cantrell. Because a church was involved, the case is automatically referred to the state fire marshal’s office for investigation. That is a result of the rash of church fires across Alabama in 2006, most of which were at the hand of arsonists. Three students from Birmingham-Southern College admitted to setting the fires.
For now, the church will meet in the home of the Brookside Civic League, the former Brookside School.