New Hope's resolve gives rise to

Originally published Saturday, November 1, 1997

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

A heavily charred power pole on the Fir Street parkway testifies to the searing fire that gutted the New Hope Baptist Church more than three years ago. But a new church being built on the same corner -- with steel, brick and Southern Baptist resolve -- is rising out of the ground as surely as fireweed comes after a slash burn.

New Hope Baptist already has mailed notes advising members to set aside the first Sunday in March for the formal church rededication service.

The sign on the fence says: "This Is A Hard Hat Area." And in a sense, there's some hard-headed thinking that's making things happen on the corner of Fir Street and 21st Avenue.

Call it resolve. Call it faith. Call it renewed hope that was forged in that fire. But the Rev. Dr. Robert Jeffrey says the 95 percent African American church family has grown stronger in the rebuilding experience.

"For some reason, it makes me think of a young woman in our church family, who was only a girl of about 15 when the fire happened," he said. "She and her family have been so much a part of the rebuilding, so much a part of our resolve. When she went 3,000 miles away to Spelman College in Atlanta, and found that they didn't have dormitory space for her, she might have come home, but she organized a group of students and they demanded living space from the administration. And they got it.

"I like to think she learned some of that resolve right here at home, in this church family. Every day, she got that lesson from the struggle of this congregation, that yes, terrible things happen, but you make things work."

If it is stronger for its effort, the New Hope congregation also is smaller, Jeffrey concedes. "We are down to about 450 members and our church experience has been cut about two-thirds. Members still come not only from the Central Area but also from as far away as Bellevue, Kent and Everett," he said. There have been no baptisms, weddings or funeral services for the congregation since the May 1994 fire.

No early Sunday services in all that time, no Sunday evening services and no Wednesday night Bible study. And the church choir has been practicing all this time at the Temple De Hirsch Sinai. "That temple and those people have been like angels to us!" Jeffrey noted. "There have been other angels, in all parts of this city, from places totally unpredictable, and it's helped the congregation grow in its understanding of diversity. We are one community."

The New Hope congregation met in a donated tent the first few weeks after the fire, then in a YMCA building, and now in the loaned sanctuary of the Emerald City Seventh-day Adventist Church. And that borrowed space, that borrowed time, has given it breathing room.

"When we were at the Y, we had services in a gymnasium and huge ventilating fans came on about the middle of the sermon," Jeffrey said. "The air rushed down over the pulpit and the front rows where our older people sat shivering, and some of the ladies took to wearing heavy coats and mufflers to services. And I'd try to out-holler the fan noise to finish the sermon. We can laugh about it now."

"There is still the vision," said Jeffrey as we sat in his cluttered church offices next to the construction site, "the vision of being a people and a place. . . . We've learned that it's the will of God that we perform our work here . . . and that this is part of the Christian struggle as well as the African American struggle, and that perseverance is an important part of our faith."

That vision doesn't come cheap. Church members already have dug deep in their pockets to augment other donations totaling about $400,000 of the $750,000 already spent on the rebuilding.

Some donations have come from other local churches and organizations and individuals. But insurance payout on the estimated $1.5 million fire loss has been only $610,000 to date, "and probably won't be much more than that," Jeffrey said.

Construction costs to date, and architect and permit fees have been paid, as well as the cost of a new parking lot across the street. But total construction will cost "about $2.4 million," he added, leaving a substantial amount of new-building debt in New Hope's future.

It took more than a year of going head-to-head with city and county building officials before the church was able to get all the permits needed to rebuild. Part of that was because the new church will be bigger -- 17,000 square feet, with a larger overall footprint on the site to accommodate an 850-seat sanctuary.

There has been some construction delay as the church struggles to keep out-of-state financing flowing through the pipeline. Out-of-state money, Jeffrey explains, because no Puget Sound financial institution would bankroll the reconstruction. "We tried for two years to get local financing, and finally were able to find a financial broker who got out-of-state money," he said.

Many in New Hope have been disturbed by what he says is the underlying "justice of the situation." That being the nagging feeling that the fire wasn't accidentally caused by overheated electrical timing switches. "We know the burglar alarm system, which was linked with that light-switching system, was activated at about 5 a.m. on the day of the fire. Our perimeter was breached just before the fire."

But you swallow that negative thinking and move on, Jeffrey said, "because your mission is to restore the situation. You make a list of the 100 things you can't live without. And then you look at the list and say: 'We have to cut some of these.' And you reduce everything to common denominators.

"New Hope was left with what's really important. And there is a sense of community coming together and a sense of where we want to go with our mission. We didn't want to have 1,000 meetings in 1,000 places, because that would only make things take longer."

If this corner of Fir Street and 21st Avenue is hallowed ground, it's because this is where the first all-new African American church was built in Seattle in modern times, Jeffrey explained. "And the committee in charge of the rebuilding has plans to incorporate the original cornerstone in our new church." Also saved from the fire, the photo portrait of the church's founder, the late C.E. Williams, will find a place in the new church.

Jon Hahn is a staff columnist who writes three times a week in the P-I.