The tale of the steeple vs. the storm

It’s the little steeple that could.

It’s bent, broken and roped down with blue tarp. But it is still clinging to the roof of Central Oak Grove Missionary Baptist Church on Mathews Drive.

Hurricane Matthew did it when it hit Hilton Head Island overnight Oct. 7-8.

Central Oak Grove calls itself “the little church with the BIG heart.”

In 129 years of existence, its congregation has weathered much worse. The Great Storm of 1893 should have wiped it off the face of the earth. But it didn’t.

Central Oak Grove once shared a building with the Chaplin School. The little schools and churches are where the Gullah looked for a brighter future following the Civil War. With meager means, they supplemented the little education offered to blacks by the public back then.

That older building also served as headquarters for the Hilton Head Health Project, a Gullah-led answer to the worm-infestation problems of the late 1960s. It was a forerunner to the Deep Well Project.

Central Oak Grove in recent times has coped with the murder of one of its 17-year-old sons. Dominique Williams was baptized there, long before he was shot to death in the summer of 2015 near Coligny Circle, the suspect then only 15. The church was there to help absorb that shock to Hilton Head.

Central Oak Grove’s heart took another hit earlier this year when Tonya Miller, only 39, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. As a whole, the church put on purple #TonyaTough T-shirts, and on a set day tried to fill Facebook with purple.

In 2012, Central Oak Grove rallied overnight to help victims up North of the destructive Superstorm Sandy. Member Carolyn Campbell got the idea from a bus. A chartered bus came to Hilton Head from New York half empty, due to the storm, for the annual Ella C. White Scholarship banquet. With help from other Gullah churches, Hilton Head sent it back crammed with supplies.

“God sent that bus down here for a reason,” Campbell said at the time. “Is the bus half empty, or is it half full?”

That same year, a Sunday school class started doing “random acts of kindness” — forcing each other to reach and out and do something simple, like mowing the lawn for an elderly woman.

In 2015, Central Oak Grove helped organize the free Fourth of July community picnic with Grace Community Church. It was called “One Island. One Community. One Hilton Head.” Planning started before the Emmanuel 9 shootings in Charleston that June. But with blacks and whites pulling together for something, it was seen as a moment of grace for this community.

Pastor Louis Johnson pulled from the 23rd Psalm and the book of Matthew in his sermon beneath the broken steeple on Oct. 16, a week after the storm.

He turned to Matthew 10:7-8. That is the name of the storm, and the dates it came through here.

It says the kingdom of heaven is near.

“We must get our spiritual house in order, now, before it is too late,” Johnson said, stretching out the word “issssssss.”

“People are spending hours and days putting their physical houses back together. There was damage from the wind and water. But what about our spiritual house? How much time are we spending on our spiritual house, making repairs and adjustments?”

Freely we have received gifts and freely we must give, he said, quoting the Scripture.

“We must be willing to help somebody before the storm,” he said. “There must be genuine sharing and caring long before the storm. There is more that we need to do. There is more that is required of us.”

And that’s the anchor for the little steeple that could.

This story was originally published October 29, 2016 at 5:27 PM with the headline "The tale of the steeple vs. the storm."